Studio: Reflections

Fall 09

Reflecting on a Community Initiation

Our last project initiating a community of our choosing into some new practice or understanding  illuminated a variety of issues on how we, as designers, think about visual conventions and our role in creating them. One of our main charges in the project was to think about how to create a NEW visual language for our community—presumably, to look at their current visual conventions and somehow transform those in such a way as to create something unique, relevant, and compelling.

There were a number of trends in our responses that I think respond to how we, as designers, approach design. And, more importantly, how we think about our role in the design process.

Our approach to the challenge seems to take three distinct paths:

1. Looking at the current or historical visual language of the community and replicating that. Maybe using different materials, or towards a new purpose, but not really modifying it so much as using in ‘in tact’ in some new environment.  For instance, by looking at the conventions of food packaging and applying those to the ‘foodie’ environment to relay nutritional information online, common visual conventions of the foodie community are applied to new information environments.  Nothing new is created.
2. Taking a visual language from another community and introducing it to our chosen community. The dimensional, handcrafted, photographic type as a new interpretation of constructivist design / typography for an anarchist (and traditionally DIY) community is a good example. The attention to craft and to literally ‘construct’ type is very much a language of ‘high’ design that is being applied to a traditionally DIY community. For this to be successful, the reasoning for the application needs to be relevant and compelling, and I think it has the potential to be. There are political implications to this choice, and those implications need to be explicit. And, it is as much about what the community is going to DO with the new conventions as it is about introducing them in the first place.
3. Combining or layering existing conventions into some sort of mash-up. By taking elements of the current visual language of competitive cyclists and mashing it up with that of street signage and civic language, an amalgam of existing conventions is created much more than a distinctly new visual language.

There are a few reasons that I think that we approach design in this way, the most prevalent of which has to do with our notion of designing FOR an existing community.  As designers, we are taught that our work does not really exist outside of the audience for whom we are designing—that to be relevant, it has to be understood by the audience.  Within this ingrained thinking, how do we give ourselves the freedom to invent? Maybe it’s moving beyond the traditional designer/client relationship, and re-creating a role for ourselves that illuminates different understandings, instead of simply responding to existing ones. As designers, should we be attempting to introduce new ideas and thoughts into the mainstream—not making something FOR a community as much as introducing something into it.

But how do we achieve this freedom? Does it need to be self-initiated? Do we need to be able to envision ourselves within the community? Do we need to be a part of the community to really understand it in some way? Or, do we need to actually forget about the elements of the visual language and think about the principles of it? Isolating what is compelling about a community—that they like to tinker; that they are fascinated with the inside of objects and the way that they are built; that they are almost rebelliously attached to the history of machinery, directs our focus on principles associated with the communities drive and passion, rather than on how that drive is already articulated. And, in our explorations of form, the biggest challenge is the balance that we strive for between thinking about process and ideas and thinking about form. Why does this struggle exist? We are form-makers. But form drives the thought, and depending on how we are thinking about the idea will drive how we are thinking about the form. There is obviously push and pull, but in an exercise of visual language and conventions—where form is really the critical element, and the core of the investigation, maybe we are more inclined to reach back into the known, even though it is precisely the known that we are trying to break free from.

I think often times, we can look to art as more compelling initiatives for this. Khalil Rabah is a Palestinian artist currently and the center of the Riwaq Biennial. His conceptual art pieces re-imagine new national institutions in a space between fact and fiction—how they exist in a state that is not a state, and around institutions that are not institutions. He smuggles them into places where they might create havoc because of their ambivalence.  (art-agenda.com) I think that it is precisely these openings, and this blankness that might allow us, as designers, to think about possibility. So when that blankness doesn’t exist, maybe we should attempt to invent it—and not be afraid to create some havoc.

There is some additional thoughts with images of the project: http://tlallenspring2009.wordpress.com/

Notes on this essay:

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Spring 09

A Free-Thinking Interface

The goal of the last project was to take a narrative text that we had written and translate that into a typographic interface. The topic of my narrative was self-representation. My goal was to create a piece of clothing that would highlight and illuminate pieces of the narrative based on the person’s physiological characteristics (so, heart rate, perspiration, body temperature, vocal level, etc.). The text that was displayed would be directly related to that.

I think the project was mostly a failure in translation. The ideas that I had and the behaviors that I imagined were stifled by my inability to use technology to realize them, and also by my unwillingness to adjust my idea based on the parameters of the project. Rather than looking at the original document as something to build on, as it often the case, I tried to overwhelm it with more and new meaning. We have, throughout the course, been encouraged to find our answer along the path, and while I think there is value in that, my attempt to navigate concept, technology and formal considerations simultaneously proved difficult to manage and detrimental to my ultimate execution.

I constantly strive for simplicity, but for some reason it is equally as hard for me to realize. I think the biggest obstacle to good design is an attempt to communicate too much, and unfortunately it is a common pitfall of my own.

In this particular project, I was constrained by the original text that I had. Rather than think about how to use it to my advantage, or manipulate it in some way, I decided to obscure it—a decision that I think was ultimately a failure, and did not add anything to the final product.

See this and other studio projects

An Interface of Interfaces

This semester is focused on interface. Defining and redefining, understanding and redirecting, expanding and solidifying, challenging and creating common and futuristic notions of interface. This last project illuminated our varied definitions and understanding of interface even further. Is our human face and interface? Is a gauge an interface (or does it have an interface). Many of these questions came up in trying to identify and explain a genre of interface. So, if a gauge has an interface but is not an interface, what genre does it belong to? Data reading or management? But that seems too broad. My definition of interface is this: An interface is something that we read, we understand (in some way) and we respond to. The interface, in turn, reacts and responds to us. This interaction can be direct (as in, pushing a button) or indirect, as in turning up the heat in your apartment. There, I said it. That’s my definition. So, my project might make a little more sense.

My genre of interface was gauge interfaces. We first sorted and designed a taxonomy of our interface. This was by no means complete, but was to start thinking about how we might make distinctions and give some form to our genre. I think a big hurdle to this part of the process was actually in defining (or redifining) or just coming to some common understanding of what a taxonomy is. For some, it is a chart or a map, for others, it was an idea, for still others, it was about behaviors. We all struggled with this portion—with understanding what it was, so that we could give it form. And, I think this is common for designers and a good struggle to have. We need to understand our content. We want to feel like our voice is common to our subject but we can’t do that without fully dissecting what it is that we’re talking about. At least, I think this is what we should be striving towards as designers. We can depart, dislodge, break apart, subvert our meaning, but we can’t do anything if we don’t understand what it is that we are talking about.

In doing my research on types of gauge interfaces and few things became important to my understanding:

1. the reductionist quality of them as a whole: they are potentially taking comples states and reducing them down to simple indicators that may or may not help the use to make a decision.

2. that many of them exist in an environment of chaos, and this seems directly related to their importance for keeping large numbers of people safe—and of course directly related to the complexity of the situation that they are monitoring. (thinking about industrial control rooms, airplane control panels, nuclear power plants.

3. often times (and this goes back to the reductionist quality) gauges are designed or produced ‘generically’ and then purposed or re-purposed however the user needs. This means that they are not designed with a particular environment or situation in mind. This seems particularly odd considering the important role that they play in many situations, and how important it is that monitors (people) be able to understand them.

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Interface Intervention

Today’s critique of the design intervention brought up interesting perspectives about what constitutes interface. And for me, caused me to think more about what design, as intervention, is. I know we will never come to consensus about some universal definition of interface, because I think it does not exist. I think you could use interface to describe or explain almost anything. But, to put some parameters around it, and try to create some sort of understanding of it, I think interface—to exist—must invite interaction. The user must be able to affect it in some way. It provides a door, a screen, an opportunity to change it. So, by this definition, a door is an interface, but a flight of stairs are not. Why? You can choose to open the door, to peek through the door, to close the door. And, in return, the door can be opened (and therefore changed) (or not) – can be peeked through (or not). It might be subtle, and it’s definitely open to debate, but that’s that.

The other discussion that was raised (in my mind, anyway) was the meaning of a design intervention. Does an intervention necessarily mean that the user MUST react in a new way to the interface. Or, could it mean that the interface is provoking the user to THINK about how he/she uses it in some new way. Does there have to be an immediate change in behavior, or is it just as valid to confront the user with how he or she might consider the meaning of how they use the interface? Does it need to provide answers or is it okay to provoke questions and considerations?

For my project, I focused on the act of writing an email, the juxtaposition of monologue vs dialogue and what sort of mental state is in play while you’re crafting the email. Email as an interface and communication tool puts us in a provocative position, somewhere between letter – writing and verbal communication, but without the benefit of reflection as it occurs in letter-writing (because of the speed at which you craft the letter) or the immediate response of the receiver that we encounter in verbal dialogue. But, what if the email played the role of reactor? Could react to the writer, and what was being written.Unlike a conversation, where saying certain things is considered within the context of face to face confrontation, email is passive. But, what if it weren’t? What if the email that was crafted had the possibility of being challenged by the email program itself?