What Designers Are,
and What We’ll Become
Notes on the future of design, virtual reality, and what it could mean for designers of digital experiences
Architecture is a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time. Vincent Scully
In the beginning, we were graphic designers. Then we became “UX” designers. In the future, we’ll be architects and more.
When I started my career as a graphic designer 10 years ago, I was laying out printed publications. I was joining the rich tradition of graphic design that goes back as far as humans have been organizing information and worrying about its appealing display in two and sometimes three dimensions.
This pretty much continued with my foray into web design. In the early 2000's, designing a website was pretty much like designing any other 2d thing, except users could only touch it with their mouse. I kept applying my sense of 2d design, typography, space, art direction and everything didn’t feel all that different.
Then smartphones came out and we started designing for mobile. For the first time users could touch our stuff, and not just to move to different static interfaces. We still wrung our hands about white space and kerning, but we had to think about our interfaces as quasi-physical objects. We had to think about the physics of these systems, how we expected them to react and how we want them to respond to stimulus. This is pretty cool, and sets the stage for the expansion of the design profession as we know it.
The bits we (old guys like me, sitting here at 30) learned about in school and early jobs are still important, but they’re just one piece of a rapidly expanding ecosystem. Type, layout, readability, hierarchy and art direction are extremely important, but now we use those skills to build a larger system, to reinforce and strengthen the actual thing we’re building; a product, a story, an experience.
I was on a layover in Dubai recently, and had a lot of time to explore. Since I had my fill of coffee and had spent some time haranguing the post office employee about the various UAE stamps, the place I spent most time was this big electronics center. They had everything, from 3d printers to drones and all manner of mobile equipment, computers and all that. Not sure why you’d need to buy a drone in an airport, but it’s cool that they were there. The whole thing just plucked at my cyberpunk heartstrings though, and being in a weird land with an array of electronic doodads at my disposal put me in a mood to explore.
I ended up buying a Google Cardboard headset and goofing around with it. I even had time to download various large VR experiences to play with on the plane (a 12-hour or so flight back to Boston, which is pretty much hell if you’re 6'4" and riding in coach).
This thing blew my mind.
I had heard about it a while back, but I never tried it out. I’ve kept my eye on things like Oculus and MagicLeap, but only in a peripheral sense, and mostly because of the involvement of personal heroes like John Carmack and Neal Stephenson. I didn’t really know how VR would feel, especially on a phone and facilitated by a thing that looks like the product of a romance between a pizza box and cheap reading glasses.
Using the various experiences was just amazing. It created a real sense of space. Even just watching my phone videos was a shocking and intense experience. It places you in a theater, with a screen showing your video in front of you and a virtual wall of thumbnails behind you. This was just 2d stuff, but the way the environment was constructed was truly amazing. I felt like I was in that old (possibly apocryphal) story of people seeing the Louis Lumiere’s locomotive film for the first time.
This really got me thinking about how designers can use tech like this, and even how big a part of our world this could become. I started digging into some of the UX guidelines, which were really inspiring. Just the way Google describes the basics of working within this system gives you a sense of what the world could look like. They talk about text sizes, which are described in relative readability at certain distances. They talk about how to ground the user in their environment with the horizon, how to use audio to reinforce the sense of space and direction.
This all made me consider what our role will be in the far (or even near) future. Our jobs have been slowly but surely moving toward more consideration of physical spaces and haptic interfaces. The digital world and the things we interact with are becoming more real, and requiring us to think like industrial designers, architects, filmmakers. All the various experiences that have existed as shards are combining to form cohesive environments and experiences. The same way my house is filled with posters, salt shakers, chairs, TVs and magazines, all combined to create a place I call home.
“Cyberspace is everting.” William Gibson
In his 2007 book Spook Country, William Gibson described a new type of art or locative media that sounds more Magic Leap than Oculus. This was Gibson imagining how artists and hackers might use virtual reality to realize Scully’s idea about environments and the dialogue we create across time. It was really cool, but even as late as 2007 seemed like a couple steps away from where we were.
But here we are in 2015, and I was just able to buy a piece of cardboard for about 80 dirhams (20 bucks or so) and step into a believable virtual universe. It really whet my appetite to explore more sophisticated VR equipment, and convinced me that this will actually be a part of our world sooner rather than later. I began thinking about how my skills would translate, and how I could build experiences for people in virtual environments.
What kinds of design problems will we be discussing in 2020? What use cases will we consider? I may look back on all this in a few years and see it as another VR bubble, the likes of which we’ve seen before. But this time it feels different, like it’s really almost here. And I can imagine people like me and companies like mine acting more as architects, interior designers, landscape designers, building whole worlds to contain and display information or experiences. Plying our trades in four dimensions. And not just creating virtual rooms and the 80's version of VR, but being given carte blanch to imagine entirely new spaces, retool the laws of physics, or create experiences for all of our user’s senses.
That’s a world I want to live in.
