Beyond boxes and arrows

Visual modelling languages and notation systems from the arts

We’re past the half-way mark. As we enter day 13 of the Eclectic Service Design Advent Calendar, we are delighted to host the incredible Tomomi Sasaki. Tomomi is a strategic designer, community leader, instructor, researcher and facilitator. She splits her time between Tokyo and Paris. I always enjoy her perspectives and her beautifully curious demeanour. So was overjoyed when I saw this post. I hope you enjoy her share today.

Some people collect Pokemon cards. I collect elephant figurines. I also collect models and frameworks, and on this occasion of joining the Eclectic Service Design Advent Calendar, I’ve pulled out a couple of visual modelling languages and notation systems from a side drawer of that collection.

To my fellow UX and service designers — Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Turntable

This is the Turntablist Transcription Method, a notation system that graphically represents turntable-based music.

On the website you can find descriptions of techniques like scratchies and backspinning, with examples of techniques by DJs who have left their mark on the art form over the years.

Invasion of the Octopus People, by Q-bert

A grid-based system works well here, as the style of music is based on counting beats, with stroke patterns and iconography used to express different sounds.

I appreciate the simplicity of this system — it feels like you could have grid sheets on hand, and jot down ideas as they come to you. The speed at which you can annotate, and the ease in which you can ‘edit’ so that the act supports the iterative nature of fleshing out your ideas, are key factors for how you use a notation system.

Thanks to Mona Kim.

Courtroom dancing

Compare that to these images of the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, a dance notation system invented in the 1680s at the court of Louis XIV.

It captures

• the placement of the feet
• six basic leg movements
• changes of body direction
• and numerous ornamentations of the legs and arms

and what I find enchanting is how the dance notation is integrated into the sheet music — the score acts as a timeline, and sometimes the bars morph into dance.

Choregraphie, ou, L’art de décrire la dance, par caracteres, figures, et signes démonstratifs avec lesquels on apprend facilement de soy-même toutes sortes de dances: ouvrage tres-utile aux maîtres à dancer & à toutes les personnes qui s’appliquent à la dance, by M. Feuillet, maître de dance; 1701; Chez l’auteur et chez Michel Brunet, Paris.

Indeed, it’s a fun example of a language that extends an established system (sheet music). I imagine the learning curve is steep, with a gap between those who can read it and those who can write it. Its intricacy hints that it’s optimized for preservation, with plenty of pomp and flair.

Collection of Dances in Choreography Notation (1700)

Thanks to twilliability.

Human movement analysis

Based on the work of Rudolf Laban, Laban movement analysis and Labonotation is a more contemporary example, developed primarily in the domain of dance and extended to health and scientific fields.

Laban is its own universe, with different gravitational fields. There’s a lot there (LabanXML!?) and it’s so interesting to follow the sprawl of topics pursued.

Thanks to Fisher Qua, who introduced it to me in the context of improv dancing.

Left: Example of Labonotation, Right: Signs for parts of the body

Juggling

Juggling has both visual and numerical notation systems. Each one highlights a different set of aspects to consider when juggling, such as when the object should be caught in your hand. I imagine that once you start ‘speaking’ a particular language, it becomes your mental model.

There’s software that can generate simulations based on these systems, which is pretty cool. It could speed up the development of new tricks, if you could program an avatar before learning it yourself.

I’ve never tried juggling but I like to swing Indian clubs, which is somewhat similar. Looking at slo-mo videos from different angles has been the best way for me to learn the swing patterns.

Examples from the Wikipedia page on “Juggling notation”

Thanks to Bodhi.

Tibetan Buddhist ritual music

Let’s look at another music example.

Tibetan musical scores consist of notations that symbolically represent the melodies, rhythm patterns, and instrumental arrangements. In harmony with chanting, visualizations, and hand gestures, music crucially guides ritual performances.

With so many elements to express, these are great examples of a coherent, composite system. Each of them look quite different, and I wonder if you’re familiar with the music and rituals, you’re able to read them like being comfortable with dialects of a language you speak.

The scores remind me that being aesthetically pleasing is a desirable quality in a visual language.

Mahakala Ritual Score — A screenshot from the Google Art and Culture page below

Musical Notation, Divine Invocation - Buddhist Digital Resource Center - Google Arts & Culture

Thanks to Dan Woods.

There’s beauty in how communities encapsulate knowledge to advance their practice, and what interests me in particular about modeling languages and notation systems is their utility as design tools. Different tools give us different ways to grapple with material, which creates space for new possibilities to emerge.

Like any good collection, friends and strangers alike have helped me accumulate new items for this one. If you know of a potential addition, please leave a comment here or on Twitter.

And the next time you want to geek out together, we could go through my collection of cookbooks. I have a whole bunch that I’ll never cook from, some in languages that I don’t even read, just for the enjoyment of how the chef’s worldview is encoded in the IA of the book…

Further reading:

How Do You Write Down a Dance?

GitHub - k-qy/notation: Collection of quotes on notation design & how it affects thought.