Presented by: Dan Willis – Sapient – dan@dswillis.com
Dan cites Harry Potter and Washington Post as “Print in Disguise” because it relies on the headline format, and the site navigation is hidden and the sites just look like a shiny print brochure that has been adapted. He argues that everything we know about web design is just everything that we know about print design.
It took artists about 30 years to figure out the medium well enough to take it and do something totally different with it. He cites George Mellies’ Trip to the Moon, and how it is merely recorded stage drama—the camera is fixed, the settings look like stage props, the acting is very much like stage drama. Dan cites Birth of a Nation as one of the first films that really did something bold and radical with the medium of film making—different camera angles, cuts between scenes, narrative dialogue, and really just creating the grammar of film. The point is, the technology didn’t change much, but the way film makers used the technology changed (different camera angles provide different types of emotions, cutting back and forth between scenes builds tension, etc).
We need to figure out “the grammar of transcendent web design”.
Random Voyerism (eg – Flickrvision, Found Magazine)
Flickrvision – A program that a dude made in his spare time that pulls Flickr images as they are posted, and plots them geographically. Plays at people’s voyeuristic tendencies, and their desire to see
Found Magazine – A shortcut directly to people’s hearts and minds.
Self Aware Content
Data is getting smarter and smarter all of the time—it has become self-aware but uncontrollable content, it knows more about itself due to meta data. There is a shift in power, from author to reader and from authority to popularity (eg – Google-bombing “miserable failure = George W. Bush”).
User-Created Context
The web is about a single user and the choices that they make. If you try to force them into anything, the customers tend to rebel. The user has control of the mouse and they aren’t going to surrender it.
Ambient Awareness (twitter diminishing peoples lives to 100 words or less)
Twitter = micro-blogging. The individual pieces are not something meaningful. Ambient Awareness is a psychological term that basically equates each Tweet to one dot in a pointillist painting.
Experiential Content
A roller coaster’s content is not the tracks and struts that hold that roller coaster together, there is something else going on there—it is about the experience, and the experience is the content.
It is important to build the relationship, to design the pieces that are going to start this relationship.
Relate the meta data every day so that your data becomes more and more powerful with each day.
Design is not about looking pretty, look and feel is not helpful from either side (designers do the “look and feel” thing, and non-designers say that designers do the “look and feel” thing). Visual design is a means to an end. Design solves problems once they have been identified. When do you get design involved? In the beginning with everything else. Everything is compartmentalized like TV Dinners (interaction design, info design, visual design, information architecture). New web is more like Jambalaya (lots of different ingredients that you know individually, but after you cook it each part is indistinguishable but it tastes amazing). Individuals need to talk as a smart guy in the room, rather than a weighted opinion—there should be a seesaw effect when it comes to actual expertise and how the opinion of that expertise is weighed.
Tips for transcendent web design
- Organize cross-discipline teams—exploit and protect expertise
- Design for specific users and their specific needs
- Embrace your ignorance
- Don’t be distracted by business models that don’t begin and end with the user
- Don’t be distracted by technology (the “new twitter” or the “new ebay” don’t matter, they are not the ultimate solution because they aren’t new solutions)
- Don’t be distracted by failure (you will fail and fail quickly, learn from it and move forward quickly)
Post a Comment