While reading John Dewey's Art as Experience, I saw crystallized one of the reasons why TheySaySmall has so far failed. Although the story itself is compelling, and many of the individual parts are interesting or fun or beautiful, as a whole it fails because it does not cohese as an experience.

Between the poles of aimlessness and mechanical efficiency, there lie those courses of action in which through sucessive deeds there runs a sense of growing meaning conserved... Thus the non-esthetic lies within two limits. At one pole is the loose succession that does not begin at any particular place and that ends - in the sense of ceasing - at no particular place. At the other pole is arrest, constriction, proceeding from parts having only a mechanical connection with one another. (Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 39-40)

Although I had conceived the directory index of TheySaySmall as an elegant and appropriate way to portray the chambers one must use when traveling through networked data, I realise that to most people it just looks like my site is broken. More importantly, it provides very little narrative structure, as I doubt the signifigance of the three streams- they, say and small - is apparent to anyone. The style and feel of each piece is so different from the others that the "story" becomes completely fragmented, and the experience has no real conclusion, rather it simply ends when the user gest bored or frustrated or tired and leaves.

I had realised this problem awhile back, and created Robert A. Small's blosxom as a way to lead the user through the disparate parts of TheySaySmall. But it doesn't cohese as an experience.

An example of a work that suceeds in unifying disparate parts is World of Awe. Although the desktop metaphor is not particularly revolutionary, it works. Joshua Davis' Once Upon a Forest used to provide similar scaffolding simply buy maintaining a consistent navigation, style and story (someone trying to describe his world visually). Now it seems to be simply a showcase for his generative art works.

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head, but I have started a new Wiki Page to collect samples of work that sucessfully unifies disparate parts into a cohesive Experience, in John Dewey's terms.