Why Art Imitates Life
But Google Glass Does Not…
A colleague (my boss, actually) recently shared a wonderful article with me, chronicling How Google Finally Got Design, spurring my own interest in the design concepts behind some of their latest app updates.
Margin, padding, color, shadow, symmetry — all traits used as the benchmarks of a good design.
For a small taste of what Google has done to bring themselves closer to understanding what holistic design means across platforms, watch this short video below on the making of their new design philosophy, Material Design. Then keep reading.
There is no shortage of opinions in the design world around what constitutes clean and compelling software or which stylistic features create an environment worthy of perpetual interaction. Margin, padding, color, shadow, symmetry — all traits used as the benchmarks of a good design.
But all good design flows from art, a field of study I have no expertise in nor any proclivity to explore. My wife would say I am an artistic plebeian. However, as a student of philosophy, I can speak on what others have taught on aesthetics and point to concepts which have influenced my work as a self-taught designer — one who has quite a keen eye for beauty if I may say so myself (my wife agrees).
Art exists as imitation and imitation as a replication of nature.
What I intend to explain is a necessary gravitation in the design world back toward the utility of art as an imitation of life and away from art as merely the cathartic emotional response of its designer.
In his essay The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde opines that, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” purposefully stabbing Aristotle in the front over his understanding of mimesis (imitation).
You see — for Aristotle — art exists as imitation and imitation as replications of nature. Whereas man can only understand little pieces of nature at any point in time, imitation can truly be aspirations towards perfection. Put another way, it is difficult for a man to capture the brilliance of a sunrise in nature — the pouring rain, the tired wife, the dawdling 5- and 8-year old hiking companions. It’s much easier to paint a sunrise and hang it on your living room wall.
Plato, Aristotle’s mentor, explains in the Republic how damning poetry and art can be, creating realities from which little form exists; complex amalgamations of imagination and desire with little or no connection to reality. You can almost see Plato run screaming down the hallways of the modern art museum.
But this is what Wilde likely found beautiful. To him, the deconstruction of art and imitation provides a safe haven to escape our own existential crisis. Life must imitate art because there is nothing true, other than our manifest emotion.
No one should ever abridge C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man (it is very short already), but I want to pull in one quote to explore this objective (art imitates life) vs. subjective (life imitates art) dichotomy.
To Aristotle and Lewis, we search for true art that accurately reflects reality.
Here, Lewis mocks the use of the “Green Book,” a literature textbook cobbled together by two authors of his time to brainwash English students into destroying their conception of descriptive adjectives as objective.
In their second chapter Gains and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge
at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one
called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the
first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gains and Titius comment
as follows: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “ Sublime” or shortly, I have sublime feelings’
To Aristotle and Lewis, we search for true art that accurately reflects reality and brings us closer to the good. To Wilde, we attempt to describe a subjective, emotional reaction we have. Art can often walk a fine line between what the artist truly feels and what is actually being imitated.
Contradictory to what I have written, I do feel there is a place for both of these types of imitation. To a certain extent, subjectivism allows us to push the limits of what we know and reimagine what is true. However, it is not a replacement for what is true.
The dilemma for designers is in this regard is imagining something that is both functional (objective) and beautiful (subjective) without surrendering to either demanding muse. However, since the startup boom, I’ve seen a major decrease in beautification as a priority for app development — like all the artists were shoved out and all the MBA’s let in, leading to the problem explained about Google.
In hindsight, maybe this was a good problem to have?
Finding its functional corporate goals satisfied, Google was able to identify a sweeping failure of cross-platform design and tackle it in a way that made sense — without glorifying the artist. Why is this key?
Looking at Material Design, you can see a comprehensive realism in the paper shapes, the shadows, the lighting, etc. It identifies with the user over the author and aims to provide a complex but similar experience to what the user is accustomed to; say a desktop or a 3D space. Instead of gut-punching a user into loving their design, Google has employed measures to bring art to imitate real life.
I honestly think this is where design is going, finally.
As companies compete, I think we will see more technology seek to imitate our daily lives rather than transform them. But we have seen some losers of the life-imitation game already — say, Google Glass and the Apple Watch, which have failed to entice people to use them.
Why? Because they seek to transcend the usefulness of existing practicalities and adopt themselves as the “new way to live.” Instead of providing an added value to ordinary life, they attempt to create new values.
But the future of technology lies not in the wastefulness of art for the sake of art, but life made easier by technological imitation.
