Bruno tags

By Kevin on December 16, 2007

Our son Bruno is four, and over the last few months has been learning to write. Yang picked up some lined sticky note pads for him to practice on, and he naturally began posting labels on things he could identify, including his sister.

It was interesting and surreal to see these when I came home from work. It reminded me of the film Memento or what I’ve heard about people using this as a technique at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

These notes reminds me of the hard work we do on websites to develop effective user labels — a job that’s much easier than it sounds. Is it a couch or a sofa? Shelf or a bookshelf? It also reminds me of tagging or social bookmarking popularized by sites like del.icio.us and many others. And I can’t help seeing this as an exercise in typography or graffiti or the much-parodied film for Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues.

I won’t attempt to make this sound deeper than it should, but I found these moments to be interesting and beautiful, and tried to capture it here.

Bruno tags
Kevin Budelmann
Kevin Budelmann
President
Kevin specializes in design theory and practice in the overlapping contexts of business, technology, and society.

Comments

Patrick Bowen January 3, 2008
Interesting. One of the first things I thought of when I read “Bruno tags” was “topic tags” on websites. I am not always a big fan of tags. Too often I find the returned results to be inaccurate from my perspective. The issue is that I have one and only one perspective. Other’s perspectives may or may not match mine. 2 thoughts popped to mind. 1. Developing user labels, like mentioned, is harder than it sounds. Differing perspectives inevitably cause this. Cultural differences, industry terminology, and countless other differences too often cause developers to overlook what they see as simple and concrete. Bounded awareness and learned behaviors from industry and upbringing are hard to combat and often hurt more than we think. 2. I flipped through the Flickr set of Bruno tags and noticed I could identify all of the images with little to no trouble. Some of the images were cropped to the point I couldn’t see the whole tagged object and some of the tags were only partially legible…although probably more legible than if written by myself. Point: the ability to take context from both the written word and the texture and pattern of the photography. How does this combination allow users to understand what they may not have before(seeing only partial pictures or less than perfect text) and what place does that have in the future of usability design.