Myplanet Digital: Better organizations through technology.

Preamble: Design fun at FITC

This year’s FITC event in Toronto, Ontario was a stimulating journey into the realm of creative thought, design theory, technical wizardry, and visual culture.  Originally positioned as a Flash-only convention (‘Flash in the Can’), FITC has blossomed into a broad digital design conference with a host of renowned speakers.  As a perpetual student of design, my central focus at any design event is to leave each seminar with at least one point to ponder, a point to rework in my brain and apply to my practice. 
 
This year’s FITC gave me a good deal to think about: John Underkoffler’s presentation on new augmented reality systems pulled straight from Minority Report – hey, why not give Shanly’s article on AR a read? – Ben Kreukniet speaking on the United Visual Artists, Keith Peters revealing a host of systems for programming art & visualizing data, Scott Hansen speaking on inspiration and the analog world, Mario Klingemann and his incomprehensible Flash wizardry...  But Brendan Dawes’ presentation, The Grammar of Interaction Design, tickled my brain most readily.  Dawes is Creative Director for magneticNorth, a UK interactive design company, and a veteran author-speaker on the design-nerd circuit.  His presentation touched on the basic grammar that underlies an effective interactive system.

The Grammar of Interaction Design: Contradictions?

Grammar is of course a holistic system, with rules and structures that complement and support each other.  But in certain ways Dawes’ ‘grammar’ seemed to me self-contradictory, in a manner that articulates the age-old function-vs-form debate.  Dawes spoke of the value of silence, subtraction, and rhythm, familiar regulating tenets for any designer, but also engaged with principles of magic, surprise, and serendipity.  In other words, Dawes affirmed that indeed, “less is more,” but he also promoted purely playful animations and interactive feedback – something as simple as animating an add-to-cart process – ostensibly for the benefit of user experience and “fun.”  We are, after all, humans using machines.
 
I approached Dawes after his seminar to examine this seeming contradiction:  If design must privilege subtraction, silence, and rhythm – removing any and all superfluous elements to reveal core, beautiful simplicity – how can the designer integrate purely playful, purely form-oriented, purely unnecessary elements?  Dawes had an interesting response (in more or less these words):  “That’s a good question.  For me, those things are not unnecessary.  Fun is necessary.  So I wouldn’t subtract or silence it.”
 
This got me thinking:  How can a designer draw that line?  How can one distinguish between ‘necessary’ and ‘unnecessary’ without any ultimate referent?  But more interestingly, what role will the purely aesthetic play in design, moving forward, as technology and society continually reconfigure design’s significance?  What role will play play in design?  What will be the relationship between usability and aesthetics – how will we define what is formally necessary and unnecessary then?  These questions are daunting, to say the least, but we might start by predicting what design absent of humanity could look like.

The Tyranny of Rationality

As a fan of constructivism, the International Typographic Style, minimalism, and all things rational and mathematical in design, I am a staunch advocate of usability, of efficiency, of minimalism.  But broadly speaking, the modernist premise that undergirds such rationality is not without its faults. 
 
At best, in a visual context, rationalism can be stuffy, boring, and regulated.  At worst, in a social context, rationalism is tyrannical:  Modernity promised the emancipation of humanity through numbers, information, data, science.  Instead, our Ford-ified climate of hypercontrolled production, consumption, and surveillance has in many ways imprisoned the developed world, as the cult of numbers slowly but surely dissolves individualized political economic control and freedom.  You don’t need to go much further than your Facebook privacy settings for some concrete support for that contention; on the other hand, you can go much further and read a few pieces by Armand Mattelart, Mark Poster, Gilles Deleuze, William Bogard, Noam Chomsky…
 
This analogy proposes a key consideration:  What will happen as interactive design comes to play an increasingly significant role in our everyday lives – as computing becomes ubiquitous and interfaces blend into our kitchen wallpaper?  Perhaps stark, modernist design will not only reflect or represent or serve as a visual analog tomodernism’s dehumanizing socioeconomic effects, but literally extend those effects thanks to its ubiquity.

The Cubicle: Our perfectly square analogy.

To flesh out this idea a bit more, let’s move away from the digital realm and into the real.  Let’s consider the cubicle.  Here we have a business implement designed to facilitate an efficient division of space and labour, an incessantly dehumanizing process (“Mmm, yeah, I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.”)  Yet through its unbearably rational, sterile appearance, the cubicle would also seem to extend its dehumanizing effects beyond its intended organizational goals:  Not only is the employee couped up, but couped up in a tiny, white cube.  As purpose is inextricably tied to design, the side effect of that purpose becomes the side effect of design.

Returning to the digital, I wonder:  Will an endless glut of sterile, excessively function-focused design not only mimic calculated Taylorism, but literally, Taylorize our digitized interaction itself?  Usable but lifeless design not merely on a computer screen, but everywhere: Vampires!  Zombies!
 
Overly dystopic?  Probably.  To extend our analogy, the reality is that many forward-thinking businesses (ahem) are abandoning the cubicle.  And in all honesty I don’t believe that Bauhaus-based iPad interfaces strewn throughout my house will stifle my freedom and turn me into a total automaton.  But my point here is that while design must embrace functionality, designers (and those who work with designers) must also prioritize form.  Because increasingly, user experience is human experience.  Word processing is a user task, but defining my identity through an online profile, communicating with loved ones, or asking my pet robot to remind me about my girlfriend’s birthday are all human tasks.  Humans have fun, laugh, surprise each other, and embrace variety.  I am a fan of grids, baselines, structure, usability, and fundamentals, but as a creative I will never forget that I am building stuff for people.

Some Other (mayhaps more concrete!) Reasons to Privilege Humanity in Design

Of course, my tale may be a tad sci-fi.  So if I haven’t convinced you that a zillion computers without any sense of humour might get a bit depressing, let me bring this all back to a more concrete level.  Privileging form in design makes business sense.  There is evidently a reason why big brands hire visual thinkers with artistic competence:  they care how they look.  In an online context, visual and interactive elements define brand equity as readily as they facilitate logging in or signing out.  While some may argue that the optimal design solution will tend towards aesthetic beauty, a conscious effort must be made to consider brand perception and art direction in addition to usability.  If user experience were purely a product of functionality, the web would look much more like a digitized version of the newspaper industry.  But evidently, even news outlets make aesthetic choices that impact brand perception online.
 
In 2005 British designer and usability addict Mark Boulton also wrote about the “aesthetic usability effect,” citing a study that claims that users perceive things that look better as easier to use.  And last year, Volkswagen ran a Fun Theory campaign to (albeit whimsically) study how people might be inclined to doing the right thing if the right thing is fun.  While I am hard-pressed to take either of these “studies” seriously – the VW program was an advertising campaign, and Boulton’s 2005 article is based on a 1997 study – I think that they do provide some alternative, perhaps organic food for thought on this topic.

So long, 'less is more!'  Balance is better.

Bringing this all back to Brendan Dawe’s presentation, I think we can understand that if subtraction and silence can work grammatically alongside magic, surprise, and serendipity, a key consideration for designers, and especially for businesses evaluating design, is to replace a stubborn reliance on the adage ‘less is more’ with a flexible reference to the Golden Mean.  Balance is better.  The challenge, then, will be in defining that balance.  Which elements of ‘fun’ are necessary, and which are superfluous? 
 
Moving forward, as interactive design is injected into humanity, injecting that humanity back into design will become increasingly important.  Form does follow function, but perhaps it is not quite as far behind as many ‘experts’ would argue.