Summary: Andrew Hinton spoke at Midwest UX 2013 on how language is central to understanding place, and how we create embodied experiences in software and elsewhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed speaking at this year’s Midwest UX, in glorious Grand Rapids, Michigan (home of one of TUG‘s studios).

As a number of our blog posts about the event will surely mention, the curated theme for this year’s conference was “Place.” What does Place mean to design? How do we create or affect the experience of place?

To that end, I prepared a talk on how language—something we don’t normally think of as especially environmental or physical—is actually central to how we understand place, as well as how we make coherently embodied experiences in software and elsewhere.

Slides below! For easier reading of the notes, use full-screen, or download PDF.

This talk is somewhat related to my earlier post on “Language is Infrastructure,” and gets most of its material from the book I’m slowly completing for O’Reilly Media on designing context.

I’m looking forward to working on this topic even more for events that are coming up in the next year.