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(April 11, 2003)
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"The twilight border between sleep and waking was a Roman one this morning: splashing fountains and arched, narrow streets, the golden lavish city of blossoms and age-soft stone. Sometimes in this semi-consciousness he sojourned again in Paris, or war German rubble, or Swiss skiing and a snow hotel. Sometimes, also in a fallow Georgia field at hunting dawn. Rome it was this morning in the yearless regions of dreams." (McCullers 138)
This is how Carson McCullers starts her short essay "The Sojourner," about John Ferris, an American man living in Europe, traveling often from continent to continent by airplane. Long before computer/internet, literature was challenging the barriers between here and there, now and then. On the flat surface of a book spread, time and space of the reader, the writer and the protagonist collapse and coincide. The physical distance between a writer Carson McCullers of the 1950's and a reader like me of March 12, 2003, or between the "splashing fountains" of Rome in John Ferris's dream and "a room in a New York hotel" where he woke up (138), is infinitely reduced to a series of seamless borderlines.
Similarly, the kind of interactive design discussed in this section is the meeting point between the time and space of the user, the designer and sometimes the protagonist. I call it "empathetic design."
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