From an early age, men have striven to possess [own] the image. Today, tribes who are closer to the living habits of the ancient cave dwelling man, still hold image as sacred.
The caveman used to paint the images of the beasts it needed to kill. It was a way of invoking their spirit, making sure the following hunt would be a successful one. It all started with the appropriation of the image.
If you ever see a monkey paint your image, run. It means it has been empowered with the ability to represent its desire. A monkey that paints a human is a monkey that for a reason or another desires a human. If a lion could draw, it would fill entire canvases with impala, and wildebeest and probably you.
Drawing is a primordial reflection of desire. When thinking about new interfaces, we should really be thinking about how to empower the user with better tools for 'drawing', for it is the the equivalent of informing the machine of the user's desire.
Moving on from drawing to doodling. Touch screens are wonderful to scribble on.
At first we may think that the purpose of scribbling and doodling is partly inherited from the medium where the doodling takes place. It's the material that dictates the use, the medium that shapes the message. But you will find that with doodling the medium is fairly secondary.
Our first incursion was centered around "what can we do with a doodle on an mobile computer?" Share it, print it, store it, delete it, edit it... the manipulation methods are plenty in such an artifact. This informed our thought process and we veered away off the manipulation methods route.
The wonderful thing about doodles is that apart from doing them whilst on the phone (difficult on a mobile phone), they are more a product of moments (defined time and space) then anything else. I know so because whilst revisiting past doodles I tend to remember where and when they took place. It's like unconscious metadata. This is where scribbles and doodles become wonderful memory prosthetics, linked to colour, sound... and other ambient variables. If you analyze doodles from different subjects you will see a mixture of words and pictures, an oscillation between what is conscious and unconscious at one given moment. This is very rich territory, specially for mobile computers and their vast amount of stored content. One more human filter is very welcome.
We don't want to give away what experiments digital doodling is undergoing in our midst so the following screens may look a tad abstract, doodely.
