Category Archives: Design

I think I’ve mentioned before that I believe I have a non-verbal learning disability. Self-diagnosed, but I don’t need to be a trained child psychologist to know that I’m unusually clumsy, get easily disoriented and confused in unfamiliar surroundings (I have some great stories about getting lost! and by great I mean they range from kind of terrifying to super-embarrassing-but-we-laugh-about-it-now), have a very poor visual memory but a great auditory memory, and trouble with non-verbal social cues. I can’t tell you about what my motor skills development was like when I was young, but I was definitely verbally precocious, and my social skills used to be lot worse than they are now. I also can remember having a lot of trouble understanding what the point of some stories were, even when I could easily read all the words.

So here I am trying to make my way as an interaction designer, which requires a certain proficiency with visual communication. I wouldn’t say that I have trouble coming up with design ideas, but sometimes you really need to be able to sketch them out in order to communicate them to someone else, and that can be a problem. And a whole lot of people like to write books about how everyone can draw, you just have to develop the right ways of seeing and stop being critical of yourself, practice until you get better, etc, etc. But I have yet to see a single piece of advice on drawing or sketching that addressed what I think of as my major obstacles: remembering what I see, and visualizing what I’ve never seen. I’ve taken art classes and made plenty of competent if not beautiful sketches of a thing that I could look at; looking at what’s in front of me and getting that on paper is not my problem. My problem is standing at a whiteboard trying to draw the visual form of something that is in my head as words and feelings and abstractions. My problem is trying to remember which way the lines of perspective go for a building and not realizing I’m wrong until I’ve produced something not just ugly but unrecognizable.

So I’m trying to develop my own kind of “learn to draw” system that focuses on improving my visual memory and getting to the point where I can reliably visualize and then produce simple, common shapes and items to build up a sketch of the kinds of things I’ll need to be able to draw. In the past two years I’ve filled a lot of sketchbook pages with funny-looking cartoon hands, let me tell you.

For the visual memory exercises, what I do is look for a photograph on flickr or something with high-contrast shapes and areas that I could recognizably reproduce in sketch form. I spend time studying the photograph, trying to take note of basic shapes, proportions, angles, that sort of thing. Then I look away from it and sketch what I can see of the photograph in my memory. Or at least, I’m hoping to work up to that. Right now what I do is I look away from the computer screen, draw a few lines, try to remember another area of the photograph and give up and look back. But I always leave a little time in between looking away and starting to draw, so that I’m never simultaneously drawing and referencing the image. One recent attempt began with emo pony, and produced this:

I’m also reading various “how to draw” books, but the usefulness of the advice to my situation varies. I know how to draw circles and squares and triangles, yes. I know it is possible to put them all together to make more complicated shapes. I know how to carefully study a thing in front of me and separate the shortcuts and tricks of my visual processing system from what the thing literally looks like, in order to accurately draw what’s there instead of what I think I see. None of this really helps if I need to draw a cat real quick and I can’t remember what a cat looks like well enough to decompose it into smaller shapes that another person would then also recognize as a cat. What I want is to develop a simplified, cartoon visual of a cat that I can remember and reproduce reliably. That’s where a book like Ed Emberley’s Make a World comes in. All of Ed Emberley’s drawing books consist of step-by-step instructions for building little cartoon objects out of simple shapes. And it’s not like all those how to draw books where they show you how to sketch in a bunch of circles and curvy lines and whatever and then ink in a ton of details and erase all the pencil lines. You know, like this:

With Ed, you just keep adding simple shapes until they all make up the final shape. And so far, it’s been fun! I can definitely follow the directions to sketch cute little cartoon cars and horses and chairs and stuff. And mostly, if I concentrate, I don’t screw it up too badly. Here’s what a couple days of going through the book and choosing objects to draw has produced:

The next step I think will be making this approach to drawing something that I can replicate without having the book open in front of me. Which could be interesting, what with the poor visual memory and all. I might add it to my daily photo drawing exercise. Perhaps after I return the book to the library I’ll go back to the drawings I’ve made, choose one object, study the shapes that it’s made of and then try to recreate it without looking.

The next step after that of course is to be able to come up with my own simple cartoon versions of objects, just based on knowing a thing I want to draw. I’m not sure whether that is an achievable long-term goal or not. Feel free to reassure me on this point, but if you don’t know firsthand what it’s like to get lost on your way to a classroom that you successfully found the previous three weeks, you’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical.

If you do have an NVLD and want to tell me stories about how you managed to improve your visual memory and spatial reasoning skills, please do! Please.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine shared a link to this article about video games and art. It’s long, but worth a read, if it’s something you care about. Or even if it’s not; I’m more comfortable talking about art from a sociological than a philosophical perspective, and I’m not much invested in the question of whether or not video games qualify. But I am interested in media theory and the aforementioned sociological implications of things like art and video games – and this is one of the most thought-provoking pieces I’ve read in some time.

I thought a lot about the kinds of aesthetic experiences I look for from different kinds of media, and whether or not they’re “art.” Moriarty spends a fair amount of time kind of talking around his definition of art, until he finally pulls out the Schopenhauer. I honestly have no idea whether or not I agree with that definition, it’s so far from the way I approach my life and my cultural consumption that I just kind of squint and shrug. It does remind me of Buddhism though, which makes me wonder whether Moriarty would agree that Buddhist meditation is art. Is anything that gets you closer to giving up desire and imposing your will on the world a kind of art, or is there maybe some other unspoken component to the definition here?

But I’m actually a lot more interested in the definition of art implied by his definition of kitsch – since Moriarty is clear that kitsch is not sublime art, anything that kitsch is, art must not be. And as I agree completely with just about everything Moriarty says about kitsch (I would just add some comments about kitsch’s role in things like shared meaning-making and social signifiers – the lines between high and low art, and the very idea of high art as something that’s “good for you” are fraught with class implications), I find it a lot more productive than contemplating philosophy about the essential nature of human existence in the universe.

so, point by point:

1) “Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.”

Fine art then, must be either not highly emotionally charged – and it seems unlikely that either Ebert or Moriarty would agree that dull art is good art – or its emotions must not be “stock” emotions. The feelings are complicated, and particular, rather than necessarily universal. Small digression re: “universal:” plenty of people declare that great literature touches on universal human concerns, but I’ve found just as many people use declarations like that to exclude literature written by people not like them as not “universal enough” for true greatness. It’s easy to call a work “universal” if it reflects back at you the world you see every day rather than presenting a view of the world you’ve never experienced. That doesn’t mean it will actually speak to the experiences of everyone who might read it. I want better words for what the “universal” sentiment is trying to express about great art.

At any rate, this first characteristic of kitsch suggests that art necessarily involves some level of emotional judgment on the part of the consumer. It should not be immediately obvious to the intended audience how they ought to feel about various objects and themes in the work.

2) “The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.”

There are no tricks, metaphors, or symbolism. “There’s never any doubt about what it is you’re looking at. It’s a leprechaun, and only a leprechaun. It’s Santa Claus, and only Santa Claus.” So, objects depicted in art may not always be what they seem – they might be used as stand-ins for some other object or idea that the artist wants to comment on. It takes careful study, and a certain level of familiarity with the range of ideas the artist is drawing on, to find other possible meanings for a piece of art.

3) “(and most important) Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.”

This is the most important aspect for me, too. With most of the books I read (I spend a lot more time consuming novels than I do most visual art or movies, so this is my basic frame of reference for questions of artistic virtue), I know going into it what I’m going to get out of it. The pieces I expect line up in the ways I expect, with the outcomes I expect. Not in all details, that would be too boring to be enjoyable, but the outlines are familiar. It’s entertainment, to pass the time or to help me relax. But then sometimes I want something different from a book than to be comforted or made happy. So then I read something else – Nabokov, or Garcia Marquez, or Helen De Witt’s The Last Samurai (no connection to the movie. also, read it!). Or one of Ursula Le Guin’s “great” novels, like The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed.

When I read one of these books, I want several things. Primarily, I want to be changed. I want to come out of the reading experience seeing something differently, thinking about it differently, feeling about it differently. While I read, I want to be able to stop and feel the contours of my mind shifting. The other thing I want is a kind of richness, and layering of meaning, that means if I come back to the book later, that I will see it differently. The shifting happens all over again, because of the other changes that have happened to me since the last time I read it.

And I can’t really think of any video games that have given me those kinds of experiences. I am what you might call a “casual gamer,” but I live with the other kind and have certainly seen quite a few video games being played. I guess playing lots of first-person shooters might change me, but not in a way I’d particularly like. The closest I’ve ever come to this artistic experience from a game is don’t shoot the puppy. Playing it was a surprisingly intense emotional experience for me, that became almost meditative. The fact that don’t shoot the puppy is fundamentally about inaction does suggest a certain support for Moriarity’s argument, but it’s just one data point.

I did play Braid, one of the games frequently put forward as a candidate for art, and while playing it definitely stretched my brain, it stretched it the same way solving a difficult programming problem does, not the way, say, Borges does. Somehow I don’t think Moriarty’s definition is what Donald Knuth means by art.

TL;DR: Here’s a song about art

You don’t have to go very deep into interaction design to find a lot of people throwing around the word “intuitive.” A lot of people talk about the importance of intuitiveness as a design goal, and praise particular products for being intuitive. Search Boxes and Arrows for the word “intuitive” and all kinds of examples come up. What hardly anyone talks about is what they mean by “intuitive.” There’s a kind of general understanding of that as “easy to use/figure out,” someone can sit down and start to use the interface without any special training or guidance, and this is regarded as a good thing.

But at one point when I was pretty fed up with empty praise for “intuitive” interfaces without any real analysis of a design, and armed with Jeffrey Bardzell’s admonitions that meaning does not exist in things, but in people, I started thinking more about this whole “intuitive” business and becoming more dissatisfied with it. Because, of course, objects are not inherently “intuitive” all by themselves, sitting in a vacuum of objective analysis. Intuitiveness, like meaning, lies in people, not products. Because when you get down to it, all “intuitive” means is “familiar.” I don’t have to learn anything new with an interface when it relies entirely on things I’ve already learned. And sure, sometimes that’s a good thing. But sometimes it’s not. And of course when I was doing my blogger homework for this post I found that Jef Raskin said it all better than me 15 years ago, or else this post might have been quite a bit longer.

I do have some more thoughts on the term that Raskin doesn’t cover in that article, though. For one thing, the use of “intuitive” like it’s a property a designer can give a thing through their own skill and that it will have forever, masks the central importance of the user’s experience to the concept. And for a discipline that claims to be human-centered, that’s maybe not the best thing for a popular and important term to do. Which is not to say that everyone who’s used the term has forgotten that they’re tailoring a product to their users, or that using it is a sign you’re not being “human-centered” enough, or whatever. Anyone who is doing user research as part of a design process is presumably aware that they need to target a particular group of people with particular experience and abilities. But it can be easy to get careless and stop paying enough attention to those particulars when you say “I want this product to be intuitive” or “It’s not intuitive enough.”

But we all understand the concept of “familiar” to be rooted in a specific person’s experience. You can’t just say “this thing is familiar” and expect anyone to believe that the object in question has this inherent quality of familiarity. The implication is that the thing is familiar to you, and if that’s not what you meant, it immediately raises questions: familiar to whom? under what circumstances? These questions are always important to a user-centered design, and speaking in terms of familiarity rather than intuitiveness keeps the importance of the user explicit.

I confess I still haven’t been making anything very interesting. In the past week and a half I flew to Seattle and back so I would have someone to kiss on New Year’s Eve. We came up with many creative and delicious ways to use homemade cranberry sauce, that’s something I guess. Work on my portfolio redesign continues very slowly. Trying to modify someone else’s HTML templates and CSS is more frustrating than I had anticipated.

In the meantime, last night I was talking to my dad about various things, including school, and he asked me if I have been keeping up with psychology research.

My initial thought was “not really,” but I follow the British Psychological Society’s blog, and I subscribe to the RSS feed for several APA journals, so every so often I skim over many boring abstracts I don’t always understand (I should probably just give up on Behavioral Neuroscience). And I have a network of peers who also serve as a sort of informal filter of interesting stuff coming out of the HCI community. So if any interaction design-relevant breakthroughs show up, I might not be the first to know, but I’d find out pretty quickly.

Pondering this led me to the question of what are the areas we know least about, where basic psychological research seems most likely to impact what I do? The basics of things like sensation and perception, cognitive load, and memory are fairly well understood to the extent that it matters to computer software design, so barring any massive paradigm shift there, I don’t think cognition or perception research are going to produce much in the way of game-changing knowledge. Social psychology is a little murkier, but also correspondingly less directly relevant to interaction design. Relevant, of course, but not necessarily directly informing interface decisions like “what color should I make this button?” or “what’s the best way for someone to access this function?” the way knowledge of the principles of visual perception or understanding cognitive overload might. It’s more that there are many things to know about understanding people’s behavior and how to influence it that designers should keep in mind, and social psychology offers one perspective on that.

So…what do I think will help most directly? Attention control, I think, is a big one. We basically understand how the brain processes sensory signals, and have some fuzzy but useful ideas about how those sensations become meaningful perceptions. But humans are just bombarded with sensations all the time, and we only become consciously aware of a small fraction of them. We don’t understand so well how or why a person ends up attending to the particular signals they do, and we know very little about helping people to manage their attention. There are graphic design principles intended to direct attention on a printed page, but many of them are inadequate to a messy, changing, multimedia interactive environment.

Maybe we never will understand attention in a way that can offer simple and concrete guidelines, we do know that what an individual attends to in a particular situation is influenced by many complex factors, both personal and environmental, and most of which are out of the control of a designer. Still, there is a great deal about attention management we do not know, and it seems to me like a good source of knowledge that would help designers create better products.