Canvas Visualizers
Copyright (c) 2022, this book is offered to the world under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
A Canvas VIsualizer:
is DAHN's outermost visual container. All other DAHN elements are presented within the visual boundaries of this container
is the root of a session's visualizer hierarchy.
offers some common top-level actions that are always available as the human agent navigates through the MAP (i.e., over and above the actions offered by the other visualizers) and also offers some top-level personalization choices aimed at bringing consistency to the overall look and feel of the view.
The most significant of these personalization choices is the selection of a design system. A design system combines a visual language with a set of re-usable UI elements, and a set of principles, patterns, and rules that guide HI designers in how to use the language and elements. Among other goals, a design system aims at providing consistency in the look and feel of the human interface. Through use, this yields familiarity and a growing sense of comfort and empowerment with the interface.
Many organizations turned to design systems to help them overcome challenges they faced as they expanded their digital presence. A design system holds the promise of enabling an organization to deploy multiple independent user interface development teams working in parallel to each quickly deliver high-quality human interfaces -- all while ensuring the resulting interfaces are not a chaotic, confusing visual mish mash.
Creating a design system requires a significant investment, but those organizations with the resources to make this investment can then leverage it to deliver custom user interfaces at scale and speed while ensuring consistency of look and feel. This can be a significant source of competitive advantage. According to a Forrester study, 65% of companies said they use design systems in 2020.
To see the polarizing effect of this dynamic, consider for example, that both amazon.com and your local bookstore's website allow people to search for and buy books. But Amazon has the resources to have developed a robust design system and the development capability to deliver and enhance a compelling human interface. Strict adherence to the design systems guidelines and principles is one (among many) practices Amazon follows to deliver more than 50 million enhancements per year -- that's more than 1.5 enhancements for every second of every day (How Amazon handles a new software deployment every second, Agile at Scale)!
There is clearly no way a local bookstore can hope to match Amazon's sophistication or pace of change. This huge power asymmetry is exascerbated by the fact that Amazon's design system allows them to deliver this consistent look and feel across a vast and expanding array of products and services. Contrast that with the fragmented look and feel experienced by a person navigating the different websites of their local bookstore, shoe store, grocery store, hardware store, clothing boutique, etc. The richness, power, and ease of use of Amazon's interface make it a go-to choice for millions of book buyers.
And people do not currently have a choice to use, say, Amazon's user interface (built upon Amazon's custom design system) to access their local bookstore's website.
DAHN intends to take advantage of the rich source of literature, tools and components available from the design systems eco-system, but in ways that are profoundly different than how designs systems are currently used.
At the Canvas level, DAHN offers the following personalization choices:
canvas visualizer -- i.e., the currently selected canvas offers human agents the chance to discover and select a different canvas from the set of available canvases
canvas tool bar action visualizer -- the canvas tool bar is actually, itself, an action visualizer. As such, each canvas visualizer may have a range of possible canvas tool bar action visualizers
design system -- this allows the human agent to select the look and feel they prefer for they experience. Each visualizer contributed to DAHN's Visualizer Space (V-Space) needs to identify the design system it aligns with (as part of its memetic signature). Thus, the agent's choice of design system constrains the selection and configuration of all of the visualizer's within the the canvas' visualizer hierarchy -- i.e., only those visualizers that conform to the design system are available to be selected.
locale selection -- locale (language and country pair) drives localization of the agent's experience. This goes beyond language translation, extending to cultural conventions (e.g., date/time formats, currencies, numeric formats, collation orders). Human agents can set their preferred locale in their profile and this is used as the default locale for each canvas they visit. However, the human agent can override their profile's locale at the canvas level.
timezone selection -- the canvas timezone drives conversion of date/time values to the selected timezone. Like locale, preferred timezone is stored as part of a human agent's profile, but can be overriden at the canvas level (affecting all child date/time property visualizers).
adaptive controls -- as described in DAHN -- Human Experience of the MAP, adaptive controls allow the human agent to make their own trade-off between the predictability and novelty of their experience. Adaptive control settings at the canvas level establishes the default settings for all visualizers in the canvas' visualization hierarchy, but it they be over-riden at lower levels of the hierarchy.
Initially, DAHN will offer a single DAHN-2D Canvas VIsualizer. At this stage, functional utility and simplicity of development are important as we explore and rapidly iterate on the DAHN concept. In the future, richer canvases are envisioned. For example, a DAHN Gaming Canvas could offer a visual experience that leverages the rich libraries of video game software. But instead of encountering fictional (computer-generated) agents in a purely artificial world, the human agent can discover and interact with other real agents, memes and resources, both offer and subscribe to real services, and self-organize into real communities. DAHN-VR Canvas holds the promise of offering an immersive 3D experience for exploring the MAP. Of course, as is the case with all DAHN visualizers, HI developers can contribute their own canvas visualizers.
The initial release of the DAHN-2D Canvas Visualizer will also likely offer only a single choice of design system. The current leading candidate is Google's Material. Material can be thought of as an open-sourced meta design system. -- i.e., a system for creating design systems.
Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.
Material is attractive because it is:
it is open-source
it is mature
it is well-documented
it offers a complete design eco-system
it favors a "mobile-first" approach
More than 60 companies report using Material to create their own design systems. Examples of design systems based on Material are featured at Material Studies.
Although Material may be chosen as the default DAHN design system, the screen mockups shown in the DAHN section do not conform to Material.
DAHN-2D Canvas
The remainder of this section specifies aspects of the DAHN-2D Canvas.
The DAHN-2D Canvas consists of a header containing the Canvas Tool Bar, a footer and a scrollable viewing area used to present the various DAHN views.
DAHN-2D Canvas is responsive to the presentation device form-factors and dynamically sized accordingly. Its look and feel conform to the selected design system.
The following figure shows two ways of viewing the DAHN Canvas Visualizer.
The above comparison reveals two aspects of DAHN's adaptive capabilities: responsive design and theme selection.
This figure also demonstrates the result of the human agent having selected a different theme. In the theme on the right, the color scheme shifted from teal to blue and the buttons have a solid fill, as opposed to a gradient fill.
The Canvas Tool Bar offers a set of standard actions that are (relatively) independent of whatever is being viewed in the viewing area.
The actions available from the Canvas Tool Bar are shown in the above figure. The Canvas Tool Bar is actually an action visualizer and consists of an affinity group of actions. Each action is represented using a (dynamically selected) action visualizer. Thus, the icons shown in the above bar may be treated as examples of how each available action may be represented. The actual representation of an action for any given human agent at any given point in time is determined by the . See Action Visualizers for more information on the different ways actions can be visualized.
Find -- performs a text search within your MAP to find holons and or saved views that match the user supplied-search criteria.
Adaptive Canvas Features
Most of the canvas personalization choices are adaptive to both individual and aggregate preferences. The exact algorithms used by the DAHN Selector Function will evolve as we gain experience with their effects.
Canvas Visualizer. The first time a human agent uses DAHN, the DAHN Selector Function will select a canvas visualizer based upon the aggregate affinity scores of the available canvas visualizers (subject to a small degree of randomness). In other words, most of the time, new MAP explorers will be presented with the currently most popular canvas visualizer. In their subsequent sessions, DAHN will likewise choose whatever canvas is most popular at that time. until they explicit select a different canvas. Aggregate affinity scores are only updated when an agent explicitly selects a visualizer, simply using a visualizer does not change aggregate affinity score values. (hmmm.... if a thousand agents accept the default, the first time ONE agent selects a different visualizer, everyone else's default visualizer will change -- perhaps usage of a visualizer should give a small bump to the aggregate affinity score).
design system selection -- this is based on the affinity the selected canvas visualizer has for the set of available design systems.
canvas tool bar action visualizer -- this is selected based on the affinity the selected canvas visualizer has for the canvas tool bar visualizers that are compatible with the selected design system
locale selection -- locale (language and country pair) drives localization of the agent's experience. This goes beyond language translation, extending to cultural conventions (e.g., date/time formats, currencies, numeric formats, collation orders). Human agents can set their preferred locale in their profile and this is used as the default locale for each canvas they visit. However, the human agent can override their profile's locale at the canvas level.
timezone selection -- the canvas timezone drives conversion of date/time values to the selected timezone. Like locale, preferred timezone is stored as part of a human agent's profile, but can be overriden at the canvas level (affecting all child date/time property visualizers).
Copyright (c) 2022, this book is offered to the world under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Open Questions:
What is the "Home Page" -- i.e., what are the initial contents of the canvas viewing area? The Me-Holon?
Should there be an "hApp Launcher" -- i.e., a grid/list of hApp's available to this agent? Since hApp's are agents, could the hApp Collection Visualizer be the hApp Launcher?
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