Thinking outside the box again

Okay I know I showed you a lot of videos in class but here is another one that makes people want to pick up trash. To some of you this is frivolous, but just think how many ways you can help people or create a great experience that will make people want to come back for more. Just give it a try sometime.

Grids

We are talking about the background spaces into which images are placed. In a screen-based world, many or most -- perhaps ALL -- of those spaces can be analyzed as based on the grid, the regularly-spaced or modular intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, generally at right angles, generally parallel to the sides of the frame/screen/image.

Grids are all-pervasive. Grids are literally and figuratively the fabric of civilization -- well, Western civilization, anyway. One theory: Grids are the natural evolutionary expression of the most basic post-and-lintel design for shelter construction. (Post-and-lintel: Two upright logs with a third horizontal log spanning the space between them, as we may imagine forming the doorway of in a primitive hut). This can be extended to all early construction: It is easier and more efficient to build everything in simple rectangular modules. Of course, with pre-industrial technologies, building curved walls can be relatively easy depending on the materials used, but once the village becomes a town, or a town a city, people discover that the most efficient use of the ground -- the individual plot of personal space -- comes when the maximum area is enclosed by the walls, and this happens in a gridded design of the town space.

Gridded town planning goes back at least to ancient India in the 3rd millenium BC, and is the most common plan in every Western civilization for the past 2,000 years. All things descend from this -- all the way down to the shape of the windows in our homes, the paper in our notebooks, the "windows" in our netbooks. Nowadays, the design of spaces and things, both physical and graphic, into gridded, rectangular modules seems so fundamental, that it is nearly impossible to imagine how the world would work without this basic strategy, this basic design substance. The grid is this basic backdrop against which the play of civilization, both public and private, is enacted.

Just a thought

Mannheimer

Multi-genre Rado Hits Indy

By S. Mannheimer

A new radio station in Indianapolis has been playing an unusual mix
of music. The programming philosophy or aesthetic of WITT in Zionsville,
91.9 on your FM dial, http://www.919witt.org/news.html, is, in a word,
eclectic. At any given moment in the broadcasting day, listeners might be
treated to an unpredictable line-up of, say, an old Dylan tune followed by a
Sinatra ballad followed by a short Mozart concerto then a smattering of
contemporary Canadian folk, with the occasional mainstream rocker or Broadway musical thrown in for balance. There are also dedicated segments or block programming, such as
the weekly shows highlighting rock from the late 1940s and into the ‘50s.
No doubt there are other interesting programming elements in the WITT
schedule, or will be soon.

Most radio stations are programmed to appeal to a definable demographic slice of the market. Their broadcast content, their programming, generally revolves around a central genre or musical aesthetic. This seems obvious to anyone with even a casual, drive-time radio habit: Radio stations have definable personalities. A station known for rock ‘n roll oldies is unlikely to punctuate a series of songs by the Stones, Led Zeppelin, REO Speedwagon with an assortment of toe-tapping favorites by 1940s-era Big Bands led by Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman. But this is the sort of mix-and-match programming WITT has been doing.

This WITT aesthetic descends from the idea of the multi- or trans-cultural connoisseur, the person equally attuned to the delights of Japanese koto music, Balinese gamelan orchestras, a Bach organ sonata, 18th-century English sea shanties, early Beatles and electronic “world music,” etc. and etc. A century ago, this was a Victorian ideal, personified by the likes of Sherlock Holmes, the detective with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s cultures, especially the cultures that comprised the British Empire. More recently, we have seen this multi-cultural sensibility in Holmes’ distant offspring James Bond, who always seemed to know the right way to drink Japanese saki or Turkish coffee.

Such people truly exist, in modified form: Schooled, skilled and experienced in multiple genres,
able to appreciate a panorama of tastes and speak
knowledgeably about a small encyclopedia of cultural products. They are out there: College professors and well-traveled professionals who return from vacations and posting abroad with Burmese tapestries and Norwegian sweaters. A glance at the hangings and bookshelf knick-knacks in their living rooms reveals the breadth of their sensibilities.

In recent years, such broad consumption could be identified with "post-modernism." Post-modernism has been pitched as a liberating reaction to the monolithic monotony of modernism and the repressive uniformity of consumer capitalism. Maybe. Or maybe it's just another marketing strategy more in tune with the realities of digital technology and the global consumer society.

Too heavy? Well, just enjoy the music and don't worry about the theories.

Books, eBooks and the Design of Reading

We talked in class about an online book rental service. I kept thinking about our conversation, and the whole idea of The Book. What exactly is a book? How much of our definition and expectation of “bookness” is bound up (pun intended) with physical qualities: What a hard cover book feels like; what a paperback book feels like and how it fits into a backpack or jacket pocket, and how we can throw a paperback book across the room to a friend – or leave it on the beach while we go get a drink and never worry about it getting wet or sandy. How books smell; how we write in the margins or underline passages, or write our names on the inside cover, etc.

In terms of “navigational” accessibility, books are a delight. Our hands are well-suited to quickly flipping through books, sorting through whole chapters, then individual pages then letting our eyes scan across a couple of pages to find themes or narrative scenes – and books themselves help us out by letting us easily bend a page corner just a half-inch or so, enough to easily mark a particular place among hundreds of others. Even the basic structure of books, with hundreds of pages held together closely with increasing pressure closer to the book spine, helps us by providing the pressure to hold in a scrap of paper as a bookmark. And let’s not forget the ergonomic qualities of books: Unlike a desktop computer, books offer a complete range of physical access postures. We can read them sitting, standing or lying on your back or on your stomach, leaning on an elbow or curled up sideways in a big easy chair with the book nestled between your knees – even upside down, I suppose. Except for the heaviest ones, we can read them propped up in bed, book resting on your chest, easily pushed to one side when you fall asleep. As a piece or platform of information technology, the good-old-fashioned book is pretty sophisticated.

In recent years there have been a number of thoughtful books about the future that good-old-fashioned technology. “The Gutenberg Elegies” by Sven Birkerts is worth a read, or at the very least a Google: http://www.enotes.com/gutenberg-elegies-salem/gutenberg-elegies. And as long as we’re thinking Gutenberg, check out Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Like all really well-designed and simple technologies, books have become a fundamental species of artifact in our culture. Put them on the same list with other fundamental artifacts such as tableware (spoons, plates, forks, cups, etc.), shoes and eyeglasses. Like dogs, they come in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes, colorations and conformations, but somehow we can always tell when that thing over there is a book. (In a sense, you can ONLY judge a book by its cover because only books have covers – and we’re willing to call magazines large flimsy paperbacks.) If the “real world” is a vast, impossibly complex jungle of information, books are a domesticated species of information containers that we have created and crafted over the centuries to serve us in a variety of roles.

All these qualities of books and the experience of reading are part of the total sense of “book design” that professional book designers consider. The graphic design elements are perhaps the most obvious factors that consumers encounter, and most of us are pretty good at the sort of intuitive evaluation that helps us decide to buy or not to buy: Pick up a book, briefly examine its cover, its typeface, its weight, and almost immediately make a decision about whether it is the right kind of book for our purposes.

Think about how much information about a book can be almost immediately apparent by glancing at its cover, front and back, a scan of the inside of the cover and maybe a quick read of a couple inside paragraphs. That is because bibliophiles (book lovers) have learned to “read” the various design clues that book designers use to communicate information about the type of content and experience this book represents. These clues are what we would call “meta-information” or “meta-descriptors” of the book.

As elements of design these can be as obvious as a gaudy or lurid cover illustration of battling space ships to announce the book as an old-fashioned Star Wars type of sci-fi novel. Or, they can be as subtle as choosing an elegant, serif typeface to lend an air of erudite scholarship and intellectual refinement to a book about the history of poetry. We can all recognize the space ships; most book lovers learn to identify the designed “mood” of typefaces, even though they may never consciously think about it but only learn by experience.

The question, then, for designers in the 21^st century: Which of the qualities of the traditional book can be translated into digital platforms? AND, perhaps more important in the digital age: How does the designer craft the total experience of reading -- not just the physical format of the readable object?

Do we expect an “e-book” read on an iPhone or a Blackberry to have many or most of the same qualities of that old-fashioned reading experience? How about the experience available on -- and the experience "through" or "with" -- one of the new generation of e-book platforms such as the Amazon Kindle http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00154JDAI/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=3254143881&ref=pd_sl_177pa6cuyf_e

or the Sony Reader? http://ebookstore.sony.com/reader/

or the Barnes&Noble Plastic Logic reader http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21365

Keep reading -

Steve

Saturday morning - the best time for comics

Saturday morning -- Design never sleeps -- or never sleeps too late

In this morning's Indianapolis Star, along with an article about Informatics professor Susan Tennant and her Herron School of Art professor husband Phil on page C1, we find the usual assortment of comics. Something about reading the comics on Saturday morning makes sense to at least my generation. We grew up with Saturday morning cartoons on TV. For some fairly obvious reasons back in the 1950s there were many local TV stations that used Saturday mornings as a kids' morning -- no school, parents sleeping in, etc.

One of the advantages -- or perhaps disadvantages -- of our media-drenched era is the way we have lost the connection between specific times of day or week or year when certain sorts of media are most appropriately consumed. We may still intuitively feel that head-banging rock or "gangsta" rap are probably best consumed on a Saturday night rather than a few hours later on Sunday morning, but would we criticize someone's choice to listen to whatever whenever?

In the past, people tended to rely on this sense of certain types of media being connected to certain times or moments, which also meant certain contexts or understood frameworks of media content and usage, certain types of communications.

On page A13 of the same Saturday morning Star, we find an article about the slow emergence of a mainstream sense of "e-tiquette." The article discusses the idea that what was once considered an inappropriate use of a specific medium or communications platform is now often quite acceptable.

The article starts with a discussion of a young married couple expecting their first child, and how the wife was a little ticked off by her husband's intention to circulate news of the unborn baby's gender via a social network, rather than waiting for his wife to contact certain friends individually. As the author, Barbara Ortutay, wrote:

"A decade or two ago, communicating important news electronically rather than in a letter was frowned upon. Now an email is considered acceptable for many situations, but even people comfortable with that might draw the line at social networks, which feel more like public or semi-public venues."

Notice that the author uses the expression "draw the line." As we briefly discussed in class, the idea of DESIGN grows out of the Italian word desegno, meaning drawing. Whenever we draw the line at using a certain communications medium at a certain time for a certain purpose, we are designing the total idea or meaning of that medium. Ask yourself a question: If you wanted to propose marriage, would you send an email? Call on the cell phone? A landline? Blog about it? Send a telegram (can you even do that anymore?)? Propose on the jumbotron at a Colts game? Write a personal letter? --- or, duh, maybe actually talk to your intended face-to-face?

Conversely, would you feel hurt or angry if someone proposed to you using ANY telecommunications platform other than face-to-face?

On the other hand -- (in marriage) -- maybe the public platform of the Web can be used well to communicate very personal messages.

How about a Web site custom designed to deliver a marriage proposal? Could you build a password protected site and send your beloved a link and password? Could you propose in a YouTube video, and send your love a link to connect to it – give it a few hours then remove the video? (And would you really care if some complete stranger found it first?)

And, about those comics: As trivial as they might seem, there are often nuggets of "new media" insight in them disquised as humor. This morning, we see a talking soft-drinking vending machine. (The ability to buy drinks from a machine by using your cell phone already exists.) Also a strip about animals competing for the greatest number of Facebook friends. (Do we have any idea if animals are responsive to media? -- Try googling "TV for dogs")

Enjoy the weekend -- with a loved one or a pet.

Steve

Greetings from Steve

Thanks again to Todd for the great idea to transform the EDJ into a blogging dialogue.

Some thoughts to share from yesterday's lecture and discussion. Your blogs will become more and more valuable as you grow more and more courageous in your explorations of new ideas about design, and your willingness to ask questions that might seem a bit off the beaten path and challenge your own opinions and assumptions about the way the world of mediated experience works.

For example: We talked in class about an online book rental service similar to Netflix. Some of you had legitimate objections or questions about how such a service could possibly be as useful or user-friendly as a good-old-fashioned trup to the book store.

Many of these same concerns were also expressed 10 years ago when Netflix first began to market its service. Back then, at the company I was working for (Thomson), people were considering actually buying Netflix. I sat in meetings where some people expressed a sense of caution, with concerns such as: "People would much rather go to the video store where they can browse in a casual way and maybe even come across a title they weren't looking for, but which now seems very interesting." Call it the "serendipity factor." Others said, "People won't like Netflix because it isn't immediate enough. The urge to go rent a movie is very spur of the moment, and when you feel like a movie, you want to drive over to Blockbuster, see what's out, and get home to watch. No one wants to wait 3-5 days for that movie to show up in the mail."

These people were wrong.

So, when you think that an online book rental service is a stupid idea, you have a responsibility to go out and find some information to back up your opinion, or perhaps evolve or re-focus your opinion. A quick Google search for the exact phrase "online book rental" produces 163,000 hits. Somewhere in these results there is bound to be a great idea of two that will either change your mind, reinforce your opinion, or a little of both. Now, you might be right, and chances are that if you immediately have an objection, others will, as well.

But....

If you were a book publisher or book store owner, watching the declining revenue figures for the entire industry, you would have a great incentive to figure out how to DESIGN a service that overcame those legitimate objections and thus might offer some hope of maintaining your business.

Having a prettier Web site might be part of that, but only a part. As designers in the 21st century, you will be asked to think beyond graphics to encompass the entire mediated experience.

Maybe somewhere in those 163,000 Web pages there might be a good idea to help overcome your concerns. Let me suggest a site like www.whichbook.net. Is there anything there that might prove useful?

Just a thought --
Steve

Welcome to your new journal entry tool!

Hello all!!!

This is the main spot where you can view everyone blogs. We will also be making post so check back regularly to see all the updates.