AlphaDesigner Blogue

Just an Intro

I won’t pretend I knew who Douglas Bowman was until today. But the news about his departure from Google’s design team and the reason behind that unleashed an uncontrollable desire to write my next sermon about design. I’ll be starting in a moment. Let’s first concentrate on the story:

Bowman explains his reasons, painting a truly horrific picture:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case…

…I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

The trend to put an emphasis on data as if it’s the new Holy Grail is not exactly new but thanks to the immense rise of companies like Google, it is spreading maliciously and slowly getting out of control. The remarkable success of the company, just as Bowman points out, is wiping out all counter-arguments. However, Chris Matyszczyk has something to add in his post about Bowman’s departure in his CNET blog. Next to Goole, there is Apple. And with Apple, things look quite different:

If Apple had been a purely data-driven company, would its products have ever looked as they do? And would its products ever have sold as they have?

No, they wouldn’t have. And there’s something else. If there wasn’t Apple, the mainstream companies in the smartphone branch wouldn’t have anybody to learn from. I hope you get the sarcasm. Now let’s twist the knife in the open wound.

The Sermon

In a sense, all designers are schizophrenic. We inhabit that No Man’s Land between technology and art and our job is to constantly build bridges between them, so people can walk freely from one side to the other. People rarely notice us and that’s the way it should be – when you drive your car on your way home you don’t usually think about the person who created the environment that surrounds you. In fact, that’s the ultimate goal in design – stay hidden, elusive, subconscious. Provide comfort, stability, friendliness and beauty.

A designer must have the capacity to think like an engineer and act as an artist. You may turn the world upside down and you won’t find more extreme opposites than those two. The first job comes with a huge set of practical restraints, the second brings the emotional disorder that most of us call “inspiration”.

It’s much easier if you’re simply an engineer or simply an artist. But then you don’t get that bridge building job. And that’s exactly what we want. We love the dare of the restriction and the satisfaction of expression. We love to overcome borders the hard way. Not physically. Emotionally.

There can be NO design without emotion. Take emotion and unpredictability out of your equation and you’re left only with numbers. Just like the amount of letters and words poured in this post can’t be directly related to its meaning, pure data is useless unless you have something to stir it on.

Is that so hard to remember?

I’ll quote Matyszczyk again. He puts it quite beautifully:

The fact is that human beings are astoundingly, depressingly, maddeningly human. Which makes them irrational, contradictory, capricious and, sometimes, just plain nuts.

These aspects are the hardest for engineers to get their talents around because, one hopes, they are impossible for engineers to get their talents around.

Amen!

Photo: An air vent in the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican

A Beautiful Mind

When I was a student at my university I had a teacher in semiotics, who was extremely competent and very dedicated. She was very close to perfect, except for one single disadvantage – she couldn’t explain to us, the 20 years old, what semiotics was. It’s not that she didn’t try but her attempts always ended with some strange quotation from Saussure or Barthes.

It was a very interesting paradox. Semiotics is a science that (among other things) examines the foundations of human communication and there we had a woman with enormous erudition that just couldn’t communicate.

The Pope reminds me of her. Again we have a dedicated, intelligent human being trapped in his studies and paralyzed by the very concepts he dares to explore. If the Pope was a mathematician and faced the same difficulties, he would surely go insane. What saves him is an unique tool called dogma. In the process of this “salvation” however, millions of people die from what Prince once called “big disease with a little name” because they don’t possess the tools, the knowledge and the luxury to study life sitting in a nice beautiful chair in the private rooms of their Renaissance castles.

Utopia

Life is obviously quite important for the Catholic church and nobody should suspect the Pope has some secret plans to eliminate humanity. It’s his definition of life that’s the real trouble. Surely the Catholic church has one and surely it is strictly defined in a dogma. Science on the other hand, still struggles with a plausible definition because it relies on reason rather than somebody’s words form 2000 years ago.

Everyday life teaches us that belief is never enough. You may believe that you will never die but that won’t save you from dying. Of course religion has many tricks up its sleeve – it would answer that while your body will die, your soul has a good chance to continue its life. For everything you put into question they will invent a virtual replacement. Any discussion is pointless and in some very twisted way, it also seems to strengthen their beliefs.

Design Restraints

Unfortunately there are bigger problems than our personal fears and expectations. 500 years ago, the world was thought to be an endless plane, to which the human race could spread indefinitely. Now we know we live in a closed system with limited resources. I’m not talking about environmentalism, I’m talking pure physics.

1. The Universe is a bubble limited in mass and energy.
2. Our galaxy is an island that resembles an oasis in the middle of an enormous desert.
3. Our planet is an unique place in a Solar system that has no extra shelters for life and as everybody is well aware – it is already bursting at the seems.

Where does the dogma fit in here? The Catholic definition of life comes from the age when nobody recognized any limits. They only became evident thanks to the advance of science, not Christianity. If science didn’t push Christianity to adjust and things continued in this dogmatic fashion, sooner or later we would all suffocate in that cookie jar called Earth, the ex-center of the Universe.

If there are still people who think some God created Earth solely for humans, facts speak otherwise. Life can be well and thriving without humans, as it was for billions of years. The planet doesn’t need to be saved by us. Salvation is a Christian concept and the trees that will grow on our graves definitely won’t recognize it even as remotely useful. They will continue to do what life does better than anything else – surviving.

And if trees know how to do it, so should we. There’s no excuse, especially when we take into account our biological complexity and the gift of reason that God or Mother Nature, or just a simple accident gave us. Adjusting human life to those restraints is not disrespect. Definitions and dogmas have no relevance until they meet reality and take a practical form. When you separate them and try to overemphasize them, you become a fanatic, not a life saver.

Requiem

They say in Africa the word of the Pope means more than law but let’s check this up close. Surely, people don’t use condoms a lot down there. So far so good. But we wouldn’t have an AIDS epidemic if they followed his calls for abstinence with the same vigor and dedication. It’s very simple – sex can happen in a hidden place, away from God’s eyes, while to buy a condom you must do it in a public store and you may be exposed. The irony is that people don’t seem to fear the Good Lord as much as they fear the salesman.

It would be funny if it wasn’t horrifying.

Periodic Table of Typefaces by Squidspot

An interesting look at typefaces by Squidspot. Found via Jonathan Good’s Blog at Dezumo.