Cyberman №9 — Design — Capturing the Design Spirit of Gen X, Origins of UX, Punk in Graphic Design and a Song by Billie Eilish
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every week, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
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This week we will talk about design. Not just graphic design, but design in a more general sense. As Brian Reed said: “Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”
The complexity of contemporary society and business has led more organizations to accept design techniques and methodologies into their business processes. Consulting studios like IDEO and Frog Design are putting design thinking at the forefront of innovation and business strategy development. Ideas such as empathy, prototyping, and embracing failure are changing the way companies are developing products, interacting with customers and planning for the future.
It seems like design is all the rage now, so let’s read some articles.
Capturing the Design Spirit of Gen X
In his 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland coined the phrase architectural indigestion, “the almost obsessive need to live in a ‘cool’ architectural environment.” It’s a kind of aesthetic gout, caused by consuming too much “simplistic pine furniture [and] matte black high-tech items” too quickly.
“The x in Gen X was an exhausted shrug from a cohort denied power by youth-obsessed Baby Boomers, who instead willed them a world of invasive technology, ecological collapse, and spectacular terrorism — and told them consumption was the answer. Hence gout. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, the market recast that ‘need’ as self-care and self-expression, all put on maxed-out credit cards.”
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“But this isn’t the louche punk of, say, Damien Hirst. Instead, it’s a focus on the what of what was around them. It was a way to, as Sellers puts it, “take design to commerce” without simply feeding the beast. “There had been a quite rigid approach to design before them,” says Dzekciorius. “With modernism and minimalism, it had been very rational. This generation saw more opportunity to be expressive.”
How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh
By law, that ingenious bit of design — known as shape coding — still governs landing gear and wing flaps in every airplane today. And the underlying idea is all around you: It’s why the buttons on your videogame controller are differently shaped, with subtle texture differences so you can tell which is which. It’s why the dials and knobs in your car are all slightly different, depending on what they do. And it’s the reason your virtual buttons on your smartphone adhere to a pattern language.
“Instead, designing better machines meant figuring how people acted without thinking, in the fog of everyday life, which might never be perfect. You couldn’t assume humans to be perfectly rational sponges for training. You had to take them as they were: distracted, confused, irrational under duress. Only by imagining them at their most limited could you design machines that wouldn’t fail them.”
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“Today, this paradigm shift has produced trillions in economic value. We now presume that apps that reorder the entire economy should require no instruction manual at all; some of the most advanced computers ever made now come with only cursory instructions that say little more than “turn it on.” This is one of the great achievements of the last century of technological progress, with a place right alongside GPS, Arpanet, and the personal computer itself.”
Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: How Punk Is Still Impacting Graphic Design
Of all subcultures, it’s not a stretch to say that punk boasts the most recognizable aesthetic: snarling, unashamedly DIY, and above all, urgent — the sort of thing typified by Jamie Reid’s, ransom-note typography and blustering cut-and-paste newsprint.
“The punk look of the 1970s has never really gone away in the design world — the most obvious flag-bearer being the world of zines. The devil-may-care collaging of various typographic styles, handwritten additions, and conflation of disparate pieces of found imagery is still rife across poster design and even in more commercially minded publications (it could be argued, for instance, that the likes of Mushpit — with its scattergun approach to layout and so on — takes the baton from punk.)”
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“Morrissey was driving the design a lot,” says Blauvelt, even though the quiff-topped singer worked with designer Caryn Gough, who has created sleeves for everyone from The Associates to Robert Wyatt and Everything But The Girl. The piece appears in the cut and paste section of the show, since it uses an appropriated image of a young Truman Capote by Cecil Beaton.”
For the end of this issue listen to I Love You, a song by Billie Eilish, performed on Saturday Night Live:
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