[strogonoff]

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine).

Some of the challenges I see:

— Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch.

— Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes.

— Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.

[saizai]

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look.

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal, and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically & grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's sparklines, but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish tactile 2.5D concept, which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

[strogonoff]

> we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice

I’m imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points.

Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language itself could remain under same constraints as before.

A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate connections outside of current plane. For such a point, viewer can pull up a projection that shows connecting conversation planes in some way (possibly 3D or pseudo-3D).

Of course, there are some technical challenges in implementing a medium that works this way, and it’s unclear how groundbreaking or useful it would be in practice (after all, all conversation planes should be possible to represent as areas on one larger plane, just with longer connecting lines).

[saizai]

I have two concerns with that, above the (major) technical challenges: 1. we wanted this to be writable using colored pens 2. if we add a dimension, we must add it for real.

#2 is to me the vastly harder problem. Just like in UNLWS, we always have to challenge our own assumptions in order to get a sense for what would be "native to" a two-dimensional written langauge, we'd have to do the same for 3D (or 2.5D). Merely slapping 2D planes together with some links would not come anywhere even close to a robust use of the medium, just like merely having English sentences branch off from each other isn't anywhere close to a robust use of two-dimensionality.

Fully 2D language is already an extremely conceptually challenging problem, at least to me. Hardly anyone has even tried. There are fundamental challenges, like "how do you tell a joke when you don't control the ordering".

I don't think anyone is currently able to do 3D in a way that would truly serve the medium - and the medium would need to be much better defined, since humans' inability to actually see anything 3D instantaneously (we see 2D with an imputed distance and assumptions about what the rest looks like) implies that there must be interaction-in-time of some sort (like, at minimum, moving your head or the object in order to see the whole thing). That's going to be very specific to the medium. Are we talking about arbitrary 3D disconnected polytopes, ants' nest casts, convex hulls, computer-manipulated 2D, VR goggles, ...? Those all have radically different affordances.

Simultaneously, it would trivialize problems in 2D that we have to deal with. E.g. in 3D, there's no circuit wire-crossing problem, whereas in 2D, Borromean rings e.g. have unavoidable collisions. It would be cheating to use 3D in some shallow way to get rid of that issue, without also dealing with 3D's own problems.

Design constraints are a good thing.

[strogonoff]

My concern with smaller screens is that naive zooming out would make conversation too small to be readable.

Perhaps some aspects could be borrowed from mapping apps—one-handed zoom, gradually simplifying conversation as it’s zoomed out, and highlighting which participant is looking at which area of the conversation.

I sense an exciting new approach to communication…

[saizai]

PS I really like the garden vs stream metaphor for UNLWS-native "conversation". I agree that it's very apt. It nicely captures the spirit of non-linear interaction.

Thank you for this new way of looking at / describing it. We may borrow it for the UNLWS documentation. ;)

[strogonoff]

Your thank you goes to karl-j, who brought it up and whom I responded to!

Thank you for your work on UNLWS!