Design is at once personal and impersonal. Design is catalysed by, let’s face it, Bobby at Bobby’s car reselling business. Design works closely with business, and it’s not surprising that people like Nussbaum at BusinessWeek are excited about “design thinking”. At the same time, design is personal: driven by an intangible mix of the emotional and cerebral. No wonder there’s so much confusion on both business and design sides.

I’ve long respected Poynor as a writer and critic, and found his recent article (’Down with Innovation‘) in International Design Magazine troubling on one level, and on another, comforting. Comforting because he raises the value of what designers make. So why do I feel troubled? I’m not sure: perhaps because I feel he’s right, and perhaps because — in my gut — I feel threatened. I will never be able to completely separate myself from the thing he feels is making design, in a sense, impure. Poynor’s vision of a designer’s work is, after all, hard to live up to: “something brilliant and extraordinary that illuminates our perception of what human life can be”. Doesn’t that sound more like art?

Poynor’s views on design thinkers like Nussbaum are clear:

Poynor’s article has been described as cynical. My interpretation is that he is railing angrily against design that is degraded, stripped down, and tossed around as a funky new business toy. He’s railing against design that forgets both the original role of graphic designers and the “inherent intelligence” in the beauty of design. He simply doesn’t want to forget what design is (something tangible, an elegant book jacket design) with something airy, intangible, and transient (an elegant business strategy). So: “Give me something tangible, something brilliant and extraordinary that illuminates our perception of what human life can be. For that, we still need designers.”

“Making things look nice”, “stylizing”, “colouring in”. Design is often sneered at as trivial work. Apply whatever logical process to design you want. There is no framework or formula to arrive at a great design. I wouldn’t call it emotional and I wouldn’t call it cerebral — it’s a bit of both — and it’s definitely personal. The way I solve a design problem is totally different from the way another designer solves a problem. It is not easy work: I’m often tearing out my hair. In the end, I find myself in partial agreement with Poynor. Let’s not forget the aesthetic value of what we produce. Business moves on to the next goal; aesthetic value lasts. Who’s going to queue to see a business strategy in a museum in 2108, after all?

There’s more discussion about Poynor’s article at IxDA. Here it’s pointed out by a clever commentator that we shouldn’t confuse conscientious designers with those who believe “design is too important to be left to designers”.

Chris just sent me a link to this fascinating New York Magazine article on how young people are using the internet to build their identity online.

I was, to some extent, part of the phenomenon of exhibitionist, obsessively-self-documenting teens on Livejournal. I started off on Livejournal writing plain, dull, what-I-had-for-lunch journal entries (FYI, I now do this on Twitter).

As I connected with other Livejournal users, I realised that I could tailor my posts to garner more comments (the cherished stamp of popularity). Comments motivated my writing, and I wrote to amuse, entertain, and to provoke commentry. I enjoyed having readers who commented on my posts as much as I enjoyed writing the posts.

I wasn’t as as obsessed with it as some. Some contacts on Livejournal would document themselves with endless photographs. And then I remember a community popping up on Livejournal, sometime in 2003, called “Nonuglies”. To join this community, wannabe members were asked to submit a journal entry to the community featuring three photos of themselves. Existing members would then vote “yes” or “no” on whether the applicant was beautiful enough to be accepted to the site. After the board had cast their votes, they would be counted. Accepted members were officially “non-ugly”. Rejects were hounded off the site.

Nonuglies was incredibly cold, elitist, and nasty. The original community shut down after a few months, and was reborn in various guises. And at the time, Nonuglies was very popular: loved and hated in equal measure — a squirming petri-dish of human nature.

What’s really amazing to me is the levels of self-exhibitionism the internet allows. Livejournal gives teens a platform to write about their lives, and garner popularity from it. We have self-made YouTube stars (leading to real-life, six-figure TV contracts). We have people documenting their lives in visual minutiae on their Flickr photo accounts. Facebook allows people to build an entire persona. Chris Pirillo streams live from his desk 24/7.

Who’s watching all this? What motivates it?

The “invisible audience” is an interesting term and is brought up in the NY Magazine article linked above. It really is possible to be famous on the internet, and I think it’s the motivation to be seen that motivates this self-documentation. Teenagers in particular battle for a sense of individuality, and they are making use of these online tools to do it. Inhibition is overcome in the process. On one hand, this self-confidence is great; on the other, it could be self-sabotaging — for starters, Google might be unforgiving to the data-trail you left throughout your confused teenage years. Nevertheless: the desire for self-invention in young people is there; the internet has given them the tools.

Tim Berners-Lee says the web is in its infancy. We have only just begun to see how the internet is being used to overcome distance, share information, and connect people together. The future web, Sir Tim says, will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.

Whilst desktop and laptop computers have defined how we experience the web, I believe that the benefit of the web is best when you can use it anywhere. McGuire’s law is that the value of any product or service increases with its mobility.

So, the mobile web…

Mowser

In many ways, I think Mowser was a great idea. I also think that in many ways, Mowser missed the point. This is aknowledged by its creator, Russell Beattie, in his leaving letter, which was widely and wildly misinterpreted after it was published. Beattie’s leaving note, far from being doctor’s autopsy notes for the mobile web, is actually full of vision and hope for what the mobile web should be like.

In a way, it heralds the death of a certain kind of aenemic mobile web, and one we didn’t want in the first place. Mowser’s failure, although sad, should help to guide others working in the shaping the future of the mobile web:

It’s not the mobile web, it’s the web…?

The mobile web should exist as a term. But it should not refer to a different web. We can’t deny that how we access and use the “mobile” web is different from how we might use it at home. This does not refer just to the device that the web is viewed on; it refers also to what we use the web for.

We need to make mobile web experiences better. To do this, we need to try and identify how we use the web outside of our homes; and how this is different from how we use the web inside of our homes. E.g., we might not want to do intensive research whilst out shopping; but at home, we might meticulously research and compare reviews for a restaurant.

Despite this, we cannot, and definitely should not, separate the web we view on our laptop from the web we view on our mobile device. Tim Berners-Lee is vehemently opposed to .mobi domain names for this reason:

I was tagged by Dave. So, here it is. It’s my solemn vow not to publish anything like this again. I am not tagging anybody, so I’m breaking the rules.

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged

8 random things about me

1. I was once a furry. An anthropomorphic cat, to be specific, in the game Furcadia, where I was also on the game staff. I assure you that I was the innocent kind of furry who read Narnia as a kid, and didn’t fully understand all the implications of being a furry until quite recently.
2. I’m a pescetarian. I have been since I read ‘Diet for a New America‘ by John Robbins. This was in 2004. After reading the book I was vegan for a month. Then I visited a friend’s house where her mother made me a tuna baguette for dinner. I was too polite to say anything, so I ate it. That tuna baguette defined my eating habits since. I am grateful because I love fish, and I’m currently developing a taste for sushi. It helps me refrain from meat, by having a little of what I like.
3. After feelings of intense jealousy towards existing residents, I moved to Brighton (effusively self-documented). I fell in love with it much in the same way I fell in love with California in 2003: immediately and passionately. I love the breezy, laid-back atmosphere, the quirky cafes, the friendly people, the proximity to the sea, the sunshine. Ahhh…
   
4. I’m a word snob. I considered dropping out of my degree in graphic design to pursue a degree in English Literature. It didn’t make sense, but I luxuriated in the idea of lounging in libraries reading Shakespeare, Eliot, Joyce, Conrad, Dante, Proust, Goethe… and I still luxuriate in the idea. Written communication, whether in print or on screen, remains a major passion — perhaps, just perhaps, the medium as much as the message.
   
5. In a family of scientists, I’m an artist. My dad and grandfather are physicists. In one Christmas dinner I learned a considerable amount about how a spinning top remains spinning.
   
6. I have a high-frequency hearing loss and can hear men slightly better than women.
7. I had five consecutive pet hamsters, all imaginatively named Hammy, and all with distinct personalities.
   
8. Can I please stop now?