I feel quite lucky to have the chance of discussing about interesting themes with smart people. The simposium formula Roman people created still works: invite (or get invited) by good people and make sure you have a good bottle of wine (like this Burdese I had with Sergio - thanks!).
I believe that food, good time and creativity are interconnected. When you have good time and maybe express yourself (or you see someone else doing it) through cooking, you are hardly propense to talk. Be with the right people and your conversation can lead you through unexpected fields.
Yesterday, Sergio told me about the work he was doing (he is an Interaction Designer\C# Programmer) on a calendar application. Then, the topic switched to the icons most of windows applications use to indicate the basic actions like saving, loading and so on. He focused on the fact that the most common ’save icon’ is a…floppy disk. He googled the web and found lots of examples and critiques about the anachronism and the validity of it. I was impressed when he quoted a blog saying ‘that’s the heritage of a legacy (microsoft one)’.
We then talked about the meaning of ’save’ that has been translated in Italian as ’salvare’. We were quite sure that we were facing a translation more than a real localisation of the term. We went through the possible images (a lock standing for a strongbox, Jesus Christ or a life jacket, as someone of his colleagues suggested him). The point I liked the most was when we asked ourselves what did ’saving\salvare’ mean to us, and to other people as well. Is it a consistent concept and what is the best metaphor to express it? We also considered the mipossibility to express such a complex concept but we noticed that going for just text would have been highly incoherent with the other icons a standard menu is made of.
After a while, my semiotics studies were screaming at me. Icons are just a specific type of ’sign’ and then they are a structure made of a signified and a signifier (have a look at wikipedia for that - it’s a quite demanding theme). The point I want to make here is that icons are culturally and socially determined as part of a language that evolves in time. In fact, I’d be glad to know how new generations feel the ’save icon’ and the whole save concept. Maybe in a web 2.0 world where applications are going online, the idea of saving somewhere is obsolete and getting replaced by the downloading one: when I’m done, I won’t save my work but I will download it (probably because I am using online photoshop!).
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