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Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Design as a (partially) Stochastic Process In my 4/23 post called Dogma and Design, I kvetched about dogmatic usability gurus and their tendency to use a rhetorical style that alienates the audience they most need to reach: designers. I suggested off-handedly at the end of the post that perhaps their rhetoric is a function of their general philosophical persuasion, which I further postulated to be some form of positivism or objectivism. While I hold these philosophies in some esteem, I have some profound issues with them as well. All I will say on that subject for the moment is that I don’t think the enlightenment was the end of the process — but I definitely don’t think we need to do away with it, in fact I consider the enlightenment to be one of the most important things to have ever happened in human history. I digress. Because I have some esteem for the “scientific worldview,” I feel compelled to try to elucidate my opinion about design using at least an empirical, if perhaps not quantitative, argument. The crux of the argument is an experiment I read in something by Robert Anton Wilson (the particular source of which eludes me,) which, if I remember correctly, was co-opted in turn from Buckminster Fuller. So this is something of a multiparty plagiarism at this point. Here’s the experiment you can try at home: Ask a friend to fetch a newspaper you haven’t seen. Instruct said friend to stand a distance just far enough from you that you cannot read a headline of a certain size. If the paper has been close enough to you during this process to have read the given headline, request that your friend find another headline of the same size and show it to you at the distance already described. While looking at the headline that is barely too distant to read, ask your friend to read the headline aloud. If the paper is not too far away to discern the headline from other elements on the page, you should see the words as your friend reads them aloud. This experiment has worked for me every time — I encourage you (all three of you that read this stuff) to try it. This experiment leads me to something more like the position of Aleister Crowley when he suggests: Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms.I have digressed from my digression. Let me try to bring this back around to commercial art. Part of the responsibility of an ad, or a web site or any other marketing vehicle is to communicate the brand. The experiment above seems to suggest that some part of what has meaning to us as humans is perceptual. There seems to be an intersection here. Add one more element to the equation: Our world is full of art and design. It permeates our existence. Because of this, we all have a quite nuanced and subconscious network of associations between a matrix of artistic concepts, paradigms and elements and a matrix of emotions, memories and contexts. In other words, we all respond to the language of art, in part, on a visceral level that gets in “beneath the radar” as it were. Furthermore, the stream of artistic thought and action is fluid, so that concepts, paradigms and elements are constantly engendered, revised or revisited. This fluidity seems to reinforce the “beneath the radar” effect by keeping the audience somewhat off-guard. Taking the quote from the 4/23 post: "Web design is not about art, it's about making money."I’ve already said I have no problem with the second clause; it is the first clause to which I object. How does a brand like Nike, competing in a crowded market, get and keep market share? It seems to me a big part of how they do it is through the intuition of the commercial artist whose keen awareness of the shifting tides of artistic value helps shape the perceptions of the market. The artist is your friend holding the newspaper, with the brand as the headline and he’s telling you what that brand means, using the archetypes of art. The web is an excellent marketing vehicle. It certainly seems to entail more vis-à-vis usability than, for example, a magazine ad, but it still does a great job conveying brand messages through art. In rare cases, I even think the value of this trumps a usability rule here and there. When considering the preceding commentary, one should take into account the incredibly convoluted nature and the fact that the author was drunk (not really.) At least he spell-chevked. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:05 AM · Saturday, April 26, 2003
Snopes.com Perusing Dave Barry’s blog, I ran across a link to this item. Needless to say, I was feeling dubious about this whole story and after a google on the name “Andrew Carlssin” returned some 400+ links (many of which were from multifarious international blogs,) I was certain it must be a hoax. I suddenly remembered the place to check: Snopes.com. Despite the apparently young life of this story – they had the answer. Good show, indeed. Now they need to hire me to redesign their site. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 2:11 AM · Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Dogma and Design Because I enjoy it immensely, and because it pays my mortgage, I am an interactive designer/developer. I say designer/developer because I really labor intensively to do both well – which is not at all easy. One thing that makes it particularly difficult (aside from the clients) is the tremendously different attitudes and philosophies of designers and developers. Most of the designers I know consider themselves, for the most part, artists. Most of the developers I know consider themselves engineers of sorts. Perhaps one can begin to see my point. Personally, I think that no interactive project will serve the client well if it is either unusable or ugly. In other words, an integration of these two disparate perspectives seems to me necessary. It is my experience with the medium, however, that this integration is very rarely achieved. As to why this is, I suspect dogmatism. One dogmatist in particular raised my ire today: Vincent Flanders. Vince, it seems, is a cohort of the egregious Jacob Nielsen. I’ve got to give some props to Dr. Nielsen for the light he has helped to shed on usability concerns in software. That usability is a matter of great concern, there can be no doubt, but the cheerleading for usability is not what troubles me. What troubles me is the dogmatic assertion that usability is not only important, but paramount. It is my contention that in some instances, usability is the most important concern, but in others, aesthetics is the most important and still others where they should be on roughly equal footing (this would seem to be the most common). It seems this is lost on these gents, and as I indicated above, I would submit that the kind of rhetoric they employ exacerbates the difficulties that naturally occur between designers and developers. So, rather than helping to produce an environment in which great work gets done, they’re despoiling the waters with comments like this (source): "Web design is not about art, it's about making money."Incidentally, this is the comment which raised my ire — he even has it in bold type. I have no problem with the notion that web design is about making money, I just don’t consider profit and art to be mutually exclusive. My experience with designers suggests to me that comments like the above do more to turn them off to usability, heuristics, et al. in toto. Perhaps Vince should consider employing E-Prime. I suspect the distance between Jakob or Vinny and say, Eric Jordan may actually be posterior to a deeper philosophical distance. In particular, I wonder how many of Nielsen’s ilk would fancy themselves objectivists or positivists. It would explain much, as the perspective of the designer/artist is often poorly or nearly impossibly parleyed into the language of slide-rules and t-squares. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:27 AM · Thursday, April 17, 2003
Steve Verdon was quite kind to post something about my blog - as well as blogrolling me! I have him blogrolled, but if you haven't been there, go read his blog: Deinonychus Antirropus. As he notes in his post, he's a regular at the Trash Talk BB, which is an excellent place to be informed about how specious science is used to further various agendas. I’m also adding a link to the “Edification” section of my links to a site I found on Steve’s site: the site of a certain David Friedman, whose online writings on economics, game theory and libertarianism are incredibly interesting. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 9:41 AM · Tuesday, April 15, 2003
My experience with Blogger has been less than stellar so far. Currently, my archive contains a link to a test post I used when I first started the blog. I deleted it some time ago, but there it remains – and even formatted in one of the default templates. For those few who read this, should you be unfamiliar with Blogger, the blog administrator is provided a way to view archives and there are even buttons that say “delete.” One would naturally assume that clicking such a button would result in the deletion of something. One would be wrong in this case. Clicking said button returns inscrutable error messages, and a consultation of the convoluted “Knowledge Base” seems to suggest that, yes, in fact, you can NOT delete the archives using the captious delete button, or indeed any other method (getting to that). I am not certain that this is what the “Knowledge Base” wants me to know, because the language is unclear at best and contained in a section suggesting that posts may not be deleted even if the site is deleted (?!?) Well – I rather enjoy it anyway, despite the shortcomings, because I’m publishing my very own rubbish for pennies. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 11:54 PM · Thursday, April 10, 2003
I have an old friend, with whom I haven’t spoken in some time. The last time I saw her, she was with her significant other, who was decidedly Marxist – well…I don’t presume to offer a label for her own particular nuanced flavor of communism – but I gathered from our long conversation that she was pretty hostile to capitalism. I consider my friend a brilliant artist and while I was only just meeting her girlfriend for the first time, she struck me as possessing a quick, clever wit. My friend, at the time had just received an impressive post-graduate degree from a highly-esteemed art school and her girlfriend was pursuing the like from the same. They are both within five years of my age, I believe. These are smart people. I think their particular type of intelligence exacerbates the issue I was kvetching about in my 4/6 post. I learned a lot from my discussion that evening, vis-à-vis trying to package very pragmatic concepts in a way that speaks to lateral-thinking minds, but there was much that I felt I communicated, perhaps accurately, but not compellingly. While this was many months ago, these things roll and loll in my cranium and since only Skye reads this thing, I thought I’d try to repackage some of my libertarian yang to her communist yin. One of the sort-of subcutaneous threads of the discussion was the perceived dichotomy between science and nature. She seemed to suggest that the results of the application of science and empiricism were ugly, dehumanizing and destroying the planet. She is by no means alone in her belief. Let me really get down to primacy here. Real freedom for all individuals is a product of enlightenment philosophy. In particular, empiricism suggests that you can prevent people from lording over you through appeals to religion or the supernatural, by testing their claims against your own experience. This is practical for everyone provided the issue is a very simple one like, “if you don’t do my bidding, you’ll immediately be struck by lightning” – anyone can test this claim – but empirical knowledge of some things require special tools. For example, your practical knowledge of the moon is dramatically increased through the intercession of a telescope. One of the dangers she mentioned – and I’ve heard it mentioned many times – is that posed by industrialized farming practices. When examining this issue, the equivalent “telescopes” of agricultural science produce dazzling images like this one. Here are some highlights: “Stated simply, 1960 yields would require virtually all of the land not yet being used for crops — or taken out of cultivation for habitat and wildlife conservation — to be cultivated.”These things are all a result of the technologies employed. Seeing these kind of results is especially noteworthy when you consider that agriculture is probably the oldest human technology – we’ve pretty well sussed it out. Now what the hell was I talking about? Sorry about the length of the post, Skye. Jeez, my one reader makes one request, "keep the posts short like you have been," and I've already blown it. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:52 AM · Wednesday, April 09, 2003
It pisses me off. The majority of the media I encounter on a daily basis, irrespective of political or philosophical identification, strikes me as tendentious and abrasive. For too many and profound reasons to enumerate at this moment, I regard genuine objectivity as functionally impossible – BUT – I see no reason why writers/reporters can’t attempt to present multiple opinions and name the body of thought associated with each opinion. Is the “conventional wisdom” really that empiricism is so ridiculous that people can’t be trusted to make up their own minds? It’s not just the media – politicians are just as bad…worse. I hear platitude after platitude in the made-for-tv communications of the body politic – but never any attempt to elucidate the philosophical antecedents of the specificities of Senator X’s positions. Would it be so terrible for the left to admit that the right doesn’t want the indigent to rot in the gutter – they just believe the issue should be addressed through different means? Couldn’t the right speak calmly about the possibility that a reasonable person could have a cogent argument in opposition of the war (not that I’ve heard any)? I want to launch into what I perceive to be the failure of classical academia to effectively market the enlightenment, but I am in pursuit of some capital and idle bloviation will not bring it nearer. Another time… posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 12:17 AM · Sunday, April 06, 2003
As I see it in those around me, I realize that I, too, have been well trained in arguments critical of Western society and philosophy, without having been given a thorough grounding in that which I have sought to criticize. In the spirit of ameliorating what seems to me to be a not insignificant problem with my and my peers’ knowledge, I’m eager to lay some blame on my/our public school education. As a sophomore in high-school, I was offered a class (taught by the English Department, strangely) in Existentialism – a class misleadingly named “Modern Thought.” It has been about twelve or so years since I took this class, but I remember the first day opened with a critique of Plato. While Plato strikes me as being considerably less important to the enlightenment than Aristotle, I am and was bemused by the fact that I had not received even the most cursory of instruction in Plato or Aristotle (or any other in the Western canon) and yet here I was being taught refutations. Standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing, but what we were engaged in was something more akin to stomping on the shoulders of the giants upon which we stood. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 2:17 PM · |
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