Johnson, J. and Henderson, A. 2002. Conceptual models: begin by designing what to design. interactions 9, 1 (Jan. 2002), 25-32.

designing what the system is to users – is this also the role of task analysis, a design message, all that stuff about making sure you’re on the same page about why a system matters? i guess it’s making that concrete? but it could come from the task analysis – thinking of how users will interact with the system suggests it’s underlying structure.
thinking at the system level, not the task level.

choosing a clear model for the system so that users aren’t confused.
weighing tradeoffs between simplicity and power.
metaphors, analogies, concepts, relationships, and mappings.
not the user’s mental model, but a tool for designers that will hopefully make the formulation of mental models easier and less prone to error.
idealized view of the system, the ontological structure, the mechanism by whish users accomplish tasks.

the argument strikes me as a little bit captain obvious, but it does make me think about things like: what are the actual conceptual pieces that i am trying to build? right now my idea is pretty abstract, with just a vague goal of bringing about a stronger sense of location, landscape, interconnection… but what does that mean? if i shy away from the folder, what am i offering instead? if i’m talking about a halo, what does that really mean? how will it be accessed, and what sort of pervasive metaphor will tie the separate pieces together? the idea seems to rely on the transformation of these dimensions into entities of their own.
is that right?
how does that work?

*more response needed to end of paper*

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