How the UI wars will end
And how the world will end too.
I’m going to predict the future.
I say this not because it’s a dramatic way of begininning a story (though it does the trick, does it not?), but because I’d like to dispell all pretenses of opinion; I don’t want to take sides or to fill the role of pursuader — such a role, as will be discussed, has already been filled intelligently and valiantly by philosophers greater than myself. I just want to share some cycles and trends that I have observed that may shed light on the goings on of interfaces, skeumorphism, invisibility and the like.
So, this is what the battleground looks like now (a very random sampling in a mostly random order):
Good Design is Invisible The Best Interface is No Interface The Best Interface is No Interface A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design Responses: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design Skeuomorphism The Flat Design Era Will Apple’s Tacky Design Philosophy Cause a Revolt? Almost Flat Design How Flat? The Great Skeumorphism Misunderstanding Skeuominimalism - The Best of Both Worlds No to No UI The Cloud is Heavy and Design isn’t Invisible So, is Good Design Invisible, or Not? Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I’ll save you the trouble of reading. Essentially, there are three camps here: the first camp is the group we don’t hear from much — the alleged offenders. These are the creators that indulge in the out-of-fashion decadence of conspicuous UI, bathe in glare-resistant leather backgrounds and gratuitous volume knobs. These are the monstrocities that Sir Jonathan Ive (we’re talking about Camp II now — pay attention), knight in shining armor, will save us from. Cue the demolishing of the middle man, the see-the-light Narnia that ushers in the flat, simple, beautiful world of drop-shadow-less rectangles. At last nothing remains but the romance that is the user and the solution to her problem. We have arrived at heaven, no?
Nope. There are responses. Many will argue that they aren’t arguing, but at the very least Camp III is in some sense defined by its variance from Camp II. We are taking it too far; we have not taken it far enough. Visibility gets in the way; visibility paves the way. Visibility is irrelevant. Camp II but with nuance.
I’ve been intrigued by all of this, and I’ve even formed opinions, but I became really interested when I read the following:
Interfaces are the dominant cultural form of our time. So much of contemporary culture takes place through interfaces and inside UI. Interfaces are part of cultural expression and participation, skeuomorphism is evidence that interfaces are more than chrome around content, and more than tools to solve problems. To declare interfaces ‘invisible’ is to deny them a cultural form or medium. Could we say ‘the best TV is no TV’, the ‘best typography is no typography’ or ‘the best buildings are no architecture’? (Timo Arnall, No to No UI)
At first I thought, good point, but shortly after I realized that I had a rhetorical answer to Arnall’s rhetorical question. Wait. Haven’t we said exactly that?
1910, Architect Adolf Loos in Ornament and Crime:
The stragglers slow down the cultural evolution of the nations and of mankind; not only is ornament produced by criminals but also a crime is committed through the fact that ornament inflicts serious injury on people’s health, on the national budget and hence on cultural evolution… Since ornament is no longer organically linked with our culture, it is also no longer the expression of our culture.
1930, Typographic Scholar Beatrice Warde in The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible:
Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine… You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For… if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain… Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ’modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.
The visibility of delivery technologies such as the television hits much closer to home, because it seems like it just happened yesterday. Surely, we thought, all of those cluttery set-top boxes, game systems, music libraries and modems would (once technologies caught up) converge into a beautifully inconspicuous black box that would be controlled by a single central remote with only one button, or better yet, mind control, or better yet, subconscious passive mind control (a theory most famously described by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture).
The answer was definitely not, and then it was sort of, and then we all just grew rather bored and indifferent and stopped thinking about it.
And here lies my prophesy for the end to all of this madness, i.e. the really anticlimactic climax to life, the universe and everything:
Meh.
To get there we need only to look at the current state of architecture, the current state of typography, the almost-current state of television.
It’s not that we’ve reached an agreement — as a species, we are not very agreeable. Some architects will create wonderfully ornament-less things and some typographers will create wonderful ornament-ful things and we can argue to death about whether these ornaments and non-ornaments are visible or invisible or sort of invisible but that’s not my point. My point is that we just don’t argue to death about these things anymore. We seem to either be content with the dissonance or we simply don’t care.
Why? What happened to our zeal? Has something changed in the way we relate to our creations or worse, within ourselves?
In case I’m losing any of you, let’s make the answer to that question nice and big.
Sex.
Good, then.
At the risk of losing you again, I’m going to bring in French literary theory. Hang in, though. It’s super good stuff.
Roland Barthes, 1973:
Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no “erogenous zones” (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.
His metaphor is fashion and his subject is text, but in my experience anything that is seen is subject to the eroticism described.
Translation: it isn’t the body itself that is exciting, nor is it even the surfacing of the body from beneath its veil, but the performance of the whole thing — the brief, fleeting, inconsistant revelations that are just as briefly, fleetingly and inconsistently taken away from us. If it is exhilirating to witness such an act it is even more exhilirating to carry it out, to put something out there into the world with certain expectations about its visibility and then to see it be seen, to observe an audience corrupt those expectations by being blind to what you could swear you put right there or to find that same audience recognizing something you constructed as something else. We delight in transience.
The body, the content, the object itself is the ultimate purpose, and yet we fetishize the interface along with the dissolving of that interface because that is what architecture nerds find sexy about architecture and typography nerds about typography and technology nerds about technology and design nerds about design.
And that’s all well and good for a while and then it all falls apart. It doesn’t happen all at once — in fact it is the slowness of it all that cultivates this destruction.
From The Prestige:
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge.” The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn.” The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige.”
There is nothing less sexy than understanding how something is sexy.
The revelation at the end of the magic trick, The Prestige, is not the revelation that you pretend to be looking for, but it is the only revelation that you want — not appearance but the performance of appearance. The simple reason for this is that the answer to why something is magical is never magic.
Anyone who has seen the failed British television “programme,” Penn and Teller: Fool Us will perhaps agree that its central premise was also its central failure. One after the other, magicians perform in front of a live-studio audience that includes famed artists Penn and Teller. If said artists are fooled, if they cannot guess how the trick was done, the participant is granted an opening act in Vegas. If they aren’t fooled, they divulge the act’s secret which sounds exciting but actually sucks, because the deception is always something really unremarkable like that it came from the magician’s pocket (here’s a clip from the show, but you have been warned). And once something has truly appeared, not in the sense of The Prestige but in the sense of inner workings, it will never disappear again (I have a similar theory that the death of a meme comes with the self-aware meme). End of intermittance. End of sex.
So what happens next? Are we condemned to a life of boredom, to a neutered existence, free of magic and riveting debates about interface design?
Well, no. What happens of course is that we find somewhere else to direct our attention. This usually takes one of two forms:
- Another magic trick: we often don’t even have to travel very far to find one of these. Take for instance the recent resurgence of the UI Wars with regards to wearable tech, Google Glass and the Internet of Things. It’s literally the exact same script but it doesn’t matter because it’s different enough to let us forget our self-awareness and once again be fooled.
- Magic theory: the death of the trick coincides with the start of discussions about tricks and their own acts of appearance and disappearance. In other words, observing the inner workings more closely reveals a rabbit-hole that is just as or even more exciting than the trick was in the first place (cf. Roger Caillois’ departure from the Surrealist movement). The visibility wars are just a semi-reflexive manifestation of the staging of appearance as disappearance. The debate has become the interface and it all starts from the top. Once that dies we get theory theory (which is probably where I would place our current discussion), but after that it’s all usually too tiresome except for the extra-nerdy few.
But I have misled you. Magic tricks aren’t the exact same thing as design tricks. Strip a magician of her wonder and all you have is a stage and a Pledge that goes unbroken. Strip a designer of her wonder and all you have is a stage and a Pledge that goes unbroken. See what I did there?
In magic, the spectacle is the content. In design, the spectacle serves the content.
The question of whether iOS 7's model is one that will last will not be a question of flatness or roundness or conspicuousness. Sure, in the short run all of these will contribute to Apple’s ability to wow (as in, “Wow, Apple has proven to us that it is still a worthy contender” or “Wow, Apple has flattened itself in one broad swoop”). All of these will elicit absurdly-long standing ovations from a crowd that has never even used the object of their affections. But much like the world, interfaces truly stand to be tested when it all goes to hell — when nobody cares about that stuff anymore.
Apathetic invisibility, rather than aesthetic invisibility, is the only enduring form of disappearance. And within that endurance, one question remains — in the naked naked end, will you have created something that truly matters?
