Ghost in the Pixel

Hard to believe but, yes it was exactly ten years ago this month that I ventured into the world of graduate school and interaction design at Carnegie Mellon. It was an incredible and life-altering move, forever shaping my approach to design, and providing a base of knowledge to draw from. I emerged from that program a far more self-reflective and critical designer overall, without question.

And so, as it turns out, a fellow designer at my current client Netflix just left this week to enter the same program at CMU, pursuing a master’s in IxD. Her departure for CMU made me reflect upon, albeit nostalgically, about all that has changed, yet stayed the same since then.

For instance, ten years ago…

* There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no iPhone, no netbooks nor any “cloud apps” or “cloud computing”, etc.
* IM wasn’t that popular on campus; and few folks had cell phones.
* Cell phones had no cameras in them!
* No iPod! However Rio introduced a portable MP3 player which I bought for $250 with only 256 megs storage.
* There was no Adobe Creative Suite per se…it was all still separately released products and versions.
* Director (and lingo) was still king; Flash was rising fast to soon eclipse Director.
* Web graphics were all either GIF or JPEG, some animated GIFS too, and some “image maps” and “roll overs”. No transparent PNG’s yet.
* Web was very 1.0, no Ajax or popular rich interactive patterns yet.
* Remember “Shockwave plug-ins”? Ha!
* No Google! Well, it was just starting, but no Google Maps or GMail. Alta Vista was the popular search engine, with Lycos and Yahoo.
* Netscape Navigator 4 was battling Internet Explorer 5 in the “browser wars”; there was no Safari or Firefox or Chrome!
* Standards-based CSS/html was just a blip on the radar, I recall.
* No Tivo I think
* Amazon sold books primarily and just started expanding to other items. Forget if there was Orbitz or Expedia back then? Hmm…
* DSL (and broadband) was just beginning really. Most people still had modems. (like me! I remember “dialing in” to CMU’s network from home)
* They were just rolling out “wi-fi” on CMU campus when I was there, 99-2000 year.
* Everyone (ie, the media) was freaking out over the infamous “Y2K” bug!
* WAP and WML were the “hot” ways of doing websites for a mobile device (like a Palm Pilot)
* Macs still ran OS 9 on Motorola chips. And Apple sold “Powerbooks” (I had one!)
* IBM still made Thinkpads. (I had one too!)
* I used Eudora and Pine/telnet for email.
* Blogs? What are those?? :-)

But regardless of technologies and digital expressions/forms, the principles of designing for audience/context/activity remain in full effect, with evolving constraints that shape the multi-disciplinary conversation, towards meaningful embodiments that provoke positive emotional and productive responses. Who knows what shall emerge ten years hence?

I’ve often written on this blog for the need for visual aesthetics to enrich the interaction of a product/service, adding that humanizing dimension that shapes emotive response. I myself am not the best visual designer out there, but I see myself more as a visual concept “catalyst” or “provocateur”, instigating and stimulating discussion amongst stakeholders about new possibilities: brand, style, overall product experience. Depending on the place, I’ve done a few crazy things to get conversations going:

** At Oracle I spent a weekend concepting out ideas for changing the look/feel of Oracle Applications (just a few screenshots in various treatments), then printed out a massive poster of them, which I posted up next to my cubicle. Monday morning a murmuring/buzzing crowd of engineers and managers hovered around the poster as I walked up to my cubicle… They were wondering what’s going on? Pointing and chatting excitedly. My own manager was none to happy about this “stunt” as she called it, but it certainly woke up people’s sensibilities about what could be for future revisions! And I gladly put all the files on the server for anybody else to improve and build upon–open source it! Many folks were excited to see the self-initiative, and indeed a few months later there was a department-wide “next generation” design contest to explore ideas further.

** At BEA I created “mind grenades”–tricked out (practically impossible) visual concepts that literally and figuratively detonated the dev team’s preconception of what the product interface and behaviors should be. I really wanted to get them out of the “enterprise” mindset. It sparked diverse reactions: engineers thought it was “the spec” (and thus were freaking out) while product managers enjoyed the imaginative take on current/new features, wondering aloud about marketing pitches and new customer segments.

** At Adobe, after trying out a new consumer version of Photoshop, I got so frustrated with the features and navigation that I drove home after work, sat down and sketched out ways to improve it, then driven by that passion to do it “right”, I just mocked it up overnight as a series of 3-5 screens (storyboards) which I then presented to the design manager for his take. Great discussions ensued which led to a team-oriented revamp of the product features that became productized over time.

** At Cisco similar feature frustration led me to just re-conceptualize the tedious thing (a people directory lookup tool) in a radically different expressive form, which (once presented to the design team) became a critical seed for a more formalized team project with outside partners.

Yes, it’s great fun being a firestarter. Not every culture may respond positively to this kind of approach but as I’ve said on this blog several times, taking the position of “informed visionary” can only empower yourself as a designer, thus improving the product and customer experience…and thus the business overall. Sometimes you just gotta provoke and light that fire, before being suffocated by the tunnel-vision induced mediocrity or bureaucratic processes. It’s good to provoke discussion, debate, conversation, to get ideas flowing and people talking about ways to make things better. Sometimes you just gotta ask forgiveness, not permission, and do the right thing.

Just got the iPhone 3GS after two agonizing years of using my first gen iPhone on the notoriously horrendous AT&T EDGE network (I think my 9600 Baud modem for dialing into Prodigy in 1988 was faster). Now i finally have 3G! Definitely faster although spottier coverage (tsk tsk AT&T). The 3 key features that I found to be just superbly well-designed are the following:

1. Cut/Copy/Paste: Well, it took forever but finally the one feature that is basic to every other phone device is now in and it functions beautifully. Truly the embodiment of damn good interaction and visual design, incredibly well-thought out: the gestures, the visual cuing, the appearance of options, and overall experience. Sure Blackberry and WinMobile devices may have it but does it perform as satisfyingly and smoothly via touch gestures?

2. Trimming a video: Yet another example of exceptionally well-thought out interaction design, with just the right number of interface elements and not too much. No feature creep. Just trim by sliding your finger and see the video strip expand the frames. Sure there’s some adjustment as you try to get the exact pinpoint but I found it fun and engaging, not frustrating actually. If another company did it, it would have all kinds of wonky UI overhead and controls I bet! And goofy effects and 3-step wizards and…and…and.

3. Voice control: Again, beautifully done. Just hold down the Home button and say “call [contact name]”–no training at all! (or play a song, ask who is the artist, etc. I’m sure the vocabulary will expand with each OS release) And I love the visuals: a nicely animated screen that shows the various voice commands floating by as a rich typographic experience, and the visual feedback of your voice as soundwaves as you speak, indicating the command is being captured, with a voice speaking back to confirm. (Although, I do wish that voice were more smoothly human, not like the old 90’s era Mac voice…)

Shaun Inman, of Mint fame, just released a literally and metaphorically “hot” new application called Fever which cleverly extends the metaphor of temperature to convey feed activity.

Andrei Herasimchuk explains further in a posting on the ixda list:

“…guys like Shaun Inman are the model for interface designers, if not now, then at least 5 to 10 years out. Whether you ever achieve his level of ability to design great interfaces both from a visual and interaction level simultaneously, while also being able to code it, is not the point. The point for this community, in my humble opinion, is to make the goals lofty, and aim to become or create designers of his caliber going forward. Shaun’s work is the epitome professionalism in this medium.”

I agree that’s certainly one direction for those who want to practice deeply and intensely the art of interaction/UI design. There are other paths, of course, if you want to go down the strategy and consulting / educator / auteur paths or revered design principal perhaps. But Shaun is definitely the man in his own unique and powerful way of contributing to damn good design.

“Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

— Steve Jobs

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Upon completing my master’s thesis almost 10 yrs ago at CMU, on the issue of beauty in interaction design, a classmate jokingly asked what will be my next big topic, presumably for a PhD dissertation (at the time Dick Buchanan dropped some not-so-subtle hints I should go for a design doctorate). In similar spirit I half-jokingly replied, “what is soul in design”. Of course, I never did pursue the doctoral degree, but this issue of soul has been quietly reverberating in the back of my mind lately, as expressed in my talks & articles on “rich experience” and the “aesthetic experience”. I think with those writings in particular I was trying to subconsciously chisel away at the elements of what it means to design for a soulful experience with a digital product (or any product or service or system really).

From What Does Rich Mean: A Deeper Look at the Rich Experience (published in boxesandarrows)

Intelligently crafted, well-intentioned acts of communication that are emotionally satisfying and sensibly organized to meet user goals, thus becoming something memorable and valuable. Ultimately, that is what richness is about—connecting to those core human qualities that define our goals, values, and attitudes for living

From Experiential Aesthetics: A Framework for Beautiful Experience (published in ACM Interactions)

To create the beautiful must involve qualities of inspiration and transcendence that speak to aspirational values held by us as human beings (not mere users or consumers), as we seek to extend and discover something that calls out to an “experience of being fully alive”.

and of course from my original thesis essay:

To combat the ugliness of disruptive, alienating encounters that deprive humans of their ideational, cultural, and personal aspirations is the driving motive for those who strive to create beauty in interaction design.

Hmm, looking back I see some commonalities there! There’s a strong undercurrent for that which is humanizing, life-enhancing, adding to an aesthetic character which is poetic in its graceful expression of visual/behavioral/reflective qualities of a product. There is a profound connection to what the user aspires towards, uniquely situated in the context of the activity and shaped by the qualitative encounter, enabled by the graphics, typography, navigation, utility, and overall service & brand promise delivery. It is what makes the product something that is desired, valued, loved, and instills a sense of gratitude in the user, that makes living without it now unimaginable. But foremost is that aesthetic quality which harmonizes the whole into cohesive blend of rational and imaginative, compelling us to surrender to its potential for enlivening our daily tasks and usage into something sublime and evocative.

So what is soul then, in design? Is it the humanistic expression of a product’s raison d’etre in a diligently nuanced aesthetic totality, resonant with one’s dreams, values, goals? Or perhaps the emotive quality manifest as visual/behavioral/reflective cues that choreograph into a sensorial blend of meaning and utility? Maybe it’s the value of personal connection and surrender to something greater than ourselves which we constantly seek and aspire towards in our daily lives but only rarely discover?

Whatever language maybe used to articulate it, and however it maybe be embodied in our artifacts, “soul” is deeply serious issue warranting further exploration and deliberation.