What was interesting to me when I began my walk, was the ease with which I could find my way around. In a place, where for all intents and purposes, I hadn’t really been before. Because I’ve spent nearly half of my live navigating through pages on the internet, I had a level of intuition about how certain sites (In this case weblogs) should be set up: Where blocks of text were placed in relation to visual elements, like photos, or interactive elements, like a comments page, on a blog. The order and continuity that conventions provide made it easy to access the information available on each page, because I knew where to look to find it.

Not all blogs I visited, however, fallowed a conventionally decided order. I found one that, instead of spreading each section out evenly across the window, it had everything crammed into a narrow column on the left. The unfilled space was filled with a red tiled pattern that, because it fills the majority of the window, drew my focus away from the actual material of the blog. There was another, that was filled with nothing but photos of various artist’s work. Text was meagerly present, if at all, and none of it helped to elucidate the meaning or reason of their placement. This was extremely frustrating for me, and I actually started to feel queasy after a few minutes of looking through. It was over all too noisy and aimless for me to find any sense in it, or be able to focus on any one thing long enough to understand it.

It seemed to me that the blogs that were the most successful in grabbing and keeping my attention, were those that fallowed a generally standard order, but had enough variation between pictures and text to be visually as well as intellectually stimulating.

This got me thinking about the reason conventions exist, especially in our constructed environment. They help us to establish an understanding of how the space is, or should, function within a social group.  This means that when we visit a place we’ve never been to before, like a state park, we can more or less navigate it and understand its patters and build order in reference to other places we’ve been.  In this way conventions can actually empower rather than inhibit us in our interaction with spaces.

This leads me to the blog that I settled on. (here) I was initially attracted by the order of the page, and the distinct, perhaps conventionally, placed sections. It was a welcome relief after the noise and confusion of the more “artsy” blogs I had visited. Because I felt comfortable walking around it, I had an easier time absorbing myself in the material parts of the page. Ironically, the majority of the posts dealt with the bar dealt with breaking down socially constructed barriers, that in many ways inhibit our true or natural needs and behaviors.

This is where I made the connection to play in my exploration. When boundaries or conventions are challenged, they key us in to aspects of our true nature, which we might have become less sensitive to. I think its only because we have established boundaries that we can make a statement by challenging them.

Advertisement