This text was written as part of my bachelor’s thesis. Ideas referring to the preceding text may therefore not always be clear.
In many commentaries on design we have favoured the thesis that design is best seen as a process and also as a kind of thinking. But if we ask what the thoughts of design thinking result in, we must undoubtedly say that in many fields of design the final stage of such thinking is a product. It is enough to look at industrial design or architecture as prototypical examples, where during the design process material is shaped into a future product. But what material do the fields whose results we find in the digital universe work with? In other words, what material do digital designers, among whom we count web designers as well as interaction designers, work with, and is it a necessity for them to know this material? The first question is easier to answer: the design material in the digital environment is code, that is, software. The second question requires a little reflection.
Requiring designers or artists to know their material is in no way controversial. Can we imagine an architect who does not know the properties of wood or glass? A painter-artist who cannot handle a brush and canvas? A professional musician without knowledge of the range and colours of the sounds his instrument produces? And what about, for example, the writer mentioned earlier, who has many ideas but cannot formulate them with the material of his medium — language? The expression of these fields is made possible by materials that are material in the obvious sense, but also in a more or less metaphorical one.
In both cases we find examples where knowledge of the material contributed significantly to the creativity of the field in question. One of the best-known examples is found in painting. The French post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat was very well acquainted with scientific research on colours and their perception. On the basis of his knowledge of what the laws of physics allow a painter to do when working with colours, Seurat redefined both the medium and the field itself. The highly innovative movement of pointillism was born.
A similar influence of science, albeit less well known and in many cases accessible only to students of linguistics, can be found in language as the writer’s material. The theories of the Czech scholars Vilém Mathesius and Jan Firbas contributed original ideas to general linguistics. It was the idea of “functional sentence perspective”, which was put forward by Mathesius in the first half of the 20th century and later reformulated and elaborated by Firbas (a detailed summary of this specialised topic can be found e.g. in Dušková). For lack of space to express our idea, it is enough to note that the work of the scholars mentioned above drew attention to the fact that the order of words in a sentence is not random; rather, in standard sentence constructions that are not emotionally coloured we find the phenomenon of FSP (functional sentence perspective, the English translation of the Czech “funkční větná perspektiva”), which shows that words are ordered in such a way that the further from the beginning of the sentence they occur, the greater the informational value they carry. In the sentence “Petr včera přišel domů pozdě” (Petr came home late yesterday), the most important piece of information the speaker conveys is thus that Petr came home late. If a writer wants to express to his readers that it was not yesterday that Petr came home late, but on Monday, he can structure the sentence like this: “Petr pozdě domů přišel v pondělí” (it was on Monday that Petr came home late), or he could add: “nikoli včera” (not yesterday). Both sentences contain the same words, yet their order emphasises entirely different information.
Despite the necessary simplification of this complex linguistic phenomenon, we have shown that a deep knowledge of the material/medium can contribute positively to our expression and at the same time to our creativity. But how does knowledge of code, as a material, show itself in the work of a digital designer?
Every medium has its inherent characteristics, which limit what expressive elements can be used. A characteristic property of the old media, in the form of newspapers and books, is their anchoring in time and their static nature. New media, of which the web platform is an exemplary instance, are interactive by virtue of their properties. If a designer wanted to carry his know-how over from the old media to the new, he risks being significantly limited by the conventions of the old media; he will not be able to use the full potential of the medium he is designing for; he will not think about the fact that new media offer flexibility of display, automation of their parts and the interactivity already mentioned. We can regard knowledge of the material as another “lens” of our metaphorical creative Occam’s razor, through which we see which solutions make sense for a given medium and are worth spending time on, and which, conversely, discards ideas that are wholly unsuitable, technically impossible and thereby also useless. Let us recall that one of the definitions of creativity is that creative solutions are useful. Which once again confirms that knowledge of the material supports our creativity.
The material of new media is code; it is their DNA. Code was and is traditionally understood as the domain of programmers and software engineers. The difference between the designer and the programmer is further amplified by the difference in their worldview, in their epistemology (Lindell, p. 1). After the analysis of theoretical approaches to design, it is fitting to describe the difference between these professions by saying that programmers and software engineers solve well-structured problems.(Lindell, p. 1)
In their book Thoughtful Interaction Design, Löwgren and Stolterman describe digital technology as a material without qualities. At first sight such a definition may seem incomprehensible to us: digital technology, new media and code clearly do have properties, which to a great extent define what operations, what actions, of what shape they can achieve. The authors justify their idea by saying that digital technology changes so often that the properties we now consider entirely essential to it may change completely in the future thanks to technological innovations and upheavals.
Yes, digital technologies really are changing rapidly; thanks to Moore’s law we even know relatively precisely how fast. But we consider this position unfortunate and, philosophically speaking, needlessly sceptical. Not only technology, but everything around us changes with time. A person just after birth looks noticeably different from their eighty-year-old self, yet we do not see people renaming themselves because of their wrinkles. Or let us look at one of many technologies: the web platform. The web, too, looks very different from the moment when Tim Berners-Lee first launched the first version of this platform on his NeXT server. We have doubts as to whether material without qualities is a suitable term. Is it not true that the very fact that digital technologies change is one of their properties? It seems to us that the adjective fluid, for example, captures the property of digital technologies, new media and code much better.
For practical and educational needs it is necessary to define and examine the properties of technologies. Even though they often change, in order to be able to say how they change over time, we need to know their previous state. Fortunately, the influential theorist Lev Manovich agrees with us; he chose to define new media as numerically representable, modular, automatable, variable and capable of transcoding (recoding). The web platform automatically has these properties as well, and that is why we will examine them in the section The Web as a New Medium.
Knowledge of code as a material has direct consequences for the practice of web designers. The web platform is interactive. We have said that prototyping should be part of every serious design process, for prototypes offer an ideal way of working iteratively on a design problem. If designing for the web requires interactivity, designers should ask themselves whether paper prototypes, or any static prototypes, are really the suitable ones. We have described design as an argument with the design (wicked) problem. If the design problem requires interactivity, it should also be part of our argument. Schön claimed that design activity contains a great deal of “tacit”, “unspoken” knowledge, which we use only directly in action, while shaping and handling the material; he believed that design is a “conversation with the materials of a situation”. (Lindell)
We are aware of the objection that immediately arises against the need to know code and to be able to work with it: there are many prototyping software programs that make it possible to design interactive prototypes, and even whole pages, without the designer having the slightest knowledge of code. Yes, that is certainly true. If we stay with the web platform alone, we must turn to the author of this argument and ask: does he really want to design for a platform that is open and that profits from its openness, since potentially every good idea of today can become the official implementation of tomorrow? Does he really want his design process to be only as good as his auxiliary tools allow it to be?
Our argument rests on exactly the same logic with which, in May 2010, Steve Jobs addressed the whole technology world with his thoughts on the Flash platform and the reason why Apple prefers the new web technologies HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. As the main argument for why Apple devices do not support Flash, Jobs writes:
“We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.” (Jobs, 2010)
Jobs continues:
“If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.”(Jobs, 2010)
If we look at the present state of Flash technology and of the web platform, we know that Steve Jobs was right. Moreover, Adobe, the owner of Flash technology, has itself acknowledged this fact and today, paradoxically, offers some of the best and most sophisticated tools for building the web with the help of the technologies that Steve Jobs gave preference to many years ago.
Auxiliary tools are useful only for as long as they make us creative. As soon as we submit to them and become slaves who depend on one and the same solution merely out of “habit”, we stop being creative, we stop being designers, and if creativity is an inherent human property (see Chomsky), we also stop being, to a certain degree, human. That is why we are convinced that for digital designers knowledge of code, and for web designers knowledge of the whole web platform, is important and unavoidable.
This line of thought has a negative impact on the profession that in the field of web development is called “HTML coders”. These are the people who are in charge of converting a graphic design into code. If the designer becomes a coder himself (and everything suggests so), what place is left for this occupation? We fear that, unless they change the way they look at their work, they will become a redundant component of the web team. They will meet a fate similar to the one through which the occupation of typesetters of printed matter ceased to exist. Technology made their painstaking and beautiful work irrelevant. How can HTML coders avoid the same fate?
We believe that the first step is the need to reformulate the activity in which they work and create. Their knowledge is valuable, and it is often HTML coders who come up with ways to use the latest web technologies and functionalities. On their side, it is necessary to start understanding their activity not as a mechanical transformation into code (the designers themselves will take care of that, since their prototypes will already exist “in code”, or, for less creative purposes, they will use one of the many available programs for so-called drag and drop prototyping and design), but as a field of creative consultants and technical “evangelists”, who will have the most up-to-date information about what the web platform can do. We might then see that the place of HTML coders will not be in offices at text editors, but at conferences, where, to the sounds of the audience’s surprise and delight, they will demonstrate creative uses of the latest functionalities of HTML, CSS and Javascript and how to use them to create more aesthetically appealing and more user-focused web design. It is one of the ways to stay relevant in the economy of the 21st century. Otherwise they will most likely become victims of the globalised information society, where well-structured problems are outsourced or automated.
Vilém Flusser writes in his essay Alfanumerická společnost (The Alphanumeric Society):
“At first, the writing and reading of letters was the privilege of a ruling minority, and then it spread ever further. (…) That is why those who master reading and writing have not only a historical but also a mathematical consciousness; one must therefore speak of an alphanumeric society. From the Renaissance onwards, mathematical thinking begins to emancipate itself from historical thinking; numbers leave the alphanumeric code in order to become independent as a new code. A new elite arises that thinks in mathematical-formal terms… The reading of letters (…) becomes a superfluous luxury” (Flusser, 2013, p. 81)
Code, on the contrary, is becoming an unavoidable necessity. And that is another, let us say economic, reason to take this fluid material of digital design seriously.
Sources:
DUŠKOVÁ,. 2005. From the Heritage of Vilém Mathesius and Jan Firbas: Syntax in the Service of FSP. In: Theory and Practice in English Studies 3: Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies. Brno, Masarykova univerzita. Also available at: http://www.phil.muni.cz/plonedata/wkaa/Offprints%20THEPES%203/TPES%203%20(007-023)%20Duskova.pdf
LINDELL, Rikard. 2012. Code as Design Material. In: POLD, Soren (ed.), Olav W. BERTELSEN (ed.), Jacob BUUR (ed.) and Ellen (ed.). Participatory Materialities Invited Workshop and Symposium at Aarhus University. Also available at: http://www.es.mdh.se/publications/2465-
LÖWGREN, Jonas and Erik STOLTERMAN. 2004. Thoughtful interaction design: a design perspective on information technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, xiii, 198 p. ISBN 02-621-2271-5.
JOBS, Steve. 2010. Thoughts on Flash [online]. [cited 2015-05-11]. Available at: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
FLUSSER, Vilém. 2013. Alfanumerická společnost. In: BABÁK, Petr. Proto: grafický design a současné umění. Prague: tranzit.cz, pp. 73-81. ISBN 978-80-87259-22-1.