Here are some ideas I found especially interesting in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design in the first chapter, which gives insights into the birth of modern design in around 1900. This period of 1880–1930 was a fascinating and turbulent time for the arts (the influence of Modernism).

The first visual symptom is the departure of ornament, and the recognition that machinery can be beautiful without ornament:

All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.

It’s surprising that the above quotation is attributed to Oscar Wilde, also known for writing particularly florid poetry. His argument is that ornamentation isn’t necessary for beauty, as “the line of the strength” (its functionality as a machine) and “the line of the beauty” (its aesthetic) are one.

Machinery can be beautiful without ornament: it is beautiful because it works well. In the same chapter, Pevsner quotes Van de Velde, who asks if the engineer should be on equal footing as the architect:

Why should artists who build palaces in stone rank any higher than artists who build in metal?

Engineers are architects, then, who use a different medium/materials. (On the flip-side: why can’t the product of an architect, a building, be a piece of machinery? A house a machine for living in…)

Van de Velde raises engineers to the level of architects: engineers are “the architects of the present day”. He requests “a logical structure of products, uncompromising logic in the use of materials, proud and frank exhibition of working processes”. This is sounding like highly relevant (and inspirational) advice for web designers and developers. Designers especially: we do like our working processes, our user testing, and a synthesis of other disciplines such as psychology in our craft, after all.

Adolf Loos, like Van de Velde, calls our engineers “our Hellenes” (meaning the Greeks: the culture which inspired the Roman Empire). So from the engineers, “we receive our culture”. Culture – previously the exclusive realm of poets and painters – received from engineers and technologists. Nikolaus Pevsner points out that Loos consistent enough to call the plumber “the quartermaster of culture, i.e., the kind of culture which is decisive today”.

Of course, there are different circles of culture. If we believe Doris Lessing, computer scientists, web developers, and web designers would be those complicit in propagating the “inanities” of the internet. One of the best things about the internet is that it’s an open platform for people to make of it what they will, high and low. Typophile and LOLcats (and people who like both).

Finally, a timeless design principle from Otto Wagner in 1894:

All modern forms must be in harmony with [...] the new requirements of our time.

Some personal milestones since moving to Brighton, in no particular order:

1. I live in Brighton.
Very fast and spontaneous decision. Zero regrets. It wasn’t easy, but I made it work: moving to a new city, jobless, and without ties or contacts, is something I thoroughly recommend.

2. Started, and actually maintained, this blog.
Scary, for lots of reasons. I’m Googleable. I’m making my thoughts tangible. Blogging has helped me to understand my job better, and it’s helped me to understand the whole industry better. Thinking, understanding, writing, sharing are all good things. I would encourage every single person to have a blog, if you can read, write, and have a brain. Just make a Wordpress blog and start writing about something that interests you. While I’m at it, I’d encourage you to use Twitter as well. Life is fleeting. Publish!!

3. Got a job doing something I love and am genuinely interested in.
Really glad I’m no longer in the shoes I was, post-graduating: flung out into the real world clutching a bit of paper. I was lucky to fall on my feet and figure things out.

4. Met some great people.
This isn’t really an ‘accomplishment’, but luck, and a side-effect of living here. Brighton is teeming with quite a number of smart, talented, inspired, inspiring, passionate people. It’s helped me to understand how important it is not to be an island, but to be part of a community. Islands don’t develop, they just get smaller. Great people help you grow.

5. Attended a BarCamp and actually did public speaking.
Kind of a big thing, for a girl who contemplated breaking her own leg to get out of it at school.

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Some future goals:

1. Write more and write better.
But at the same time, relax about writing: I think I automatically slip into a formal essay style, which actually constrains directions I want to go.

2. Do more public speaking (BarCamps)
And become more confident about it. My first BarCamp was pretty much baptism by fire, as James Aylett put it: my audience included someone involved with BarCamp’s founding, and several other muses.

The best way to think about BarCamp is giving back: sharing what you know, in exchange for learning more about what other people know.

Ah yes, and not entirely unrelated to the rest of this post: I’m going to SXSW Interactive (March 13–19th) in Austin in 2009, and can’t wait to catch up with the great people I met at dConstruct and at Nokia Open Lab.

A friend told me recently that she wished she had the same motivation to write a blog as I appear to have. I replied that it’s not the fact I’m blogging that motivates me… it’s what I’m interested in that I want to write about.

I don’t think much about blogging. Writing is not the point: while I love writing, my blog is just a side-effect, or a kind of “exhaust”, of life and everything I practice.

Exhaust is really too negative a term – there’s a connotation with pollution – for the hopefully positive, constructive, and interesting things I want to share. The purpose behind this blog is to keep a record, to explore thoughts related to what I do, and to put these ideas out for other people.

Why keep a record
It’s hitting me recently how easy it is to forget stuff. I found a stack of revision notes from my final year of university: very detailed notes, complete with dates, names, timelines – most of which I’ve forgotten. I can’t recall them in detail. I enjoyed the course – and did well in the tests – but where’s the knowledge now? It all seems a bit vague.

Details seem to very quickly fall out of conscious memory. Fortunately, we have computers to remember for us. Without infantilizing us (though some think so), we can store and share documents, keep a written record, and share data about our lives so it’s not entirely lost in memory. Twitter’s quite good for keeping a record. Flickr is good for keeping a record of photos. I value my blog, not least because its presence recently took me to Helsinki.

What I value most, actually, is my LiveJournal which I’ve kept since around 2003, which is a kind of private, online diary. It’s really interesting to look back and see patterns and developments in things that I write and record. Again, I’m shocked at how much I forget, so I’m placing more value on writing things down, recording things, taking photographs.

Apart from organizing and collecting data – which Flickr does really well – I want to analyse and synthesise, which blogging allows. I know that everything I experience is somewhere in my head, but really thinking about it, and analysing it, makes it more useful to me because I think it through more carefully and make new connections.

Blogging makes experiences more useful to others: by publishing in public, it’s at least accessible for other human beings to peruse – and they can choose whether to J-key-toss it, read it, or share it.

My own personal mid-year resolution is to do this more often: record things and ideas I like, take more photographs, analyse more (and better), update my blog more often.

Another brief, interesting idea sparked off the Nokia Open Lab event at the weekend. I mentioned to Jenifer Hanen (@msjen) that I followed her on Twitter because we appeared to have an exceptional number of mutual friends.

Following someone who repeatedly appears in my feed seems natural, and I’ve met several people that way: by discerning a social network made up of conversations between friends and second-degree contacts who show up in my Twitter feed. All of this supports the idea that Twitter is a really good, transparent, conversational tool.