Category: design

Phone Gender: It’s Aphrodite In A Mini-Skirt

Published December 1, 2009 by cgerrish

AphroditePan

Driving across town the other day, I heard a Droid phone ad on the radio. The ad compared Droid’s capabilities to that of a relentless robot that accomplished tasks with power, speed and an implied ruthless inhuman amorality. And then there was a line that revealed a little more than was probably intended. Although in this day and age, it seems impossible that an unconscious thought could slip through in an advertisement. The radio ad states that the Droid isn’t:

Aphrodite in a miniskirt

For those of you keeping score at home, in Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the Goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. The phrase in the commercial is obviously referencing Apple’s iPhone. It appears that the gender of the iPhone is decidedly female.

In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture. According to Hesiod, she was born when Uranus (the father of the gods) was castrated by his son Cronus. Cronus threw the severed genitals into the ocean which began to churn and foam about them. From the aphros (“sea foam”) arose Aphrodite, and the sea carried her to either Cyprus or Cythera. Hence she is often referred to as Kypris and Cytherea. Homer calls her a daughter of Zeus and Dione.

After her birth, Zeus was afraid that the gods would fight over Aphrodite’s hand in marriage so he married her off to the smith god Hephaestus, the steadiest of the gods. He could hardly believe his good luck and used all his skills to make the most lavish jewels for her. He made her a girdle of finely wrought gold and wove magic into the filigree work. That was not very wise of him, for when she wore her magic girdle no one could resist her, and she was all too irresistible already. She loved gaiety and glamour and was not at all pleased at being the wife of sooty, hard-working Hephaestus.

Apparently, compared to the Droid, the iPhone could be considered pretty, sexy even, but not very serious or useful. The iPhone is merely a decorative female. In the myth the Droid might be compared to Hephaestus, the husband selected for Aphrodite by Zeus. Although Hephaestus had emotions, and the Droid, as a robot, lacks them. A cursory glance at the communications sheath surrounding the Droid pegs it squarely as a teenage boy infatuated with science fiction. Due to his inexperience with the female of the species, Droid manufactures a fantasy that assigns the female a particular role within the science fiction narrative it inhabits.

In a follow up commercial, the iPhone is described as a:

Tiara-wearing, digitally clueless, beauty pageant queen

At this point, it’s fairly clear that Droid doesn’t have a date to the school prom and feels contempt for the social set. Droid will show the world that geeks are cool, that math and science rule. That being popular shouldn’t be based on how you look, how many friends you have or your sense of style— but rather on how many mechanical pencils you can fit into your pocket protector.

iphone_beautypagent

iphone_princess

Now, take a look at Google and Apple and think about what this narrative says about the respective companies. Apple has spent a long time developing its corporate messaging. Google has never had to. The Droid ads are an interesting view into the unconscious wishes of the Google corporation. In an age where becoming an adult is optional, Google could embrace this awkward teenage geeky science fiction persona for a good long time.

Nutty_Professor01

But deep down, the Google Droid is using all its powers to search for that potion that will turn the Nutty Professor into Buddy Love. And then thanks to science (fiction), that mini-skirt wearing Aphrodite beauty queen will find him irresistible.

6 Comments

Ornamentation: The Beauty of Search

Published September 27, 2009 by cgerrish

It began with a discussion of ornamentation. As we look around us, the ornament seems to be disappearing. The things we use have been stripped of ornamentation in favor of pure functionality. Form, we are taught, must follow function. Decoration is an unnecessary expense, as it adds nothing to the function of a manufactured thing. Ornament has lost the battle of Return on Investment.

It wasn’t always so, there was a distinct turn. Alain De Botton, in his book “The Architecture of Happiness” explores the moment when engineering and aesthetics collided.

“The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominanace in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution.”

These engineers were building the factories, bridges and railways that would provide the infrastructure for the industrial age. Style simply wasn’t a consideration.

“The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott.

The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.”

In 1923, Le Corbusier penned a book called ‘Toward a New Architecture‘ which outlined the principles of this new approach to the design of buildings. Again, from De Botton’s book:

For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture — meaning, architecture movtivated by the quest for efficiency — was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

And with that prelude, we arrive at the web search engine and the use and meaning of ornament. There’s an interesting experiment currently being conducted called Blind Search. The creators of this test wonder what happens to a user’s perception of search results when all branding is removed. Google initially established itself by producing noticeably better search results. Now, established as a verb meaning “to search,” does Google still provide results that are visibly superior? The results indicate that Google still leads, but not by as much as you’d think: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. And putting the Google brand on any search results increases satisfaction.

In looking at the design of the Google user interface, we see the influence of Le Corbusier. The typographic logo is the only design on the page, and occasionally it is playfully re-imagined to commemorate notable events. Here, form follows function.

In his book, De Botton tries to articulate how we find beauty— the mechanics of what attracts us:

“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally are deficient. We respect style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.”

While we may perceive the Network as vast, complex and opaque— with its simplicity Google’s design provides us with the antidote. Now look at this image of Microsoft’s Bing home page:

Bing’s user interface is decorated with a background image that gives a sense of what it does. I’m fairly certain that the image has no effect on the quality of the search results. Bing is attempting to provide a usage model for the consumption of faceted search results. Queries return both potential facets along with the traditional list of links. Bing is designed with both facets and links in mind, while Google appends facets to the bottom of the link list.

As the facets and links that search engines return become more and more indistinguishable, what is the difference that will make a difference? One could assume that there will always be an engineering innovation right around the corner that will make a significant and visible difference. We like to believe that progress is always linear.

Corporate brand clearly makes a difference, users like a brand name search product. Microsoft’s brand has been held in the background and a new brand has been established. Images have also been used to distinguish Bing. Ornamentation has been exiled for so long, it’s hard to understand how to even value it.

Let’s return again to Alain De Botton:

The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worth wile — which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of the good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forthrightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.

Le Corbusier’s aesthetic demanded design be “ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.” He had a hatred of any kind of decoration. Google’s engineering aesthetic is a terminal design. Any competitor employing a purely functional design will unintentionally be referencing Google. There’s no way to get radically simpler than Google, and therefore no way to create enough space to allow for differentiation. The only alternative is to move back into ornament, into the decorative, into beauty.

While we may think of computerized search of the internet as a purely functional affair of ONEs and ZEROs, the simple lists of links are being pulled into organic forms by their facets. Human forms of life are surfacing in and through our search queries. Search results will begin to bloom into something that looks much more like a natural form than points and lines in a frictionless space. This moment may mark another turning point…

Comments closed

The (TV) Guide is Broken: And Now Everything is TV

Published September 13, 2009 by cgerrish

There’s an old joke that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. But more and more, it seems like everything is happening at once.

Where television channels used to offer one program at a time, one after the other, laid out along a time line, now there are an infinite number of channels. To the extent that programming is recorded, or recorded live for broadcast, it can be tuned in on demand. Programs don’t need to unravel at a particular time on a schedule anymore. We’ve entered the era of random access; everyone can be watching different shows on the same channel— because it’s the watching that is the channel, not the broadcasting.

Live broadcasts used to be so labor and infrastructure intensive that it wasn’t possible to go live with more than one signal. Many broadcasters now emit multiple signals—different mixes and playlists of programming.

Assume for a moment that broadcast video/audio will move entirely to the internet—the new Network. How will you know what’s on? When everything that exists is on at the same time—how do you choose? This problem is similar to deciding which book to check out from a public library. The selection set you walk into the library with doesn’t include every book on the shelves.

I hate cable television listings because they present everything equally in a grid. And, of course, this is Comcast’s product—I understand that TiVo is much better. The schedule of programs knows nothing about me, therefore it presents everything in the equivalent of a comma separated value file with sub-primitive tools to work with the data. Everyone gets the same bad listing of a 1000 streams. There’s a sense in which this is the same problem users have with RSS readers and Twitter streams. Rolling cable television listings look disturbingly like an RSS or Twitter stream. They’re a linear representation of simultaneous data.

The suggested solution isn’t really a solution. It’s simply the acceptance that you’ll miss things that would be valuable for you to see. It’s noted that since you can’t completely consume a multivalent, multi-threaded real-time stream, instead you must simply jump in from time to time. When you jump out, you miss what you miss— and that’s okay. As with phone calls, if it’s important, they’ll call back.

With so much programming simultaneously available, its value is significantly reduced. Experiencing something and not experiencing it have a roughly equivalent value. This corresponds to the idea: The more information, the less significant information is. The less information, the more significant it is. Philip Roth put it this way: in Eastern Europe (before the fall of the wall) nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.

More and more we live in simultaneous time with links that provide us with random access to an almost infinite number of connections. The index was the first tool that was attempted, but the map could not keep up with the rapid growth of the territory. The search engine using a citation algorithm was the next tool. This would be a welcome method to discover when a program was on, when a program with an actor was on, when a program by a writer was on. More complex queries would enable more advanced discovery.

Why did the girl throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.

But as we live in simultaneous time so do the things that we experience. As McLuhan noted, everything has become television, streams of text, video and audio sensory data. We aren’t matching the grid of our daily schedule to a grid of programming. The grid is an artifact of linear time. The selection set in simultaneous time doesn’t contain everything, it emerges from a swarming micro-community in real time. The infinite universe is bounded by the social graph, but it expands into infinity through six degrees of separation.

The new guide leverages the swarm, the social graph, the real time network and track. So, what’s on?

Comments closed

The End of Architecture

Published June 26, 2009 by cgerrish

It was when the web site entered its Baroque era that the job description of the information architect seemed to crystallize. The ornamentation decorating the dizzying heights, the complex taxonomies of categories, and various drawers into which content was stuffed, all this required the vigilant organizational skills of the architect. The web site seemed to pattern itself on the design of the altar of a Baroque Cathedral. Information organized for the greater glory of the product. The value of the space radiating out from the home page expressing the theology of the brand. The adjoining chapels and the stories of the saints told in shards of glass extend the value proposition. User-centered design assumed the supplicant wished to have the most useful experience of prostration before the brand.

Room after room was added to the structure, each cleverly tucked into some classification that related it to the whole. Of course, while all of the rooms were smartly decorated, there was almost no foot traffic. The monitors of the brand wander the halls, peeking in to the this room and that one, checking to see whether dust is accumulating. The small portion of the structure that attracted use and generated revenue serves as a keystone to the entire surrounding architecture.

Wikipedia, for the moment, has this to say about architecture:

Architecture (from Greek word ἀ�?χιτεκτονική – arkhitektonike) is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use. A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding context (see town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture) to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture and hardware. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system.

The reason that the Baroque era of web design signals the end of architecture, is not that the task is complete. Nor is it that another style, Bauhaus, for example, will replace the previous style. Architecture is an art and discipline that organizes things in physical space. The Network is not a physical space. When we speak of it as a space, we project attributes on to a blank screen. Doc Searls talks about the Giant Zero, the idea that the distance between endpoints on the Network is zero. In the manifesto he wrote with David Weinberger, World of Ends, he describes the thoughts sparked by Craig Burton:

When Craig Burton describes the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.

Even this description relies on a spacial metaphor. If there’s no distance between the startpoint and an endpoint, why do we talk of starting and ending at all? What are these points that have no distance between them? We gut the history and most resonant qualities of a word, and then persist in using it as a tool for thought. We ask what are the qualities of the space of the Network? What’s the most user-centered approach to building out a site in that space?

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
– Ludwig Wittengenstein

The end of architecture doesn’t mean the end of thinking about the Network, or standing up new nodes of connection. It’s only that we stand at the edge of our language and words come slowly. Rather than looking for an external model out in the world, perhaps we should look for an internal one. Or something that stands at the threshhold between the two: Language itself might serve as a point of departure.

Comments closed