Taking a cue from Melissa Holbrook Pierson's "The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home," this Ignite-style talk at SXSW 12 looks

1. The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone:
Loss in Space
BUILT 2012
Joe Sokohl
@mojoguzzi
Friday, March 16, 2012
Progress has an impact on our selves...not just physical progress, but digital as well. SouthBy
certainly focuses on progress. I'm interested in “at what cost.”

2. on.com
okP iers
aHolbro
Me liss
Friday, March 16, 2012
So, I am starting with this great book by the wonderful Melissa Holbrook Pierson.
She talks about how important place is to us...and what we experience when it changes, and
changes drastically.

3. Friday, March 16, 2012
Her books like “The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles” and “The Man Who Would
Stop at Nothing” deal with place, self, and change as well.

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http://northforksound.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html
Friday, March 16, 2012
The great Lowell George of little Feat, in “Easy to Slip,” sings about loss.
Our sense of self is tied to our sense of place...

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Sometimes those memories have to do with family, with friends, with people...but usually
people in a place.

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What happens when we return to those places....and they're changed. Do those people really
exist at all anymore?

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Our sense of self is strongly tied to place. Many of us can tie memory to a mall or house or
synagogue. Here is where you kissed your first girl...there is where you shoplifted a bag of
Swedish Fish...

8. Friday, March 16, 2012
...and when progress radically alters that landscape, we are lost. Now, the place you loved is
so much broken signage....disappeared, non-existent shops...

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...broken pavement, or at worst, simply nothingness. Atreyu lost. The Nothing won.

10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnpaultitlow/451069459/sizes/z/in/photostream/
Friday, March 16, 2012
Altered landscapes affect our cognitive processes, whether they're physical or digital. At one
time, this is what folks longed for. Even Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reflected its meme, now
long forgotten.

11. Friday, March 16, 2012
and, sometimes, our digital home just gets...bulldozed.

12. Friday, March 16, 2012
Sometimes we look back with fondness at our first forays into a digital anchor. How many
started here with TheFacebook?

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Then renovation radically refaces our home. When several of these changes happened, lots of
folks expressed their anger

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...and when it moves the line even further afield, frustration, loss, and anger bubble up to the
fore.

15. Friday, March 16, 2012
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, coming from the Greek for ”home” and ”pain”

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http://www.mobilebloom.com/
Friday, March 16, 2012
The impending suburbanification of the digital experience promises to fragment our
relationship with our digital homes

17. Friday, March 16, 2012
Some firms have been working at radically altering how we think about debt, tasks, and time.
Great stuff

18. http://forevergeek.com/
Friday, March 16, 2012
Yet at some point, don't we just wanna go back in time? Strains of Huey Lewis waft
somewhere behind us.

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Friday, March 16, 2012
And so at the end of every hard-working day, people find some reason to believe

20. So...
• Realize the effect design changes have
• Provide a path for folks to go home
• Understand how loss affects people
• Avoid unintended design disjunct
• Know that we all wanna go back in time
Many thanks
Joe Sokohl
Joe@RegularJoeConsulting.com
1.804.873.6964
@mojoguzzi
Friday, March 16, 2012
So there you have it. Many thanks!