The End of the Design Era in Technology.

The aesthetics of creative innovation in technology are split into two cultures — a design one (productivity and efficiency) and a narrative one (stories, entertainment and games). The design one is of the way things look and work: minimalism; Apple; flat, modernist user interfaces and the narrative one is one of the way things are imagined: fantasy and gaming; symbolism drawn from paganism to superhero comic books; skeuomorphic (imitation based) user interfaces and subconscious associations. The narrative aesthetic may be about to gain the lead.

Today, there are two cultures in the Information Revolution.

The 1959 Rede Lecture by C.P. Snow put forward the thesis that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society” was split into two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I will argue that computing technology is split into two cultures — helper computing (which revolves around computing applications that help us in the real world, from productivity software in work environments, to business communication, maps and non fiction information services) and immersive computing (centered around applications that create an immersive experience, such as music, games, literary fiction and movies). The aesthetics of these two environments, design vs narrative, are fundamentally different. One (design) is based on an aesthetic of what you are actually looking at and the other (fantasy), what you imagine when you look into something. You could argue, the whole of modernism is based on this distinction, since modern, the new, equates to the present and future, where there is no historical baggage. Looking at something for what it is, independent of associations based on memory and imagination are all that is possible for something new.

Innovative technology is hopefully about about the future, while a design form based on relatively low tech such as suburban architecture is often about creating the illusion of permanence. This is why iPhones aren’t designed like many domestic buildings are, based on styles that are more than 100 years old.

The dominant aesthetics of the current era of personal computing are based on mid-century modern product design.

Just as with Science vs Humanities, there is overlap between these distinct Helper and Immersive computing cultures. People can be immersed in a movie, or playing Candy Crush on the same device as is used for helper apps like a calculator, and messaging on Facebook is taking part in a ‘narrative’. But the fundamental aesthetics driving the experience are very different between helper and immersive environments, helper computing, which is the current paradigm, is driven by a design culture and immersive computing by a narrative one.

Examples of the two cultures of computing technology.

UI as design (helper apps):

The IOS Calculator was based on a real world, classic Braun one. The original IOS6 version mimicked the plastic and LCD, so you could imagine you were looking at the real thing. The IOS7 version realized that this was dishonest to the Braun design which was honest and functional — so a UI that did not rely on any pretend plastic (skeuomorphic) elements was actually closer to the design principles of the original than a literal imitation of it in software.

UI in-between Design and Narrative:

User interfaces in movies are a special, niche case that helps illustrate the point. They sit in an in-between world of ‘looking at’ and ‘immersive’. You immerse yourself in the fictional universe the movie inhabits, so the UI can have fictional, fantasy elements that whet the imagination, but would be useless or annoying in real life— such as ubiquitous bleeping, scrolling numbers and unnecessary animation. Nevertheless the UI itself is not something you immerse yourself in so it has to look functionally plausible within the movie’s universe. You look at it for what it is, design wise, but through the lens of an imaginary world, where a cartoon world would have an imaginary cartoon UI and a futuristic one an imaginary futuristic UI, etc.

The Iron Man movie UI has to look futuristic, but within a universe that is slightly more ‘cartoony’ than, say, Minority Report. It is half ‘design’, half ‘fantasy’.

UI as Narrative (immersive apps):

One of the predominant fantasy styles, to the extent that it is a geek cliche, is the pagan/medieval inspired one. From Lord of the Rings to Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Legend of Zelda and The Ring Cycle, knights, dragons, castles, swords (or laser swords), good vs evil and mountains, lakes, caves and rural villages, these things comprise a series of common narrative elements. On the one hand these are like something from a satire like Spinal Tap and on the other they are archetypes that run deep in northern European culture, which in turn forms a significant component of the American one. When it is mixed with other deeply rooted folk cultures from other parts of the world, all sorts of interesting things happen, like Rock and Roll. The role play world of Comic Con may be fantasy, but the fantasy elements it draws from are often no less absurd than what Carl Jung supposed was archetypal to the human experience.

Nothing exemplifies the two cultures of technology better than the fact that what the design culture perceives as bad taste by looking at the surface (what it looks like), the narrative culture sees as an immersive universe of rich experience through imagination (what it means) that would be lost completely in a stripped down, functional, design aesthetic.

The same pagan narrative elements run the gamut of culture, high and low, old and young, from music to games to movies & TV to the Opera, to the extent it is difficult to tell what part of our society the image below comes from.

Is this from: (a) Skyrim video game, (b) Game of Thrones TV series (c) the Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in NY?

The image is, in fact, from the Ring Cycle at the ‘Met’ — so it’s ‘high culture’ rather than, say, a bad heavy metal band from Finland, but it is part of the same tradition as the picture below, which is a product of modern Japanese games design, a bizarre blend of traditional Japanese and European archetypal imagery. My designer side wishes the picture below didn’t exist, as if Caspar David Friedrich had drawn My Little Ponies, but maybe that is because I am looking at it, not into it.

Promotional Artwork from Twilight Princess, which inhabits the same universe as Legend of Zelda. My designer side wishes this didn’t exist, as if Caspar David Friedrich had drawn My Little Ponies.

The reason for the decline in design: hardware design is less important as devices start to look the same.

Most people would say that design is becoming more important in tech, yet i’m about to argue the opposite — that we are about to enter a new period where design is going to be far less important and story telling much more so, with its fundamentally different aesthetic approach of looking into rather than at. It’s an argument I have no incentive to make, having spent my entire career arguing for the importance of deep, often invisible design processes all the way through technology development, rather than just highly visible graphic or UX design, so I feel I can do so without ‘talking my book’.

When new things are invented there is lots of innovation in the range of forms they can take, rather like new species in the Cambrian explosion, or the bizarre range of flying machines before the first working aircraft. Changes to ecosystems allow for lots of design variation and lots of opportunity for new designs. The standardization of mobile computing, in the form of the keyboardless, screen only smartphone, is much like passenger planes standardizing on the cigar shape. The principal hardware design has been settled on, and hardware product design opportunities for smartphones, tablets and laptops will decline.

This plane is as old today as the first aircraft built by the Wright Brothers was when it was built by Boeing. But unlike the Wright Brother’s box-kite like object, it looks remarkably similar to today’s passenger aircraft.

This is a big trend and will take a decade or so to play out, in the interim, design will still continue to feel more and more important as corporates hire designers to bring technology design skills to the level of maturity of other fields such as product design and architecture. However, it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate on commoditised technology running on things such as smartphones, tablets and laptops which have standardised in terms of form factor, to the point where there is almost no real product design left in them in terms of the hardware.

Design will be more about software and processes and so the importance of the company which brought design to the tech industry: Apple, will diminish. This is because apple’s dominance is predicated on hardware excellence and where their lead in software design is slipping. Chasing hardware margins through luxury branding may work in the short term, but will fail eventually, since ‘luxury’ is fundamentally about past prestige rather than the future, and technology and the vision that built Apple is about the future.

Luxury is about the past, not the future. Although this Swiss mechanical watch is a design classic, it is a retro design classic, a once highly functional, well designed item that is luxurious precisely because it is obsolete and therefore unnecessary.

A pure, luxury business model is only possible when there is no real functional innovation, and it has been replaced by cultural signaling, such as expensive retro raincoats or mechanical watches. Similarly, luxury is literally about selling a fantasy, which is antithetical to design, which is about honesty, simplicity and functionality. Apple’s designs are founded more than anything on the work and ideals of Dieter Rams, whose 10 core design principles include being useful, unobtrusive and as economical as possible — luxury is almost by definition the opposite of this, being associated with expensive, extravagant ostentation. Not to say that indulgence in unnecessarily opulent things is always bad, but it is not principally about design. It’s true that design classics, such as a Porsche 911 are luxury items, but a car designed specifically to travel at illegal speeds was always extravagance masquerading as ergonomics. Apple’s products, on the other hand were once genuinely pared down highly functional, modern, innovative products.

The perceived difference between the device on the left (which costs 1/3) and the one on the right is what the majority of the revenues of the world’s biggest company depend on. In terms of hardware, a protective case makes more difference to the design, and in terms of software, better integration with Google apps and control over remote backup are why I switched to the one on the left.

The smartphone may have been the beautiful end-game of a 50 year period of consumer technology innovation, leading to truly ubiquitous personal computing and a device as minimalist as could be imagined — Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’, a flat piece of nothingness.

The black mirror that the majority of the world’s human beings will shortly carry with them, is not necessarily immersive technology. It is a device that slips into your pocket so that people need not know you are connected to the rest of the world’s computers when you want to be, but it does not make you look like a cyborg. This was the vision of how computing should be that traces back to Pavel Curtis when he was a Xerox Parc, where he foresaw the utility of invisible enablers rather than an immersive world.

The reason for the rise of immersive and narrative aesthetics: immersive software experiences and even, possibly, VR.

Despite the rise of social media, our connected world is creating experiences which are less social, where we are immersed in our own bubble. In the pre broadcast era, entertainment happened live, in groups, and even with TV and cinema, it was a shared event, on the sofa or in a movie theater.

Broadcast era technology created a realtime, shared experience in the real world.

Today we can consume TV when we want, streamed, rather than when it is broadcast, and so this experience is a more immersive, asynchronous, solitary (we are in our own bubble) one. As we all watch and listen to different things at different times, whether on the train or sitting in bed, we hold our own personal screen in our hands in front of us and listen to our own audio through headphones — we have entered an immersive, fantasy world all of our own, where the rest of the real world and other people are outside of our bubble or contained entirely within it, but in virtual form.

Internet era technology is creating immersive experiences which are not shared with people in the real world in realtime. We create a bubble of isolation with headphones and our own screen and with the Internet there are effectively infinite channels so we can watch or listen to something when we want. This means there is neither a real world shared experience nor an online one based on knowing that millions of people are doing the same thing at the same time.

This creates a universe of narrative and fantasy and an aesthetic based on the opposite of the design one — looking into rather that at.

Immersive software experiences will be the real tipping point for the switch between a design vs narrative computing culture, but it’s possible that VR will play a role, because if VR is successful it will be about games and fantasy, not helping and productivity.

VR is the most immersive of all technologies, literally like sticking your face into a book. Bringing new meaning to Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift.

An immersive headset that places you in a fictional world is the opposite of a black mirror you take out of your pocket, to help you in the real world. Virtual Reality has been, as the expression implies— not really real, for 30 years, but now it has reached a threshold of speed and performance where it is good enough and may be the first new consumer technology form factor to become mainstream since the smartphone.

When the web took off in the mid 90s, Apple was a failing company with no design prowess, and personal computing was, in reality, small business computing. The aesthetics of computing were those of cubicles and cheap office furniture and when people imagined what could be done with the world wide web, the inspirations came from the futuristic vision of science fiction writers such as William Gibson rather than designer minimalism.

This was the aesthetics of personal computing, before Apple made it future thinking again, through design

Comdex 1995. It would have taken 10 minutes to download one of today’s average webpages — but we had VR.

By the mid 90s, Virtual Reality became the inspiration for iconic imagery used to represent the web and ‘cyberspace’ and people wearing headsets very similar to the Oculus Rift ran on the front of magazines. Virtual Reality Modelling Language, VRML, was a core focus of early web activity and China Lake (a military site that hosted a 3d model repository) was one of the first databases of shareable digital assets, on the Internet. Prior to Wired magazine, cyberpunk’s proto-Burning Man, Mad Max meets rave culture aesthetic figured in magazines such as Mondo 2000 and movies such as The Lawnmower Man produced a vision of cyberspace that preceded the web itself by two years. Fully immersive online, realtime 3d rendered chat environments, with avatars and voice conferencing, such as Onlive Traveller, were available by the late 90s.

Before Wired there was Mondo 2000, a proto-Burning Man, Cyberpunk zine which was nothing like the design culture, based on modernist product design, that Apple would develop.

I even dabbled in VR myself, in the 90s, despite the fact that the aesthetics were a long way from my modernist designer sensibilities. In 1998, with Angus Bankes, I created the world’s first 3d search engine based on Lycos — which returned a 3d world of objects representing search results, where their color, shape and movement determined relevancy. We also built a music search engine that allowed you to fly near album artwork, in an infinite grid, to hear samples without clicking. Both of these were intended purely for fun, but we tried to avoid the figurative, fantasy aesthetic and go for a pared down modernist one. There was no audience for a modernist VR universe however, and they were adopted enthusiastically by the ‘cyberpunk’ community whose user interface aesthetics (think Kai Krause and Kai’s Power Tools) tended to be the exact opposite of what we were trying to do. In short, VR, above all became emblematic of the early web and determined its aesthetics — which were the polar opposite of today’s, outside of one area — gaming.

Kai’s Power Tools 1992. This was productivity software (Photoshop Plugins), with a bizarre aesthetic that looks like the figurative ‘kitsch’ of a tile-based game or the universe inhabited by Mondo 2000’s Cyberpunks.

The aesthetics of video gaming are about fantasy. With a few notable exceptions, modernist or highly abstract games have not done as well as highly figurative ones, either in the form of realism (Grand Theft Auto) or cartoon (Super Mario). The most successful game of all, Tetris, is highly abstract, but it is not minimal, the shapes are more like the fruit machine style candy of Candy Crush, with 3-d blends and shadows rather than the flat minimalism of Dots. The difference between Dots and Candy Crush says everything about gaming aesthetics, Candy Crush has ‘fantasy’ aesthetics, for a game worth billions, Dots has flat UI, modernist design worthy of an Apple IOS utility, for a game with similar play, but worth very little.

Dots’ IOS like elegant minimalism (left) vs Candy Crush’s digital fruit machine. The difference? Several billion dollars.

If VR is by definition immersive and if immersive goes hand in hand with a narrative (what it means) rather than design (how it works) culture, then VR is going to be about gaming and the aesthetic will probably be Candy Crush not dots. But there is one exception…

The In-Between Culture — ‘Virtual Safari’ and augmented reality

The possibility that VR will not be colonised entirely by a gaming aesthetic, depends on the real world invading the virtual one. This is possible this time around, because of 3d video, advanced online maps and in particular, Street View, allowing exploration of the real world in 3d. Early examples of this are Charity Water’s immersive 3d videos and Google’s Expeditions Pioneer Program.

Charity Water’s VR experiences are more interesting than many games demos. 3d video allows you to really ‘be there’ and empathise with another part of the world through more direct experience of other people’s environments. Empathy is key to the principle of charity.

The Expeditions Pioneer Program shows what could happen if the experience of Street View were extended to VR — creating the opportunity for realtime Virtual Safari.

Another counter trend to immersive, narrative technology centers around the Internet of Things, and the idea that physical objects are invisibly connected to the Internet in vast numbers. This may be true, but the use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) are so widespread and vague that the IoT is everything and nothing. Most of the really promising use cases revolve around enterprise markets, such as Smart Factories, where supply chain efficiency gains from sensors on machine tools and factory instruments are obvious. Because these are B2B applications not personal ones, they will impact our cultural environment less than immersive technology.

The IoT could create a counter trend to immersive technology (invisible, ubiquitous sensors in the real world), but if the most lucrative markets are enterprise ones such as smart factories, rather than personal ones like the Apple Watch (which has not clear ‘must have’ case) then it will have less cultural impact than, say, immersive personal technology.

Summary

The era of modernism and design in personal technology may be over as the hardware converges around similar forms, leaving very little room for hardware product design in personal computing. Since personal rather than business computing has more impact on culture and since hardware design was what triggered the awareness of design through its tangibility, the culture of computing will change. It will be driven more by games and the aesthetics of fantasy and imagination which are very different from ergonomic design.