Ghost in the Pixel

Just saw this at A List Apart, articulating the philosophy of wabi-sabi in regards to user interface design:

The Elegance of Imperfection by David Sherwin

A brief quote:

The simplicity of wabi-sabi is best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things that are wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole.

Sherwin explains ways to infuse a sense of “heart” and thus wabi-sabi into typically cold, code-based digital constructions like websites, software, etc. He also describes a “taxonomy of elegance” per Jeremy Alexis of IIT (whom I previously criticized in a prior posting re: the role of intuition :-) However, the taxonomy while nicely thought-out, does curiously map to the logos/ethos/pathos rhetorical frameworks from Dick Buchanan, which I find fascinating and further evidence that all designs consist of same core elements no matter what it’s called.

Last night I attended the monthly bayCHI talk, featuring two speakers: Larry Leifer of Stanford’s Center for Design Research and Kim Goodwin, VP of Design at Cooper in SF.

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Larry Leifer spoke of “design thinking” as framed by some Stanford d.school projects, and in particular his notion of “dancing with ambiguity” which he described as preserving that ongoing state of exploration of alternatives, in the “divergent” mode of thought, going wide and generating tons of options, with maximum bravery/freedom to prototype and fail, thus constantly learning and expanding options. He really emphasized the divergent half of the divergent-convergent equation of innovation for much of his talk. Here’s what really struck me:

— He didn’t give the usual “design will solve everything” spiel from the fanboys of “design thinking” (ahem, like Bruce Nussbaum)
— He stated upfront that the Stanford d.school “has nothing to do with training designers…its for training the rest of us to empathize with designers”. WOW! And Leifer went further saying that the d.school is “not designed to teach [the students] to be designers”. I was shocked and pleased to hear such honesty! Applause.
— Advocated prototyping as a fast, easy way to learning through failure and iteration. I like that! You learn by prototyping.
— Leifer said it’s not about teaching design methodologies but instead you create (in the d.school projects) your own method for a situation, and show how it works (or fails)
— Another axiom: all designing is just re-designing. There’s really nothing blazing new under the sun, all is just re-iterating on prior concepts for new situations and criteria.
— Mentioned that negotiation and “tailoring your talk” are also part of the creative act of design.
— Another axiom: design is about questions, not just decisions and solutions. This comes from the “design attitude” vs. “decision attitude” described in Boland/Collopy’s Managing as Designing.

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Kim Goodwin spoke about the value of multidisciplinary design, blending expertise from interaction, visual, and yes even industrial design fields, especially as more product encounters involve a blend of software and hardware (or convergent experiences, as frogdesign would say). Kim referred to this as designing for a “unified experience” using her vernacular from Cooper. Excellent informative overview of the process and where/how experts from these fields need to collaborate effectively (and necessarily) towards achieving a truly good unified experience for a product. As she wryly pointed out, if a customer has a problem with the voicemail feature of a phone she’s typically gonna hate on the whole phone, not just that one isolated feature. (are you listening Motorola??) There needs to be as much parallel engagement as possible throughout the product development, whether it’s waterfall or Agile or whatever. For me personally, I knew much of this already and resonated with what she said, so nothing mind-blowing for me, but it always great to hear a smooth, mellow articulation from such a good speaker! A few major takeaways:

— There’s a difference between “end goals” (focused on specific task accomplishment) and “experience goals” (focused on emotional response)…thus Kim has expanded upon the traditional Cooper persona definition to include emotive goals–how does the user hope to feel upon using this product or interface?
— Scenarios expanded from prior definitions to be really technology-agnostic “what-if” scenarios to provoke deep questioning of motives, goals, purposes…what the possibilities could be beyond the initial 100 page tech reqs doc (which of course has a listed requirement “13.5.2 Must be easy to use” hehe!)
— She mentioned the need for sketching at a lo-fi level, as well later having interaction designers get into pixel level definition to have proper articulation and communication of visuals to users AND to ensure “can you really fit all that data into there?”.
— Never ever ever justify a visual design because “it’s cool”. There will be “blood on the walls” :-) Kim offered other more specific, concrete language to justify a visual design direction or style, based upon the client’s brand: confident, secure, exceptional, etc. She showed some word maps/clouds as a tool for establishing the brand attributes and thus visual language qualities to target.
— Mainly emphasized that collaboration must be constant, keep pinging those engineers and work with them, sometimes need detailed specs or just good close relationships to ensure constant communication of criteria, restrictions, iterations, etc.

Making its rounds through the interwebs lately is a concept video produced by Microsoft Office Labs portraying a slickly digitally amplified life in 2019 (presumably thanks to MS technologies), which was shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, by Stephen Elop (formerly of Macromedia, then Adobe, now head of MS Business Division).

It features the now-common motif of multi-touch interfaces, gestural interaction, transparent wafer-thin screens, instant collaboration across space/time, animation/transition/cinematic motion galore, and no files but lots of colorfully animated information everywhere with instant access. (stifled yawn)

Yes, it’s a slick production piece, no doubt, but as this author at Fast Company commented, it all feels a bit…old and not really innovative or visionary. (I mean, it’s nicely connected together into a slick pastiche :-) Hmm. Why is this? As the writers of Battlestar Galactica recently reminded us, “this has all happened before and this will all happen again.”

** Vodafone prepared a slick, award-winning Flash site portraying various future scenarios featuring…touch-screens, gestural interfaces, transparent wafter-thing glass screens, etc :-) Unfortunately it’s been taken down but used to be here: http://www.vodafone.com/flash/futures/
A commentary is posted here by Christian Science Monitor.

** NTT Docomo has a 2010 vision video here, reinforced by a few heavy-sounding acronyms describing the original intent.

** IDEO in 1999 did a series of slick fashionable hi-tech future concepts profiled in BusinessWeek, entitled Connected Products 2010.

** Way back in 1993 AT&T ran a series of ads based around a digitally enhanced lifestyle entitled “You Will” which was quite compelling for its time (before smartphones, e-commerce, websites, etc.) featuring touch-screen interactions, but interestingly no cellphones or flatscreens. Here’s a very blotchy montage of those ads on YouTube.

** Minority Report massively made popular the orchestral and cinematic glamour of gestural interaction, along with other technologies for truly “targeted advertising” in shopping malls, re-designed transit systems, and, ahem, pre-crime deterrence :-)

** Other recent future-tech movies that have helped shape our general expectations for what’s emerging in “our future digital life”: Iron Man, Children of Men, Gattaca, Quantum of Solace, Bourne series (spy-tech/surveillance madness), AI…and of course going back to Bladerunner, THX 1138, 2001, Alien, Terminator, etc. (and of course various Anime flix like Ghost in the Shell (this blog’s namesake ;-)

I think as a culture we’re just becoming so used to the notion that there will be all these fanciful technologies amplifying our lifestyles across home, office, car, hospital, school, etc. Corporations, movies, tv shows, magazines have been continually filling our heads with these visions for the last 20 years or more. So it feels there’s really nothing new under the blazing sun anymore…like say, Vannevar Bush’s Memex, or Englebart & XEROX Parc’s mouse/keyboard/GUI combo when it was first introduced, or Ted Nelson’s hypertext and related concepts. Or William Gibson with his majestic, poetic description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination”. Or of course, the real grand-daddy of them all, Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video simply blew away audiences back then.

They were all truly ahead of their time, suggesting a new paradigm previously un-anticipated (for the most part). So these days, amid the pop cultural hype and deluge (from Engadget to Apple’s announcements to latest Hollywood film, etc.), is everything just old hat now? Can we be surprised anymore? Can there ever be a truly revolutionary concept video that dares to radically shift our conception of living in a fundamental way? Hmmmm…

Just recently re-discovered this through a facebook posting by a former frogdesign colleague…it is quite eloquent, profoundly succinct, a true personification of Dieter Rams‘ severely austere ethos as a designer–pure functionalism and anti-style, anti-waste, the sacredness of the object and its utility, nothing more or less. Indeed he once articulated his design approach as “Less, but better”. A valuable set of ideals to aspire towards in our work both digital or physical, no question.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design helps a product to be understood
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is durable
8. Good design is thorough to the last detail
9. Good design is concerned with the environment
10. Good design is as little design as possible

Full breakdown with commentary and examples from Rams’ own work here.

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Someone commented on that posting with a list of George Nelson’s five tenets of design:

1. What you make is important
2. Design is an integral part of the business
3. The product must be honest
4. You decide what you will make
5. There is a market for good design