(2013-11-14) Chimero What Screens Want

Frank Chimero: What Screens Want. What does it mean to natively design for screens?

So, if computers are like aspirin, and we’ve been making the computers smaller and smaller, where’s the necessary padding that allows us to grasp things? I stumbled over the question for a while. Then it hit me. The padding isn’t around the screens. It’s in them.

I’d like to show you a video clip from a BBC series called Connections, hosted and written by James Burke.

As a little formal exercise, let’s take every time Burke says “plastic” and replace it with “software.”

If something can be anything, it usually becomes everything

And now there’s a new generation of objects that can only be made in software.

It’s a software world. And because of software, it’s a soft world in a different sense, in the original sense of the word: it changes its shape easily.

Just like any material, screens have affordances. Much like wood, I believe screens have grain: a certain way they’ve grown and matured that describes how they want to be treated.

We’re stuck in a pendulum swing.

There are two main ideological camps. On one side, you have proponents for flat design

On the other side, you have folks who believe in the value of skeuomorphs as near-tangible, visible metaphors

Screens are aesthetically neutral, so the looks of things are not a part of their grain.

Well, if you think about it, the grain of wood is documentation of how the tree has grown. Maybe the best thing to do is to figure out where screens came from

LONG AGO IN THE VALLEY
In 1872 a man took a photograph of a horse.

Eadweard Muybridge

The photos were originally taken to settle a gentlemen’s bet to see if all four of a horse’s hooves were off the ground at any point in their stride. (They were.)

Muybridge’s little photo project was the first time we ever split the second

Muybridge had discovered how to bottle movement, and like any good inventor, he did experiments to see if he could reanimate his frozen horses.

Screens don’t care what the horses look like. They just want them to move. They want the horses to change. Designing for screens is managing that change. To put a finer head on it, the grain of screens is something I call flux.

Flux is the capacity for change

Flux is a generous definition. It encompasses many of the things we take for granted in the digital realm: structural changes, like customization, responsiveness, and variability.

I break flux into three levels

Low

These are really small mutations we take for granted when it comes to computing, like the ability to sort a table row on your spreadsheet.

High

These are the immersive interactive pieces you think of when I say “Flash website.” I think this sort of stuff is rarely a good idea on the web, but we’re talking about screens in general.

Medium

This area is most interesting to me, because it overlaps with what I do: websites and interfaces

Movement, change, and animation are a lot more than ways to delight users: they are a functional method for design.

A designer’s work is not only about how the things look, but also their behaviors in response to interaction, and the adjustments they make between their fixed states. In fact, designing the way elements adapt and morph in the in-between moments is half of your work as a designer. You’re crafting the interstitials.

I’ve worked on several responsive projects in the past couple years, and it’s always been a headache—not from technological limitations, but because there weren’t suitable words to describe the behaviors I wanted

We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another

a map’s biases do service to one need, but distort everything else. (all models are wrong)

That’s how I feel about the web (world-wide web) these days. We have a map, but it’s not for me.

It’s the business structures and funding models we use to create digital businesses. It’s the pressure to scale

We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention.

We can make a new map. Or maybe reclaim a map we misplaced a long time ago. One built on:
extensibility
openness
communication
community
wildness

We can rearrange how we think about the tools we build, so that someone putting down your tool doesn’t disprove its utility, but validates its usefulness.