Forward Thinking

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Joi Ito on the next 100 years of science & technology:

“We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.”

There’s the long view, and then there’s the looooong view. Kind of puts that dating app you’re working on in perspective, right? Read the rest here.

iPad 3: Why I’m Waiting.

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The new iPad (or Retina or HD or whatever it’s called) came out yesterday, and from what I’ve heard, I could have gone out and picked one up without much trouble. But for this iPad, I’ve decided to hang back a few months before I upgrade from my iPad 2.

Not that I don’t need to get one for testing purposes. We have multiple iPad apps mid-development right now, so not having a retina version to test on doesn’t make much sense. And for personal daily use, I have no doubt that the retina screen will make my iPad 2 feel like an antique.

But I’m holding out as long as I can, because I don’t think the web is ready for a retina iPad yet. Brad Frost makes a good point in his article, “iPad3′s Retina Display Will Wreak Havoc on the Web,” where he worries aloud about enormous file sizes when websites start sending images for the retina screen.

“You know the web is in trouble when even the native apps are struggling with the gigantic Retina screen.”

I think that’s very true, but I’m actually holding off because of the opposite of what his statement implies. I think the majority of sites in existence aren’t going to make the effort to upgrade their image files. I’m not really interested in browsing the blurry web—it already drives me nuts when it happens on my iPhone. To me, it’s that simple. We need to wait for the web to catch up.

So, I’m sure I’ll be picking up an iPad 3 sooner than later, but I’m going to hold out as long as I can. Giving designers & developers a head start to optimize seems to make the most sense to me.

 

Oh, That Kind of Typeform

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“The role of the designer, as the humane and aesthetic conscience of industry, is that of a surrogate for the consumer. He senses the pattern of evolutionary factors in manufactured products and directs the object toward the perfection of its typeform.”

-Arthur Pulos

Art as a Platform

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Lately I’ve been thinking about how we appreciate today’s art, versus how we might have thought about art 20, or 50, or even 400 years ago.  In a digital society, are the measures for value shifting?

LuftWerk Installation @ Chicago's Bean by Ken Ilio

photo: Ken Ilio

 

This is an installation in Chicago called, “Luminous Field” by LuftWerk. It’s stunningly beautiful, and really only possible because it’s based on another piece of incredible art—Cloud Gate. To give you a quick overview:

For the next 10 days Chicago creative ensemble LuftWerk, the creative vision of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, have capitalized on the sculpture’s reflective properties by turning it into a canvas for a choreographed light show titled Luminous Field. The duo are using an array of ten projectors to create the experience, setting everything to music composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Third Coast Percussion.

-via Colossal

Cloud Gate, and the fantastic show at MoMA last year called, “Talk To Me,” are great examples of art created specifically for interaction. The greater the participation, the better the work of art itself.

In the past, art was created to be final. Art was to be observed, studied, and admired. If it’s great, then it evokes an emotion. But it ends there. How dare you think you can improve upon the Mona Lisa.

The network has changed us. I believe that as a culture, sharing and reworking is engrained in our everyday lives to the point that even our art is now created to be built upon. Our new measure of greatness isn’t merely an incredible degree of craft (as it was in the past), but the ability to create art that makes more great art possible.

Whittling Down Social Media

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I was intrigued earlier this month when I noticed that, tucked away in frog design’s list of 2012 tech predictions, they touched on the personalization of social media. It’s something I’ve been looking at through a microscope lately, not only because I’ve spent most of 2011 running projects that revolve around this idea, but because I’m noticing myself heading in that direction in my own social media use.

Now, I’ve never been an enthusiastic Facebook user. I’ve just never really thought that it suited my life, or the way I like to share the events in it. It’s just too much of a shotgun approach. On the other end of the spectrum, I care even less to know what my friends are interested in—mainly because very few of them are actually my friends.

For me, checking Facebook has become a tiresome part of my day that I can do without. Surely I’m not the only one:

So, to get back to frog’s 2012 predictions, here’s Nathan Weyer’s take from The Reductive Social Network: Technology Finally Gets Personal:

“…Today’s technologies, products, and services do not adequately serve the human need for intimacy and personal connections. The early days of Facebook and Flickr felt this way, but now our social networks and hard drives are swamped with a deluge of digital data that we can’t process. Our Internet personalities have evolved into amplified personas that aren’t truly us.”

I love the idea of turning down the over-amplification and distortion in our social streams in favor of an experience that is inherently focused on clarity. It brings to mind two social media instances that I’ve spent most of last year falling in love with.

The first is a app that we designed for a San Francisco-based startup. It revolves around making romantic couples’ lives better, and it does so by linking the two together. It functions as a social network, except it only takes two people to make the experience shine. For a network like Facebook to gain you as an active user, it has to first win the majority of your friends, and in the masses the intimacy is lost.

Of course, there is a downside to a network of two, and it’s obvious. If one person loses interest, the experience is ruined. But, after months of using a two-person network, I’ve come to realize that the upside is huge too. Being able to use something that’s great without requiring a majority of your friends to adopt allows you to use the app that truly is the best, not just the one that is the most popular.

And with that, we come to Path. Path is, in my opinion, the most well-designed social app out there. However, I use Path differently than they intended, and it’s all the better for it. While Path recently upped their cap of friends to 150 (from 50), I decided to go in the other direction based on what I’d learned with our work on the couple’s app. For me, Path is perfect to use with only one other person.

My wife and I use Path constantly together; it’s become a text messenger on steroids. It’s more enjoyable than any other social media interaction I have, and it’s completely due to the intimacy that such a micro-network affords.

So, like Nathan from frog, I firmly believe that 2012 should be the year of the micro-network. It’s time to iterate on what the social networks of the last few years have taught us, and I believe that lesson is clear: edit down as far as we can, and use the tools that social media has created to make real-life relationships better.

Not Their Best Work

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“How horrible for a client to have gone out and found a good designer and then get handed work that looks like something they would have done. Clients deserve your best work, not their best work. Really good clients, the ones I want you to work with, would rather be challenged than pandered to.”

Love this perspective from Mike Monteiro in a piece for .Net magazine. Read the whole thing here. Very worthwhile.

 

At Least Twice As Complex

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There’s a nice little observation tucked into John Gruber’s critique of the new Twitter app over on Daring Fireball.

“A tab view within a tab view is often a bad sign — a second level of hierarchy makes things at least twice as complex.”

Seems like common sense, but when you’re the one architecting an app, it’s easy to forget that breaking things down makes them more difficult.

How Can Entire (Design) Industries Get the Web So Wrong?

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Zaha Hadid Homepage

Architects

As a designer, I have deep, almost religious respect for great architecture. There’s something awe-inspiring about it that I haven’t found in any other design discipline (or art movement, for that matter). Maybe it’s the scale & permanence of the structures, or how those factors interact with us in such a human way. It really is the pinnacle of design.

Which is why, as someone who lives in the digital world, architect’s websites strike me as particularly insulting. And not just to me or you as the user, but also insulting to the work it fails to showcase.

Here’s a quick sample of what I’m talking about:

Surprised? They’re miserable. All three are so unnavigable that I had to force myself to make it past the first page for the sake of writing this article.  There are surely some good architecture websites out there, but by and large, these are indicative of the whole.

Other Industries?

Here’s the thing that’s so frustrating: these aren’t small companies limited by the level of web design that they can afford. I’m not picking on some construction company’s website, I’m looking at world-class starchitects.

But they’re not the only ones: design in general is a pretty sad group to be in web-wise. Whether its fashion, interior design, or industrial design — they just don’t seem quite there. Seen Anna Sui’s website lately?

A Common Thread

I think there might be a reason for entire industries that “don’t get” the web: it’s diametrically opposed to the mindset in their everyday work. Just as print designers had trouble giving up control when transitioning to the web, architects and other designers may very well be in the same boat.

Now, I didn’t work on any of the sites I’ve referenced here, so I can’t claim to know exactly how the process went. But based on the architects I know, being in control of the details is everything. Hence the Flash. Hence the Javascript that might as well be Flash. Every detail is accounted for, but on the web that comes at the expense of the overall experience.

I don’t have a great solution, I’m just observing from the outside. From here what looks like an ego issue could in reality be something else entirely. But I will say, the architect lucky to get an interactive agency with the guts to tell them “no” could end up with a site beautiful enough to rival their real-world creations.

My SOPA Letter to Bob Goodlatte

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This morning I sent a letter to Representative Bob Goodlatte outlining my thoughts on the flawed Stop Online Piracy Act. I’m posting it here because I believe in it, and welcome anyone who wishes to use any or all of it in their own letters to do so.

Congressman Goodlatte,

I’m writing this letter because I believe passing the Stop Online Piracy Act would be an error of catastrophic proportion. I understand the intention of the act, and agree that online piracy needs to be addressed in a way that adequately (albeit responsibly) protects the intellectual property of its owner. However, the legislation as currently written is a profoundly counterproductive (if not wholly destructive) means of installing those protections. The potential for collateral damage is so great that it could very possibly destroy the internet as we know it.

As a business owner, my company depends on the Web. If the proposed measures to restrict the sharing of online content were to be passed in their current form, my company would not be likely to survive. SOPA’s requirements for the self-policing of intellectual property, and the ability to shutter sites in the interest of protecting intellectual property will almost certainly create a climate devoid of clients interested in the Web. Few, if any, would be willing to spend money on a quality website with SOPA in effect. Why spend thousands of dollars on a site that could be shut down upon the accusation of an IP infraction? I can tell you with certainty that the clients I depend on to put food on my family’s table will not take that risk.

If you think lost revenues due to piracy is a drain on the economy, imagine what would happen if you put this act into law. SOPA will cost the United States millions of jobs. Companies will fold. Our largest tech companies (the ones driving our economy and leading the world in innovation) will be devastated. Perhaps you’ve noticed that they all oppose SOPA as well.

You are salting the very earth we use to build our livlihoods. This serves the few at the expense of the many.

I urge you to do the right thing and reconsider this ruinous piece of legislation.

I chose to send it to Goodlatte (R-VA) specifically, because of his role in bringing SOPA to the House. I grew up in Virginia, and went to college in Goodlatte’s district.

Lastly, I should mention that this letter received some much-needed polish from Max Heyworth, a fantastic copywriter and friend of Auxiliary.

**Update** I also think there’s some merit in heading over to I Work For the Internet and adding yourself there as well.

Designing for iPad’s Safari Browser

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Sometimes, someone just needs to say it out loud:

“Designers really need to hear the following, loud and clear: The iPad browser is fully capable. It doesn’t need you to treat it differently. You’re fighting with users when you get fancy. Just stick with what works on the desktop.”

-Dave Winer

via Brent Simmons