EYE ON DESIG N #05: DISTRACTION
Dearest Reader, If we could have your attention, just for one second, we’d like to ask you to take a breath, quiet your mind, and note what first pops into your head when you hear the word “distraction.” Most of our initial reactions (unsurprisingly) involved tech nology: We’re distracted by screens, social media, and accidental internet k-holes. We’re interrupted by ads we don’t want to see, deluged by articles to read, and pulled away by the constant pinging of push notifications, status updates, and unread emails. This is where we started for the Distraction issue1, but like the beginning of every time-swallowing, path-splintering rabbit hole, it’s not where we ended up.
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1_Liz procrastinated prepping for pitch meetings by making her kitchen (almost) sparkling clean.
One of the darker sides of distraction is undoubtedly how companies profit from it. When our attention is commodified, designing new ways to divert and capture it is lucrative business. No one does this better than porn sites2, and in one of our main features we explore how they pioneered live chat, video streaming, credit card processing, pop-ups, web promos, and other UI elements we now consider commonplace on the G-rated web, too.
2_Madeleine procrastinated writing her piece by going through every single advert on her Instagram feed and reporting it as offensive. This frenzied, frenetic mode of absorbing information is also reflected in new styles of design. As one of the educators who participated in our roundtable discussion about Instagram and design school3 put it, “You see this collaging and appropriation of styles, and mashup of visual styles together, because that’s how we consume content now.” Add to that a dark sense of humor, a reverence for ’90s rave graphics,
3_Meg procrastinated leading the roundtable discussion by editing everyone elseʼs stories instead of working on her own.
and an irreverent tendency toward “antidesign,” and you’ve got “acid graphics,”4 a contemporary design trend that we decided to take a long, fun, and heady look at in this issue.
4_Emily procrastinated researching “acid graphics” by creating a very long Spotify playlist, also themed “distraction,” and sharing it with the team to help them get their work done. But distraction isn’t all doom and gloom and data mining5. In fact,
5_Tala procrastinated from writing and designing her piece by researching instant image background removal tools, downloading one, and realizing that it doesn’t really work.
6_Perrin procrastinated from writing her profile on game designer Roberta Williams by rediscovering a childhood favorite from 1992, “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis,” which she played (and won) from memory. With so many things vying for your attention, we hope this issue will be the kind of distraction that inspires slow reads, a shift in perspective, and puts a beautiful, physical object in your hands, designed with wit, criticality, and immoderation by Ann Richter and Pia Christmann of Studio Pandan. Love from around the world, The Editors7
7_Liz Stinson, Madeleine Morley, Meg Miller, Emily Gosling, Tala Safie, and Perrin Drumm.
EDITORS’ LETTER
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a bit of escapism can be a very, very good thing. Lots of the designers you’ll meet in this issue have something they spend their time on—DJing, making jewelry—that pulls them away from design and brings them back to it more fulfilled and inspired. Two of our longform features center on women interaction designers in the 1980s and ’90s, who used nascent video games6 and experimental webzines in ways that would change their industries forever. And one writer’s ode to Flair, the beloved, opulent, short-lived magazine in the ’50s, celebrates the sumptuous, over-the-top pleasures of maximalism in print.
Table of Contents 11 6 12 Editors’ Letter
Designers’ Letter
All of the Lights
EYE ON DESIG N #05: DISTRACTION
How Times Square became the glowing heartbeat of New York City By Liz Stinson
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Artist Spotlight: Yuichi Yokoyama In his manga Travel, the artist carves out moments of stillness in a whirring world
Queen’s Quest
Hands on My Hard Data Online pornography is designed for the ultimate money shot By Madeleine Morley
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Design in Dimensions Miglė Kazlauskaitė’s jewelry is an extension of her graphic design By Meg Miller
The world’s first graphic computer game designer is famous for all the wrong reasons By Perrin Drumm
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Style Before Substances
A new, futuristic take on “acid graphics” is well and truly here. But for how long? By Emily Gosling
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Things I’m Doing on Our Conference Call Right Now When I work from home, no hour-long meetings can hold me down. Multi-task ftw.
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Please @ This Design Class Instagram builds community at the same time as it fuels anxiety. How can design educators use the best parts of the platform, and leave the rest?
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The Rise of the #MuseumMirrorSelfie
It’s easy to consider art selfies an act of vapidity and distraction—but they also bring exhibitions outside of institutions and into the wider, digital world By A. R. practice
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Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful Making history’s most beautiful magazine just took an impossibly fabulous editor, connections to the upper echelons of society, and buckets of money By Rachel Syme
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Does designing “delight” into products serve short-term needs at the cost of long-term harm? By Alex Rothera
A Graphic Designer’s Screen Time Report
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Screen shaming for your own good. You’re welcome. By Tala Safié
The ever-changing art of the screensaver
Picking Up the Cyber Slack
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Don’t Click
The Delight Dilemma
Multimedia artist Jaime Levy was at the forefront of web design before websites even existed By Claire Evans
Forever Young
“Brown People Are Cute, Too!”
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Who said games are just for kids? Here are our favorite design diversions for those who are still children at heart.
For DJ and illustrator anu, a diverse creative practice is about more than making lots of different work
Down the Rabbit Hole Designers illustrate their past 24 hours of browsing history
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What Kind of Procrastinator Are You? “Non-procrastinator” is not an option, so stop kidding yourself
All L   ight How Times Square became the glowing heartbeat of New York City
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By Liz Stinson
Photography by Chris Maggio
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The lights never turn off in Times Square, not even at 10 a.m. on a sunny day midweek. You emerge from the 42nd Street subway station and they’re right there glowing in the daylight—7,500 bulbs shimmering in sync on the marquee of the most spectacular McDonalds you’ll ever encounter. This is the border of Times Square, a district in central Manhattan that stretches from 43rd Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue up to 50th Street, just past a 68-foot-tall kinetic digital screen advertising Coca-Cola.
The further you edge inward from Times Square’s boundaries, the more the city seems to turn itself inside out. Its nerve center is a place of pure excess—too many people, too much light, and too much noise. Times Square has changed plenty since it first received its name, but it has always been a place defined by deliberate chaos. In the late 1800s, the underground subway first snaked its way through a stretch of land around 42nd and Broadway called Long Acre Square, bringing business development, theater, and nightlife to the once rustic area. By the early 20th century, advances in electricity and the advent of neon transformed the newly commercial area into a beacon of entertainment1 and advertising that has stayed alight, more or less, ever since.
Times Square is ugly by design. Today, Times Square is a giant pop-up advertisement specifically designed to grab hold of your brain and not let go. Buildings are covered in digital screens that stretch across entire facades and display an ever shifting array of ads that cover the towers in a patchwork of technicolor blankets. It’s a garish, mind-melting display of consumerism, and it’s entirely by choice. Times Square is ugly by design. Buried deep within city zoning documents are rules and regulations that state just how much space should be dedicated to the glowing signs (a lot)2, where they should be placed (as visibly as possible)3 and how they should be displayed (very brightly)4. Most of New York City abides by regulations that aim to limit the size and scope of signage. By contrast, Times Square is designated a special signage district that requires building owners to invest in over-the-top signs. “Here, you can go as big as you like,” says Anthony Caruso, vice president of real estate & public affairs at Clear Channel Outdoor and treasurer of the Times Square Advertising Coalition. The city created these regulations in 1986, a moment when Times Square was scrubbing off the tawdriness associated with the area due to the sex industry that emerged during the Great Depression
ALL OF THE LIGHTS
1 In the 2007 book Times Square Spectacular, author Darcy Tell wrote about early 20th-century Times Square signage: “The most popular attractions in the district were free: enormous electric advertising signs that sprouted on roofs all over Times Square. Even on Sunday evenings, when the theaters were closed, crowds came to stroll up and down Broadway at the latest dazzling spectaculars.” 2 Special Times Square signage requirement: There shall be a minimum of one #illuminated sign# with a #surface area# of not less than 1,000 square feet for each 50 linear feet, or part thereof, of #street# frontage on Seventh Avenue or Broadway, except that for any one #zoning lot# no more than five #signs# shall be required.
New York’s nerve center is a place of pure excess—too many people, too much light, and too much noise.
and thrived through the 1970s. Developers were interested in building large office towers for white-collar workers, but they weren’t so interested in plastering advertisements to the side of their multi-million dollar investments. For some, revitalizing Times Square meant scrubbing it clean and erecting glass towers. But glitz and grime had always been the area’s calling card, and the city wasn’t going to let a few new buildings turn a tourist attraction into another staid officeland. In a 1986 application for a zoning amendment, the city planning commission stated its case: “The proposed amendment to the Zoning Resolution is a response to accelerating changes in Times Square that could threaten its unique character, which for nearly a century has made this space symbolic of the vitality and dynamism of New York City itself.” Extinguishing Times Square’s over-the-top nature, they wrote, would be extinguishing its lifeblood. Preserving the characteristic gaudiness that made Times Square a worldwide symbol of excess turned out to be a savvy business plan: Today it costs between $ 1.1 million and $ 4 million a year to buy advertising space in Times Square, with much of that going to the developers, who typically own the signs on any given building.
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3 Special Times Square signage requirement: At least 75 % of the #surface area# of #signs# required shall be placed at an angle in plain view of not more than 45 ° to the Seventh Avenue or Broadway #street line#. 4 Special Times Square signage requirement: A minimum of 25 % of the required minimum aggregate #surface area# of #signs# shall comprise #signs# each of which shall attain for a minimum of 25 % of its #surface area# at least 1.5 LUTS incident illumination.
Glitz and grime had always been the area’s calling card.
In the more than 30 years since the city legitimized Times Square’s claustrophobic aesthetic, it’s become the glowing heartbeat of the city, recognizable to people around the world with a single photograph. It’s a place that’s foreign to visitors and natives alike, even those × who bear the brunt of its contradictions every day while //********************************* walking to and from work. //* proceed to page 46 ************** “We want Times //********************************* Square to look a little cheesy,” Caruso says. He tells me this on a blustery morning in early spring while standing on the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street. Above us, a 1,200-square-foot screen that his company owns is broadcasting a high-resolution advertisement for Netflix. Compared to the 17,000-square-foot sign just up the street, the screen we’re looking at is almost tasteful. It looks like a flat screen TV that’s been blown up to city scale. Today, all of Times Square is like this. Illuminated vinyl signs stretch across entire building facades. Corners are blunted by signs that protrude in an attempt to grab the attention of passersby. The digital screens get bigger, brighter, and sharper every year, and the constant march towards technological relevance isn’t going to stop. It’s all a bit paradoxical. In a time when targeted digital advertising rules, developers in Times Square are squeezing as much screen space as they can out of the finite physical world. The effect of this visual cacophony is that real visibility itself can be surprisingly difficult to achieve. The city estimates more than 380,000 people walk through Times Square every day. That’s 760,000 eyeballs potentially taking in the more than 230 signs that fill the district. It is impossible to measure exactly how many people linger on a sign for the seven seconds it takes to count as an “impression,” but what’s clear is that Times Square elicits a rare form of distraction that even the most internet-trained brain can barely process.
EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
Queen’s Quest
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g n i k Pic Up r e b y the C k c a l S By Claire Evans
Photography by Nolwen Cifuentes
e Levy im a J t is t r a ia design Multimed b e w f o t n o r f re was at the fo s even existed ite before webs
EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
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Jaime Levy’s real name is not Jaime. She won’t tell me what her real name is, only that her parents named her after a Beatles song, and that she hates the Beatles—wishes they’d never existed—and so she’s Jaime, a nod to Van Halen, of all things, and the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, her “idol” when she was just a punk kid growing up in the haze of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Jaime Levy is, in all things, self-made. And when what she wants doesn’t exist, she makes that, too. As a graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in the early years of New York’s new media renaissance, she figured magazines would go electronic soon enough; in 1990, she started publishing her own interactive floppy disks, pointand-click magazines full of sound collages, rants, gig reviews, and games. The zines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood made her famous in the emerging cyberculture, and when the web finally caught up, she adapted her DIY interaction design to online publishing, becoming creative director of Word.com, one of the first magazines to properly make use of the new medium’s affordances. Word was scene-altering: The first time the New York Times ran a feature on web browsers, it used Word as its example site, and even the Netscape browser had a button pointing straight to it (the button was labeled “What’s Cool?”). The site’s icon-rich design, heavy with streaming audio, experimental layouts, and interactive experiences, was so ahead of its time that it had a tendency to crash browsers. In those days, unmistakable with bleached-blond hair and a mouth as unfiltered as her hand-rolled cigarettes, Levy called herself the “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley,” a grunge prophetess of new media who wasn’t afraid to make waves, or make money. Her clients were rock stars—a floppy disk she created for Billy Idol’s 1993 Cyberpunk album was the first interactive press kit—and corporate giants alike. Samsung once hired her to create the “Malice Palice,” a dystopian chat room modeled after a post-Fall San Francisco, full of drug-pushing zombie bots and radioactive burritos. Silicon Alley, New York’s media-centric analogue to the Bay Area’s entrepreneurial internet boom, was her playground; Many East Village artists saw the web for the first time in Levy’s Avenue A loft, on a Mac II a hacker friend connected to a 28 k internet connection. At the tail end of the dot-com bubble, she was the CEO of a “production studio for the internet” called Electronic Hollywood, where she created interactive toys for major clients and authored a 16-episode
Tell me about being a teenager in L.A. in the ’70s. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and the two big things that shaped my teenage years happened when I was about 13: my parents split up, and I was obsessed with skateboarding. I’d ride to school, or I’d just ride to the 7-Eleven, hanging out with the guys, trying to be cool. And then at the same time, this idiot named Judge Paul Egly decided to enforce this thing called forced busing. So instead of going to the school really close to my house, I had to wake up at 6 a.m. and catch a bus and go to school in Crenshaw. I was bullied on the bus; I was literally the only girl. I spent
PICKING UP THE CYBER SLACK
Prev ious sp p a ge : Jaim read: Jaim e Le e Le vy ho v lding y showin g off a key Cybe boar r Rag d in front II, 19 of a s e r ve 9 1 / 1 9 9 2 . Pola r at t roid. he o P ffice s o f W h o t o g ra p hed ord.c by M om, ichae 1 9 95 l . Pho togra Levine. T pher his unkn ow n .
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Flash cartoon called Cyberslacker about life in New York’s IPO-fueled “trendy freakout.” As one of Silicon Alley’s most visible media darlings, she crashed along with the stock market in 2000, landing back in L.A., where she now teaches UX strategy at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
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two years there, and it gave me a very hard shell, but it also exposed me to hip-hop music and break dancing. By the time I got back to being a ninth-grade “Valley Girl,” I was not the same person.
When did you find punk rock? Was that a big thing for you? Huge. Just as I was starting high school, I had my first job at the UA6 movie theater. These were more street-smart kids, and they dragged me
“It was everything about art and technology and music and storytelling and me jammed onto a floppy disk.”
EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
to a party where I heard The Specials, and ska music, and became obsessed—so obsessed with The Specials that I decided that one day if I had a son, I would name him Terry, after Terry Hall. And we know I have a son named Terry. Then you left L.A. to go study film in San Francisco. I immediately moved to the Lower Haight and started working at Skates on Haight. Within a year, the Mac came out and I started using a computer. More importantly, I was exposed to this thing called video art. I started shooting video, and back then it was all about getting access to edit bays, which was a huge deal. You either had to intern for a film or TV company or go to a college with a proper film and video department like SF State or NYU to get access to editing suites. San Francisco State was great because I got to be around artists who were experimenting with technology just for the sake of it. Lynn Hershman Leeson ran the multimedia Inter-Arts Center when you were a student at SF State. Was she an influence on your work? She was the most famous person there, so for sure. She brought in John Sanborn and all these other video artists. And it seemed to me the hippest thing, because I wasn’t going to make straight-up television. I was producing a lot of videos for public access. Filming [live, in-studio musical performances for] everyone from Faith No More to The Beatnigs. There was so much performance art and video art and experimental stuff in San Francisco, and you could live there for no money. I think the room I rented in some big Victorian was $120 a month. I’m so happy I got to experience San Francisco before it turned into the shithole tech bro place that it is now. Back then it was just all about burritos and experimental art. When did you start integrating computer animation into your film and video work? Around my third or fourth year. I met this guy who had an Amiga, and he was making these animated e-zines, but he was mostly uploading them
Jaime Levy , Electronic Magazine Co Photograph llector's Lim ed by Nolw ited Edition en Cifuente and three sig s, 2019. ned disk iss ues includin g Cyber Ra g, Cyber Ra g II and El ec troni c Hollyw ood.
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to a BBS, and the content would be things like his penis animated—it was just shock stuff. But the idea of integrating animation with the video… it was kind of a free-for-all, where you could do something that no one had done before. And then I saw this LaserDisc that was part of
“The disks were game-changing multimedia, because I think people saw a glimpse of what the web would be.” a museum exhibit. It was [an interactive video artwork] by Grahame Weinbren, and it was about two famous 19th-century texts, Goethe’s Erlkönig and one about the dreams analyzed by Sigmund Freud. But you could basically control the narrative by touching the screen or clicking around. I saw that and I was like, this is all I want to do with my life now.
Interactivity with video and storytelling. And someone said, “Oh well there’s this program within the graduate film school at NYU.” This was before the web, obviously, so I had to look it up on microfiche at the SF State library. I was too afraid that they wouldn’t let me in, so I decided I would just bum-rush the school. I went there just before Christmas break and it was snowing and I just walked in. I had bleached white hair. They saw me, and they were like, “What’s this person doing here?”
You eventually talked your way into a full ride at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. I told them I couldn’t afford to go there, but that I wanted to do things with technology that no one else had done. The program was full of people paid for by Citibank to design ATM interfaces. I was pretty much the first
Jaime Levy, interactive zines on floppy disk. Photographed by Frank Miles, 2015. Courtesy Jaime Levy. From left to right: Cyber Rag, winter 1990; Cyber Rag II, summer 1990; Cyber Rag III, New Year’s 1991; Electronic Hollywood, fall 1991; Electronic Hollywood II, the “Riot” issue, 1992.
EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
Interactivity.
“They’d come to the loft, and it would be alcohol and drugs, but imagine you could go over there and see the web for the first time.” Cyber Rag, one of the first electronic magazines to be released on floppy, was your master’s thesis at ITP. I learned graphic design by doing interface design. I look at Cyber Rag now and I see interactive concepts in there that I think are actually kind of interesting today: buttons that swap in and out or animate across on the screen, which is totally unacceptable for a product that’s decidedly not a game. It was in black and white, and I was stealing art from Love and Rockets, and sampling all these noise bands—it was everything about art and technology and music and storytelling and me jammed onto a floppy disk. It was so distilled, in terms of bandwidth. I didn’t think I would ever finish it because the idea of compressing all that and making it play off a floppy was stupidly ambitious. I was so far ahead of my time, for better and for worse, so I had to send the disk out to all the magazines that I respected, like Mondo 2000 and High-Performance magazine, and the editors would get them and they’d look at them and they’d be like, “What the fuck is this?” And then they’d stick it in their computer and it would explode with all this content, and then they’d write about it.
You distributed the disks in bookstores and record stores, rather than at computer meetups. I love this intuition you had to go straight to the noncomputer people. Because even though it was a technological object, Cyber Rag wasn’t for the technoculture.
PICKING UP THE CYBER SLACK
ctive how, Intera igital art s sit y’s d r t e s r iv Un ts’ fi York tuden the s t N ew ters a paring for u p m , pre g co movin s Program L ev y ation wn. ic o Jaime n n u k n u omm pher Telec togra . Pho 1990
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artist. Now if you go there, it’s totally evolved into the school I wish it had been when I was there, but it doesn’t matter, because it was the only place in the world where they would let you do what you wanted to do with technology.
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It wasn’t for nerds. I was using the technology, but I was making it for Gen X-ers, and Gen X-ers weren’t nerds yet. They didn’t even own computers. At best they had the Mac Plus or the Mac SE, so that’s what I made Cyber Rag for. I went to all the hipster bookstores and galleries and said, “Here’s 10.” I couldn’t demo them, but I fronted them and then they sold out. People went gaga over them because no one had seen anything like it, and they were only six bucks. Eventually I sold thousands. The disks were game-changing multimedia, because I think people saw a glimpse of what the web would be.
Can you tell me about your CyberSlacker parties? Oh my god. What’s sad is that it was before digital cameras. It would have been way too lame to pull out a camera at one of these events because they were so cool. The first party, Phiber Optik—he was a hacker who went to jail—came over and hooked my Mac II up to probably the first 28 k connection to the internet out of the East Village. I had this big ass twostory loft in the East Village. Part of the party was to show all these people the internet. They’d come to the loft, and it would be alcohol and drugs, but imagine you could go over there and see the web for the first time, and here’s DJ Spooky playing. We were all partying and hanging out and talking about tech-driven art. It was all these interdisciplinary people coming together. We did the parties at the loft for as long as we could stand it, because they just grew. It was always about people bringing their computer stuff to show off, and trying to get the East Village scene up to speed with tech. When did you start designing for the web? Did you get it right away? Immediately. I was working at IBM as an interface designer and there was barely anything for us to do there. One day, my friend Kevin showed me the Mosaic browser and I just—no bullshit—walked out. I just saw a home page and I was like, “That’s my disk online.” I turned in my notice and I went home and found the one guy in New York who knew HTML and had him teach me.
PICKING UP THE CYBER SLACK
What did you bring to interactive media that nobody else could have brought? Fearlessness. I’m that person that got beat up so much in junior high and just didn’t give a shit, who could walk into a school and say, “I want to come here.” Insanity, relentlessness. That’s how I am when I set my mind to something. This despite the fact that I’m a girl and I don’t code. I could communicate with developers. Before the UX methodology existed, my way of communicating interactivity to programmers was by writing out experiences as “scenes.” I would literally write things like a screenplay: screen one, this is what can happen. Life was fine for me before wireframing became this mandated tool for expression.
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After the collapse of the dot com bubble and 9/11, you came back to Los Angeles and reinvented yourself. What were those early years in L.A. like? Horrifying. It was so bad. If I went on a job interview and if I was to pull out, “Here’s all my press from New York,” that did not go over well. Saying you were CEO of a dot-com company was not a good way to pitch yourself at that time. And because I didn’t have a portfolio of deliverables, like wireframes or site maps, I barely supported myself. I detoured to DVD authoring and design, but the only place that would hire me was a porn place. For six weeks, my job was basically to scrub through videos looking for the cum shots. To be making minimum wage in a shitty part of the Valley timecode logging pornography… I fell pretty hard. You had been like a rock star in New York. And a party girl. I think the farther you fall, the harder you land. But finally my then-husband had a friend who was an information architect and I was like, “What’s that?” And he told me, and I’m like, “Oh, you mean it’s
“A lot of designers, they’re just pixel pushers, man.” a structure of a website, this thing I’ve been doing in my head for 15 years? You just draw some lines on some paper and some boxes and arrows?” I decided I’m just going to become whatever this IA/UX/UI thing is.
VIP pass for a CyberSlacker party held by Electronic Hollywood Productions in 2000. Courtesy Jaime Levy.
EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
It seems a lot of people in New York saw the web and realized that what you had been doing was making websites offline. They came to you because you were the established person in a field that didn’t even exist yet. I never heard it put that way. But yeah, I was basically making websites offline. Razorfish and Word.com both came at me at once. Word was like, “We want you to be our creative director and we have $1 million.” Whereas Razorfish was like, “We’re going to make websites and you’re going to get paid in equity and be a third partner of this company.” Those were my two choices at that point. I went with Word, which was total freedom. We were the place [online] where people could come every day and see a new story that was nonlinear, with an ambient soundtrack. Every day a new technology would come out that we could leverage, like the ability to stream audio, or the ability to have an animated gif. Imagine!
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How did you find your way into UX strategy? I had already been doing strategy my entire career. I strategized how and what the products would be, dealt with the client, wrote the proposals, so all of a sudden I thought, “Oh, instead of being told what the product is, I could be put in room full of stakeholders who all have very different opinions, and figure out how to get a shared vision, how to build consensus.” After doing software design for decades, I knew exactly how the internet works and how content works. It was a new thing that I could learn about and fall in love with, and I’m still in love with it. I love strategy and especially how strategy intersects with user experience design. Why make a bunch of wires and argue with colleagues and stakeholders about the “look and feel?” I think I just got burnt out on subjectivity: “Ooh, I like this ’cause I like purple more than pink.” No, everything can be tested.
Still, there has to be a point where designers can make new contributions. Well, as a musician, can you tell me if there’s any opportunity to make some kind of music that’s never been heard in pop music? I used to wonder how there could be new songs left. How can it be that the combinations of notes haven’t been totally exhausted? But music is also about performance, production, culture, instrumentation. It’s harder though, right?
PICKING UP THE CYBER SLACK
Is UX strategy design? No, it’s what you do before design. You figure out what’s the product strategy, what’s the product? Who are we making it for? What features should it have? How are people going to find out about it? What are they going to do once they find out about it? How will the product make money? And then instead of building it, you prototype the most important parts and get customer feedback. Principled design is disappearing from the UX world; I have international students who have never taken even an art class who can make a native app using Sketch in two weeks. It’s so easy with all the toolkits. It’s all been commodified. If you’re a UX designer, unless you have five years of building digital products that actually see the light of day under your belt, your pay should be minimum wage. That’s all you’re worth to me. Because what have you done? Make some screens that have more than a few boxes on them, actually build some products. Make many, many prototypes. Do everything yourself, be truly hands-on and don’t just be like, “We’re going to design think our way through this.” I think there’s a lot of fakers out there. It’s not like we’re making a billboard or a packet of cigarettes—we’re making something that people are going to use. And so we need to know their mental model. That’s a lot more complicated. A lot of designers, they’re just pixel pushers, man. They’re not doing user research. They’re literally designing interfaces for themselves.
8 3 1 EYE ON DESIGN #05: DISTRACTION
It’s harder, but there are different tools, different opportunities. Right. And so many people have the tools. I’m not saying design’s over, I just feel there’s less opportunities to do something that’s innovative. It’s really, really hard, and it’s getting really complicated. You can’t just say, “Oh, I know how to do a wireframe. I’m a designer.” No, you need to understand all those other technologies that are related to it, so that you can actually make something that’s truly contextually connected. I’m talking about interaction design. Every design pattern has pretty much been done: we have the accordion, we have swim lanes, we have carousels, we have global navigation. I feel there’s less need for design or visual designers in the world of software design and that the opportunity for being creative is around integrating it with all of these other technologies—and the physical world.
I still think that’s design—it’s designing design. I like seeing digital products as jigsaw puzzles, so I say, “Let’s look at this app, and then look at that app, and take a piece of this functionality, and a piece of that, and put it together, like cooking.” It’s all about minimalist design. Less is more. What are the two or three things this thing needs to do? Let’s make it do them really well. Do you still think about your art practice? I did a bunch of shit in this 10-year period of my life from 1990 to 2000, and I would like to preserve that legacy, which means constantly converting it so that it will play on contemporary computers. I took my VHS tapes and my DVDs to this transfer place and I was like, “Can you get all this stuff onto this new hard drive?” I felt I was going to a kitchen appliance center. The DVDs had to be frozen to work and the videos had to be baked. I think about my heroes, all the video artists that inspired me, the only way you’re going to see their art, man, is if it’s in a museum. For all the artists at the time—including me, smack in the middle of it—if we aren’t actively converting our work, it’s all going to be lost.
PICKING UP THE CYBER SLACK
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