Imageability: a dialogue between the person and the environment
In The Image of the City, on how people understand and wayfind in cities, Kevin Lynch introduces the concept of imageability (how easy it is for a dialogue between the person and the environment to build into a good mental image) [notes], and five basic elements of these images: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks [notes]. The book is brilliant; Lynch introduces a whole vocabulary for those emergent properties of human wiring and social habitation, then applies and explains. It's going to be enormously useful in thinking about how people learn to find their way around websites (and semantic spaces of all kinds), how we relate to space in general, and, more, how that space is collaboratively created and moulded. This is a modest book, self assured but not declarative or over-confident, quiet. A joy to read. (I also have notes on the book design.)
Heb het gevoel dat die vijf elementen ook voor interaction design goed zouden kunnen werken. Hier nog even iets uitgebreider wat de elementen zijn:
Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves.
Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.
Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent, which the observer mentally enters "inside of," and which are recognizable as having some common, identifying character.
Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.
Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external.