Plectica

Posted by Dr Andus
May 4, 2020 at 10:17 PM

I’ve been using Plectica on and off as an online concept mapper.

But I’ve only just realised that besides being a really good concept mapper, its main future is its ability to zoom out of detail in such a way that it keeps making the headings of the top levels visible, so when one is physically zooming out, the software is effectively rendering a process of abstraction (they call it “semantic zoom”), and the reverse of that when zooming in (i.e. getting into specific detail, quite literally).

I know this make it sound like any other outliner, so you need to try it to see what is unique about the way Plectica implements this. It’s all about the “pinch to zoom” action.

The closest thing that I’ve seen to it is Treesheets. You can start with a region, then add a card, then a card within a card, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum, and then zoom in and out with ease.

This is opening up all kinds of possibilities for it as a thinking tool, when one needs to travel up and down the axis of abstraction, from small detail to big overview, or to break a big task down into ever smaller tasks, which makes it a project management tool (work breakdown structure).

It turns out the tool was developed by a systems theorist / cognitive scientist and there is a whole theory that the software is trying to implement called DSRP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSRP

I haven’t delved into the theory, but the tool is certainly very special.