Frank Chimero · Webstock, 2015
There’s a quote from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard:
We begin in admiration and end by organizing our disappointment.
Now, this is a bit pessimistic—he is a French philosopher, after all—but right now the statement does ring true for the technology industry. Think about the weight we’ve added to the world: attention-greedy devices and services, new business structures that turn out to reinforce existing inequalities instead of working against them, technocratic blowhards, never mind the surveillance shit storm we all now must navigate.
How could any self-aware person who works in technology not start to organize their disappointment? It’s gotten to where several of my peers are floating half-hearted speculations about their next careers. This isn’t good: you want the talented and mindful people to stick around, not get husked out, then leave frustrated, exhausted, and conflicted.
The closer I get to it all, the more I become confused and overwhelmed. A thing I knew so well has reached out wider and wider, only to make less and less sense. So last year, instead of being stubborn, complaining, or feeling powerless, I went searching for a different perspective. I wanted to take something big and make it small again. This was urgent: I needed a way to re-engage with my craft on a foundational level. Otherwise, I’d also be looking for a second career.
Can I play something for you? Trust me: it’s worth it. Oh, and while you’re listening, pay attention to your chest. You may feel a growing warmth, kind of like the fiery trickle after a shot of whiskey. Wasn’t that great? I’ve listened to those irritating bing-bongs 30 or 40 times in the process of making this page, and while you can’t see it, I’m typing this with a big, stupid smile on my face. If you came online in the ’90s like me, you’re probably smiling too.
That sound, of course, is the audio handshake of a modem connecting to the internet. And the fiery feeling in the chest it creates is the warm pang of nostalgia. I’ve managed to tether that grating sound to all the wonder and magic I felt my first years on the internet. Back then, if you told me that I’d get to spend the next decade or so making things for the web—well, that would be just about the best news I could be told.
But things have changed, as they always do. I’m writing this fifteen years after the bing-bongs, and the fascination has faded. What happened is what always happens: the wonder I felt was diminished by experience. The awe goes—time takes it.
In Buddhism, there’s something called the beginner’s mind. If you’ve ever done any kind of guided meditation, you’re probably familiar. It refers to having an attitude of openness, of eagerness. You drop your heavy preconceptions and revitalize a practice by finding a new way to look at it. Making things for the web started to feel very heavy to me, so this seemed to be what I needed.
Most investigations into beginner’s mind eventually lead to the same zen koan. It’s a small story, and it goes like this: Before I began to practice, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers.
After I began to practice, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. Now, I have practiced for some time, and mountains are again mountains, and rivers are again rivers.
So what’s the lesson? Here’s my take: we eventually work through the naive belief that profundity comes from complication. It simply isn’t so. Things have enough depth and worth on their own terms. No metaphors or analogies are needed for insight, only the willingness to listen to the subject speak for itself, even if it contradicts received wisdom.I’d like to do some listening today.
What is there to see when you look at a website as itself? A lot, actually, but let’s simplify things down to their core. As we go through this, please excuse me for stating the obvious. My intent is to describe and document the apparent. Rivers as rivers, remember?
Here we have a very vanilla website. No styles, just markup. All defaults.The first thing to notice about this page is that it is fluid—it adapts to the width of the viewport to fill it up. We can’t quite say it’s responsive, because responsive sites require media queries, but this site, like a responsive one, isn’t opinionated about the size of the viewport. It works well at whatever size you throw at it.
I think you make what I call “bicycle bear websites.” Why? Because my response to both is the same. “Listen bub,” I say, “it is very impressive that you can teach a bear to ride a bicycle, and it is fascinating and novel. But perhaps it’s cruel? Because that’s not what bears are supposed to do. And look, pal, that bear will never actually be good at riding a bicycle.”
This is how I feel about so many of the fancy websites I see. “It is fascinating that you can do that, but it’s really not what a website is supposed to do.” For example, behold Apple’s Mac Pro website. Same response as the bear on the bicycle: all glee, until things go haywire, and you realize it is coming right for you.
What is this monstrosity? Why does it feel like docking a spaceship? Why can’t I scroll? And why is there lag on my fancy laptop? What’s that sound? My computer’s fan?
Apple’s pursuit of cool yielded an incredibly fragile, willfully esoteric website that’s good for no one. And I’m certain you can think of a few similar examples of your own: clumsy sites that work counter to the inclinations of the web. Back to the zen koan—if we see the mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers, these are the sites that try to be different, yet end up swimming up stream and climbing uphill.
I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material. We expect technology to help us overcome limitations, not produce more of them. In spite of those promises, we typically yield consistent design results.We use flat colors and simple gradients, because they’re lightweight, easy to draw with CSS, and can easily scale for areas of unknown proportions.
Sites have large horizontal stripes of content, because of the vertical bias I mentioned earlier.We use text as interface, because the nuanced but significant differences in technology’s abstractions are difficult to communicate visually.Ambient, atmospheric, blurred, or tinted photographs become background images, because we can’t quite be sure how it will be cropped across different viewports. And big type is overlaid on top of these images because every client simultaneously wants big images and big type. Plus it dances around those text versus image scaling problems I showed earlier.
We use photography with props, because software is abstract and hard to embody, so we show it on a device in a related context to have it seem like the product that it is.And mosaics, because every page presents a multitude of elements, and we need structured ways of showcasing this variety.
The web is forcing our hands. And this is fine! Many sites will share design solutions, because we’re using the same materials. The consistencies establish best practices; they are proof of design patterns that play off of the needs of a common medium, and not evidence of a visual monoculture.
So this is a good start, but it is only a start. Could those simple sites I showed earlier assist us beyond the page and provide a larger way to think? To put a finer point on it: What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?
It turns out, I found the answer from a painter who also thought to step away from the canvas. Let’s have a short art history lesson, shall we?
Meet David Hockney—artist, painter, and conflicted photographer. In the early ’80s, he took a small break from painting to pursue these mentioned photographic joiners. They were an investigation of time and space. Now, that seems really heady, but once you see them, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. They kind of look like cubist paintings, but much quicker to read. I’d like to show you a few.
As Hockney says in the video, he started the project with Polaroids. You can see them tiled together here, because each individual photo can’t capture the whole picture.
Inside, Hockney is using redundancy to show action. How many hands are there? How many heads does that man have? Two faces in this image, but you don’t interpret it as a two-headed man. It is two glances at one face—facets of the same thing.
It’s so seamless, you’d probably not count the faces without me mentioning it. You just know, because this is how you see. You have a small focal range; your brain stitches the bits together into a complete whole. Here’s another piece, even more advanced. This one is my favorite, because it’s so economical—like a comic strip.
Do you see what’s changed? Hockney stopped using Polaroids. The grid is gone, replaced by overlaid, borderless photos. Nothing cut or cropped, nothing tricky. Hockney’s able to do a lot of work with only six images. What would this method look like with many more? Hockney asked the same question.
This is The Scrabble Game, and in my opinion, it’s the masterpiece from this era of Hockney’s career. This piece is all over the place: so many faces, so many hands. The game board is out of sync from image to image, so you can actually piece together the plays in the order they were made. Also, there are no ends to my aggravation about how he does not see he has a word in his tiles. (Liqueur, anyone?)So, do you see what’s happened? Recall the first joiner I showed you with the Polaroids, and compare it to The Scrabble Game.
Hockney began with an image-making practice that relied on the grid necessitated by the Polaroids’ borders and produced a rectangular final work. When he switched to normal film, he was able to overlay images in any necessary shape that accurately described the time and space of a scene. Nobody would set out to make a picture with these edges—what you see is what was required by the images he managed to snap.
In essence, Hockney abandoned the notion that a two-dimensional work of art needed to exist at a fixed, rectangular size. Instead, small individual photos were overlaid and assembled until they formed a complete picture. Individually, the photos don’t mean much, but collectively they… does this seem familiar? Okay, I’m sorry. I’ve tricked you, and we’ve come full circle. We’re back to responsive design. Let’s make an analogy.
On the left, the Mona Lisa. Cliché, but why the hell not? The painting, to me, is like designing for the printed page. On the right, The Scrabble Game. This assemblage more closely resembles designing for a screen. Do you see it? It is control versus discovery, uniformity versus multiplicity. With the Mona Lisa, we have fixed, uniform edges that can be planned for with a high degree of certainty and control. We revere and celebrate this painting because of that exquisite control.
With the joiner, we have a different kind of beauty. It is an edgeless surface of unknown proportions, comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment. Also known as web design. Here, I’ll restate what I just said, but this time, imagine I’m talking about web design and not the Hockney photos:an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment That’s a pretty good description of the visual challenges in interaction design, huh?
In November of 2013, I gave a talk called What Screens Want, where I tried to answer what it meant to natively design for screens. I said it was something I called flux—the capacity for things to change. This could be as showy as animation, but also as simple and fundamental as a spreadsheet sorting itself and showing new results. You can’t do that on paper. So, designing for screens is managing this change over time, and expressing it in clear, communicative, and powerful ways. Now, after looking at Hockney’s work for far too long, I can add another item to the list: edgelessness.
A lack of edges permeates the web at all levels. You just have to look for it:Edgelessness is in the web’s structure: it’s comprised of individual pages linked together, so its structure can branch out forever.Edgelessness applies to the screens that show the web, because they offer an infinite canvas that can scroll in any direction for however long. Boy, do we take for granted that a screen can show more content than is able to be displayed in a single shot.Edgelessness speaks to the diffusion of device and viewport sizes. Above is a chart of screen sizes across Android devices. How could there be a clear edge on a spectrum with such minor differences between each size? And, most interesting to me, edgelessness means blurred lines between the disciplines that work together to make things for the web. Everyone that I’ve spoken with that’s worked on a large responsive project with a big client says that the process disrupts workflows, expectations, and work culture. Simply put, the edgelessness of the web tears down the constructed edges in the company. Everything is so interconnected that nobody has a clear domain of work any longer—the walls are gone, so we’re left to learn how to collaborate in the spaces where things connect. Let’s take a look at how edgelessness affects how we work. Suppose you’re about to start a web project with some sketches. How would you begin?
We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly, convergence and simplicity make for poor goals. Instead, we must aim for clarity. You can’t contain or reduce the torrent of technology, but you can channel it in a positive direction through proper framing and clear articulation.Technology only adds more—it is never this or that; it is always this and that.
So just like Hockney’s joiners, we’re creating assemblages of elements, then associating them with the appropriate space.The practice of assembling conflicts with most of the terminology we have in place for responsive design. Our words make it seem that we’re designing how elements break down, but really, we should be focusing on how they build up. And this concept, just like the layouts we create, can reach out a bit further.
A quick example from my life: Twitter didn’t replace Facebook. The iPad didn’t replace my phone. My phone didn’t replace my TV. Now, I watch YouTube on my iPad, toss the video up to my TV, while checking Twitter and Facebook on my phone. It’s a little constellation of technology. But I keep asking myself: how many more things can I juggle? And for how long?
The answers offered are typically technological solutions. Algorithms. Automation. Tiny programs and sets of rules to filter out what bursts from the internet’s flue hole. While well intentioned (maybe), these answers only become extra points of control and influence. Using technology to solve the problems it causes is as futile as cleaning a grass stain by rubbing grass on it. More technology only amplifies the problems created by an abundance of it. This leads to the most pressing question: How far out will technology grow? And when does it cross the line of comfort?
We’re building edgeless environments of divergency. Things are added in chaos, then if successful, they expanded further and further out until they collapse and rearrange. This is probably why responsive design feels so relevant, maddening, and divisive: its patterns mimic the larger patterns of technology itself.What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience.
To create convenience—particularly the automated convenience technology trades in—someone else must make our choices for us. In other words: the less you have to do, the less say you have.Up to a point, swapping autonomy for ease is a pretty good trade: who wants to run the math on their accounting books or call the restaurant to place a delivery order? But if taken too far, convenience becomes a Trojan Horse.
We cede too much control and become dependent on something we can no longer steer. Platforms that promised to bring convenience to a process or intimacy to a relationship now wedge themselves into the transaction as new middlemen. Then, we’re left to trust in the benevolence of those who have the power to mold our dependencies. Citing a lot of the concerns I mentioned earlier, those people are less responsible and compassionate than we had hoped. In pursuit of convenience, we have opened the door to unscrupulous influence.
You could say that our current technological arrangement has spread out too far, and it is starting to look and feel wrong. Fortunately, we can treat this over-expansion just like everything else I’ve mentioned. We can draw a line, and create a point of reassembly for what we’ve made. We can think about how to shift, move, and resize the pieces so that they fall back in line with our intentions. This power is compounded for those of us who make this technology.
Michael Rock · T Magazine, 2015
This mirror is a fitting room. Click any sentence to pin it to the foamcore board on the wall. At the end, the board becomes your mood board.
We designers love to fashion ourselves as “problem solvers,” but let’s face it: the line between solving problems and creating them is blurry at best. What problem is being solved by a $1,500 pair of heels, or a $150,000 car, or a $150,000,000 architectural extravaganza in the Bois de Boulogne? The truth is, no matter what designers say, we have never simply answered problems. The act of design vacillates between the functional and the beguiling, often performing one while claiming the other. Le Corbusier dismissed the architecture of his beaux-arts contemporaries as cloying, while he looked longingly to the brutal utility of the grain elevators and factories devised by American engineers. A half century later, Rem Koolhaas jettisoned function in favor of performance: “functionality is boring; performance is about what role the building plays and what kind of scene it triggers.” There has long been an ideological divide between the utilitarian and the emotional, between rational design and the decorative arts, but the balance of power is shifting: In the battle between the head and the gut, the gut’s now cleaning up.
The empathy economy is booming. Facts are out, feelings are in. This is attributed, at least in part, to a kind of brand-mania that asserts that everything from your razor blade to your public library to the IRS needs to have a relatable personality. Everyone is in the business of brand management: artists, designers, businesses, celebrities, politicians, museums, universities, armies, nations. (Is it only a matter of time before we’re debating our intergalactic positioning?) Branding is supposedly not about what something says, or what it means, but how it makes us feel. A brand is a promise. It’s the putative guarantee of the emotional payoff on an investment in a particular product, place, or individual. So the new handbag makes us feel chic and knowing; the laptop, savvy and contemporary; the vodka, suave and sophisticated; the museum, refined and sensitive. When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, have the knack for using design to produce an emotional coherence that spans from content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you its working.
So if the goal of design is emotional coherence, how is that end achieved? Enter the mood board: the most quotidian, slightly-embarrassing and now ubiquitous design tool. The mood board has long been associated with the softer design arts — fashion, interiors, styling — that trade in allusion and affect. Decorators used them, serious architects didn’t. There’s no science to it, simply a collection of inspirations and influences: an array of Xeroxed pictures pinned to a foamcore panel or scattered on the studio floor, a cloud of references composed to evoke atmosphere. Their very vaporousness is the point. Pictures joined together don’t signify any one thing, but rather inchoate feelings. An image of a silky kitty, when juxtaposed with an angora bunny, a desiccated dandelion, and an eskimo anorak, is freed from the bonds of the corporeal and becomes the essence of fluffiness. For the professional brand manager the mood board attempts to render, in a handful of swiped images, some vague quintessence that’s difficult to achieve with words.
For fashion designers who are required to pump out a new set of allusions every season, the mood board has long been an essential and highly confidential way to pinpoint explicit references before assiduously burying their tracks. One former Calvin Klein designer recalls how when she worked at the brand in the 00’s, the mood boards were sacrosanct. Only certain people were allowed to touch them. The foamcore was covered in different materials — linen for one collection, cotton for another — and the teams was required to use specific pins. The boards could only be carried one at a time, never stacked, lest the surface was disturbed. As almost proof of how far we’ve come, last spring for his men’s collection, Raf Simmons came right out and superimposed his reference images — a Japanese block print, an antique postcard, an astronaut — directly onto coats and jackets. He likened pieces in the collection to “mood boards you’d pin your favorite images to.”
As the longing for emotional connection spreads from how we want our clothes or living room to feel, to how we want our minivan or pharmaceutical or constitutional democracy to feel, the mood business continues to expand. (A friend recently told me her therapist encouraged her to make a mood board expressing the feelings related to her recent divorce.) This expansion is fueled, in large part, by the sheer overabundance of available images. It’s hard to remember that a couple of decades ago, finding pictures of things was actually quite arduous and involved countless hours of random page flipping. Now a few seconds of furious key-stroking produces endless examples to regurgitate. Every possible idea is immediately diluted by retroactive references. That glut of images is constantly resifted through personal curation tools such as Pinterest and Tumblr, and inspiration websites such as ffffound.com or vfiles.com. Such hyper-individualistic online collections, in turn, become open-source mood repositories scavenged by branding professionals. Why assemble collections of your own when there are millions that exist ready for appropriation? Need to evoke cozy softness with a vaguely synthetic overtone, an early seventies color palette, and just a touch of glam rock? Missile silo chic? Mid-century Crimean beach culture? I can guarantee someone out there has that covered. There are even Pinterest pages dedicated to collecting other mood boards: collections of collections. And then, of course, there is Instagram, which turns every individual life into a social network mood board. The carefully curated Instagram account is essentially a personal image management tool: private life as public brand.
While the ascendency of mood boarding reflects the way brands, from commercial products to people, are imagined at this moment, the question remains why we are all so susceptible to manufactured emotion. Why are we so needy? Perhaps this yearning is a reaction to the lurking presence of Big Data. As vast files of meta-data and personal search histories are ferreted away in some server farm in god-knows-where, we crave the kind of anodyne, gauzy experiences that at least promise something warmer and more human. When everything is available all the time and we’re inundated with information in every way, shape and form, we’re left no choice but to favor what makes us feel.
Alexandra Lange · a letter to swissmiss, 2014
This mirror asks you to judge. Like or dislike every paragraph. If you dislike one, it will ask why. Say why and that is criticism. Say nothing and that is the trash button.
The lesson I’ve learned is to be wary of those who are. The ones who seem to think that being critical is the same as having good taste. Those people almost never have good taste, so their opinions don’t matter.There’s no particular sophistication required to be a critic. We know this, because children often dislike foods they learn to love as adults.
I always take more pleasure in liking something than in disliking something.
As a child I disliked the Eames LCW chair in my parents’ bedroom. I took no pleasure in hating it. My feeling separated me from my mother, whose taste I have always admired.
Was Eames a flavor I had to become more sophisticated to enjoy? Perhaps. But that dislike, that gap between us in taste, fueled a productive thought process. I had to figure out what was so great about an object so ugly, so bulbous, so unlike the other (normal) chairs in our house. I had to learn about the Eameses, about bentwood, about cleaning up “the slum of legs.” If at the end of that process I still hated the chair, would I have gained less in sophistication? I learned to love the exploration. I love the chair too, even though, due to its age and the innovative industrial means of its manufacture, it is now sculpture rather than furniture.
My now-husband’s first gift to me was another collection of criticism, Michael Sorkin’s Exquisite Corpse. My education in criticism up to that date had been establishment; this book was made of ruder stuff. It bristles with dislike about some of the very same buildings Ada Louise Huxtable loved, and love for those about which she was lukewarm. The Ford Foundation. The Whitney. My favorite essay in the book is probably the one on the Whitney, an all-too-rare love letter to Marcel Breuer intertwined with a demolition of Michael Graves and his “shitty beaux-arts apparatus.” However quotable, I still wouldn’t call that hating. Sorkin says Graves can’t help it, the apparatus is just his way. It’s on the rest of us to save the Whitney. Sorkin is simply giving us reasons why we should. His conclusion is less important than explaining how to get there.
Your blog is clearly a critical enterprise. The mission of swissmiss seems obviously analogous to Tattly, which you created to clean up the slum of temporary tattoos.
You must get hundreds of emails a day with products, apps, videos and posters that you deem unworthy of publication. Every time you don’t publish something, you are being a critic. Yet you don’t share that judgment. That negative determination happens without comment, in the click of the trash button. What I’d like to hear about is what happens in your head between the look and that judgmental click. Why this and not that? What’s wrong with that picture?
That’s not to say there aren’t somethings that deserve to be liked and somethings that deserved to be disliked, but I’m never fond of disliking something.
You are motivated by a love of design, as am I. Haters are name-callers, body-shamers, trolls. They are destructive. If my fellow critics and I did not love buildings, books, gadgets and food, there would be no reason for us to do what we do. I really don’t get paid enough. But as I move through the world of objects, I have a lot of questions. I can’t ignore what I dislike or don’t understand. Sometimes I describe the way I choose my topics as scratching an itch: if something bothers me each time I see it, the only salve is investigation. Growing up is doing more than complaining (or, as you have said, coming up with a Twitter hashtag). Let’s talk about it—as adults, of course. I would like to save a building or improve a megaproject, but sometimes the critic has to settle for creating a conversation. Maybe this is just the long way of saying something very simple: Dear Design, I love you. But love isn’t blind.
To be able to say, simply and directly, what is wrong (or not-yet-right) in design is not a child’s task. I don’t think it is possible to educate about design without talking about the world of wrong, ugly, misguided and oversize. Yes, swissmiss, like Switzerland, might be the exception to that world. But it will never be the rule, and accentuating the positive will only reorganize so much territory. Today’s Lois Lane cannot avoid the aisles of the can compare our Twitter followings), but there’s more constructive work to be done below, where so many design blogs fear to dive. You are motivated by a love of design, as am I. Haters are name-callers, body-shamers, trolls. They are destructive. If my fellow critics and I did not love buildings, books, gadgets and food, there would be no reason for us to do what we do. I really don’t get paid enough. But as I move through the world of objects, I have a lot of questions. I can’t ignore what I dislike or don’t understand. Sometimes I describe the way I choose my topics as scratching an itch: if something bothers me each time I see it, the only salve is investigation. Growing up is doing more than complaining (or, as you have said, coming up with a Twitter hashtag). Let’s talk about it—as adults, of course. I would like to save a building or improve a megaproject, but sometimes the critic has to settle for creating a conversation.
Maybe this is just the long way of saying something very simple: Dear Design, I love you. But love isn’t blind.
Three essays on design. One verdict: on you.