As Clement Mok observed in 2003, designers are the only professionals who describe their work in media-specific terms. A surgeon says, “I heal people;” he doesn’t say, “I make cuts.” A lawyer says, “I prosecute people;” he doesn’t say, “I make legal documents.” And yet, designers say, “I make websites. I do print work. I’m in video.” We are so focused on the medium that we often lose sight of the conceptual goals that inform our overall design practice.

There was a time when graduate art programs defined themselves in terms of media. Painters attended a painting program, ceramicists a ceramics program, and so on. With the rise of integrated, multimedia art, that time is passing. A contemporary artist may now work in video, sculpture, drawing, and performance simultaneously. The focus is not the media but rather the artist’s conceptual goals.

As designers, we should be willing and able to move fluidly from medium to medium. In order to do this, however, we must first identify the overarching conceptual goals of our design practice. Every artist has a “practice”: a career-spanning continuum of visionary making that drives the creation of each individual piece of work. An artist’s career isn’t simply a series of unrelated pieces that have no conceptual cohesion. Instead, her goals inform her practice which, in turn, informs the creation of her artwork over time.

Should a design practice be any different? Master designers (from William Morris to Stefan Sagmeister) have always pursued something more meaningful than the next job. A singular, evolving vision informs their choices with regards to clients and projects. Although their work varies depending on the particular needs of each job, it nevertheless follows a conceptual trajectory consistent with the goals of their practice.

Case Study: Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci is a poet, artist, and architect. His career has been defined by his conceptual goals rather than the media he uses to achieve those goals. (more…)

Much has already been written about the marketing of Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. Bypassing major labels and a fixed pricing scheme, Radiohead invites customers to purchase the album for whatever amount they like (including nothing). The music is purchased and downloaded via inrainbows.com, an e-commerce web site designed by Radiohead’s graphic design mastermind, Stanley Donwood. Just as Radiohead’s distribution scheme is a critique of capitalism and major record labels, the interface design of inrainbows.com is a critique of the rigorous usability guidelines that have become all but ubiquitous on the corporate web.

The traditional goal of an e-commerce site is to separate the customer from her money as quickly and painlessly as possible. Disorienting and thought-provoking interface design has no place in the checkout line of amazon.com. But what if you are a rich band like Radiohead, with little interest in money but a strong desire to tweak culture, provoke thought, and establish a meaningful relationship with your audience? What if you decide to spend the popularity you have earned on a kind of experimental art project? Suddenly e-commerce design becomes less a means of extracting money and more a means of disrupt the customer’s expectations.

Donwood’s design for inrainbows.com is so minimal it’s disorienting. The copy is cheeky and terse, dry and ironic.

inrainbows.com welcome text

Although the FAQ section addresses a number of logistical issues regarding product shipping, it never explains that the album can be had for free. Only when you arrive at the payment do you realize that something is amiss. (more…)

In my previous post, I suggested that contemporary designers are increasingly responsible for “designing” the contexts in which their designs occur, and I gave two examples of what such contextual designing might look like. Here are three more instances in which context is not merely taken into account, but rather purposefully altered in order to enhance a designed experience.

Service Design

In his excellent book Interaction Design, Dan Saffer defines a service as “a chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user.” By way of example, the cashier in a grocery checkout line performs a service. A service can be thought of as a system of events. Service design is the art of designing the entire context around this system of events. In the case of the grocery checkout line, a service designer would script the interactions between the cashier and the customer. She would also design the cash register interface, the signage for the checkout aisles, and dictate the physical layout of the aisles themselves.

In order to properly design such services, a service designer must take into account the size and nature of the shopping carts, the dimensions of the parking lot, the number of store employees per shift, the store’s hours of operation, the location of the store within the city, the amount and types of products on sale in the store, etc. In other words, a service designer must necessarily concern herself with the totality of the context in which the service occurs, and she must design (or at least negotiate) that context appropriately. (more…)

Up until the late 1800s, a painter could concern himself solely with what occurred within the borders of his canvas. In the biannual Paris Salon art exhibits, paintings were hung floor to ceiling and side by side, piled upon one another. Nobody considered the implications of hanging a painting of a virile bull directly above a painting of a reclining woman, and the artist certainly was not responsible for the overall context in which his work appeared publicly.

The Paris Salon of 1799

It’s not that artists in the 1800s were technically unable to control the contexts in which their art appeared, it’s just that there was, as yet, no historical precedent for doing so. However, when Marcel Duchamp entered a signed urinal into an art exhibit in 1917, everything changed. From then on, artists have been forced to consider the context in which their work is presented.

Likewise, there may have once been a time when a designer could be concerned only with what occurred within the borders of her cleverly composed layout. However, with the advent of interaction design and ubiquitous computing, that time is passing rapidly. (more…)