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.

I came across this really interesting article on mobile typography at the Ministry of Type blog. It spells out the difference between the iPhone and the average mobile phone.

It’s also the only phone that’s been advertised purely on its UI, because that’s what the whole thing is about. The adverts for the Samsung D840 showed you the hardware buttons and how the glossy front of the phone is so reflective it can be used as a mirror, but with no showing off of the UI. The Motorola RAZR had a similar set of ads - you’re invited to gawp at the thin, sleek hardware, but you’re not shown the UI. Same for most of the Nokia ads in fact. That’s because the default UI is at best workable, at worst, hideous.

Why is most mobile UI design unusable, unresponsive, and ugly? Here’s one theory: “If the UI of these other phones was usable, responsive and beautiful, there’d be little need for themes and a big source of revenue (from advertising on the theme sites alone) would disappear.”

I’m not sure if this is a serious theory, but there might be some truth in it. Desperate to upgrade their poor interface experiences to a superior one, users purchase a new theme, hoping it’ll solve their problems. Unfortunately, themes are superficial solutions to mobile interface problems. Anyway, I don’t think this theory works, though it does highlight a problematic approach to interface design.

Manufacturers need to address the deeper problems with interface design on the mobile phone. They must focus on making software and hardware more powerful in order to accommodate users’ needs, as the mobile phone becomes a web-browsing device as well as a phone. Manufacturers will, and are, shifting from seeing a mobile phone as a mobile phone, to seeing it as a mobile internet device as well. Nokia admitted in May that they’re now competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Mobile’s restrictions are frustrating both for users and for designers. One of the most frustrating things for me right now, to use one example, is working with antialiased outlines on mobile phone graphics. For those unfamiliar with the term, antialias means, in plain English, the smoothing process between the object and the background, whether font or graphic element. (Here’s a simple illustration.)

Mobile interfaces, composed of typography and graphic elements, suffer because of this lack of support for alpha antialiasing across devices. When I say mobile interfaces “suffer”, I really mean users. Lack of wide support for alpha antialiasing is just one example of the inadequacies of mobile interfaces. However, inadequacies present new, interesting challenges, both for designers working with the imposed restrictions, as well as companies spotting opportunities for improvement.

Last week I attended a talk by Stephen Bayley at the London College of Communication, titled The State of Design Criticism Today. To put it bluntly – and mildly – the talk was dull. The promise in the title was not fulfilled. The question remained frustratingly unanswered. Just what is the state of design criticism today?

What exactly are the ways we can write about design? and why should we? and how should we?

What is design criticism supposed to provoke?

‘Critical writing about design’ is suddenly quite a hot topic, at least for universities. The London College of Communication is convening a new course in MA Design Writing Criticism for October 2008, and so is the School of Visual Arts in New York. I very much liked Joe Clark’s thoughts on the latter. It’s generally thought that the cream of (the current definition of) ‘design writing criticism’ is published in Eye (I also like Joe’s thoughts on this topic, as it’s extremely rare to hear Eye criticized).

The trouble is the very idea of “criticism”. It implies personal taste, which is fine for art criticism and literary criticism. The “arts” are full of ambiguity and subjectivity.

Design has something more objective about it: something well-designed is something that works. Unfortunately, writing critically about design is more complicated than this. It’s somewhere between something that works (science) and something that appeals to taste (art). Much of the “criticism” I’ve read about design seems to be more along the lines of historical documentation.

The talk at LCC confirmed my suspicion that, along with all of its other troubles, perhaps the main trouble with “design criticism” is that many of the writers are art historians, not technologists and designers.

And another interesting question is: how closely should design follow technology? Since graphic design – which deals with the organization of information – was born out of the industrial revolution, perhaps it’s quite important that it does follow technology. It is tied to information proliferation, and in 2008, it’s tied to the Web.

This leads me to feel that the history of the Graphic User Interface in software, pioneered in Xerox PARC in 1981, should have been included in my graphic design education along with the history of the printing press and metal type.

In conclusion: the trouble with design criticism is that it’s really confused about what it is. And I still don’t know.

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: