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Defining the New Singularity
Exploring the next level of convergence: between hardware and software, information and object, human and technology.
By Mark Rolston, Senior VP of Creative, frog design
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| Mark Rolston |
Mick Jagger is a beautiful man. That’s not to say he’s good-looking; one can’t overlook that large mouth, those slightly off-kilter eyes, that slur. Neither is it simply a matter of his being a rock star, though that’s certainly a part of it. He has neither the most beautiful face nor the most beautiful voice, the best style nor the best music. But what he does offer is an uncompromising singularity, a fully embodied personality that draws us, inevitably, towards him.
Let’s call this the Mick Jagger Phenomenon. It can be found in most things we call beautiful. Looking at Jagger, you don’t see a hybrid set of choices and opinions; you don’t sense an amalgamation of different views. He is who he is. You feel that there’s a distinct core identity from which it all radiates – and that singularity is his beauty. That singularity is beauty.
And it is this quality that we, as designers, must capture in our products. We have long sought to give our clients that je ne sais quoi that drives market success. We have worked to express the core values of each product, brand, and consumer in the function and aesthetics of our work. But too often, what we end up with is the average of multiple considerations: of client and consumer desires, of digital and manual functionality. We end up with The Monkees instead of The Stones. It has become increasingly difficult for form to follow function, or emotion, or consumer identity – leaving designers without a clear direction. Why is this happening? Because today, the complexity of our products is greater than ever before.
The Map Has Outgrown the Territory
Capturing this essence used to be a more direct process. Fifty years ago, the appearance of a product primarily reflected its functional demands. Over time, this simple charge expanded to embrace globalism, branding, emotional and cultural considerations, and eventually what was supposed to be the great catchall of the design process, “user experience.”
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"This is the irony of the situation: while the object itself has become less dominant in the overall product story, it assumes new importance as the icon for this much larger set of relationships." |
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Yet there was more on the horizon. As the writer Bruce Sterling puts it, borrowing a bit from Baudrillard and applying it to design, we are now approaching an age of technological advancement when “there is more stored in the map than there is in the territory.” Put more simply, the story surrounding a given “thing,” a product or service we buy and use, is rapidly exceeding the value of the thing itself. The identity of a product can no longer be easily defined through its form factor, but rather by the information that encases it, passes through it, and is accumulated by it over the course of its lifetime. The notion of this emerging product universe covers far more than we are used to considering in the creative equation: the form, the means of production, the business built around it, the social implications of its existence, the ecological impact of its creation, the object’s role in a system of multiple devices, the social community developed to manage, discuss, and enjoy the object at hand. Sterling calls this new modern thing a “spime” – and it has massive implications for design
There is a second effect at play as well: as the conceptual scope of our work expands, the design artifact, the object itself, must assume new value as identifying symbol. This is the irony of the situation: while the object itself has become less dominant in the overall product story, it assumes new importance as the icon for this much larger set of relationships. Human nature will always seek a focal point – a singularity – to recognize, capture, and associate with the greater notions at hand. No matter the complexity of the relationship, it is always the artifact, with its physical or digital touchpoints, that attracts us first.
Value is No Longer Self-Evident
Most vital among the series of relationships that surround a product is the relationship between object and user. It is this relationship that designers confront first and foremost in our every assignment – no matter the industry, no matter the scale. And it is this relationship that drives, in part, the growing virtualization of our products today. The introduction of digital technology not only into our computers, but into our homes, our cars, and our toys reflects the capacity of everyday objects to interact with us more directly, understanding our needs and providing the best possible solution. By introducing computers into these diverse products, designers have established a more mutual relationship between people and products, whereby not only do users act upon objects, but objects act upon users.
Thus, whereas once the value of an object was self-evident, its utility communicated by the outer form, the value of today’s objects often comes in hidden, computerized form: the GPS unit in a luxury sedan, the motion sensors in a doll. Traditionally, the concept of “intuitive design” meant offering the user an immediate understanding of features and functionality; a toaster should look like a toaster. This immediate understanding is no longer possible, nor even desirable, by means of form alone.
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"It’s not hardware vs. software but instead the object versus its story.... This is the new virtual nature of the thing." |
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And so we must improve the connection between industrial design and software interface, allowing the virtual story to augment – and in some cases supercede – the clarity of meaning once communicated by the object form itself.
Surely we have been talking for years about the increasing imperative of convergence of ID and UI in design. We have reached a point where this integration is critical if we are to help users navigate the increasingly complex systems that pervade our world – not only in computers, but in countless everyday products. We must reject the tendency to force a traditional form-based story into the design of our virtual products. The consequence of forcing physical interactions, where a digital apparatus makes more sense, is often nothing more than a useless appendage. This isn’t to imply that industrial design is being overrun by software GUI design. My use of the term “form” applies to both disciplines. It’s not hardware vs. software but instead the object versus its story.... This is the new virtual nature of the thing.
Perhaps we might amend our design process to focus more on the space between traditional ID and software design, representing a third field of design – that between physical and digital concerns. This new design discipline ensures that the semantic clues in the industrial design of a product (the form and mechanical design for controls) align with those of the software interface (I/O alignment with the hardware, alignment in UI mechanisms, style and iconography), offering users a truly intuitive understanding of the product at hand. Bridging the disciplines offers us a chance to loosen the slavish linking of a product vision to its external form.
Inventing The New Analog
The first step is breaking out of the existing paradigms to better address the realities of human behavior. Rather than teach users to operate within the digital world, we can amend the digital world to better reflect the sensuality of human existence, our innate understanding of physics and inherent biases in comprehension.
A large percentage of human communication is unspoken, our messages conveyed via phatic communion – gestures, simple words, facial expressions, body movements used to convey our disposition (“What’s up?”). As we seek to naturalize the human-computer interface, we must continue to reintroduce these elements of our behavior into the technologies we create. But we need also to keep in mind the suitability of these models.
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"Today, we have reached the point at which new technologies can enable us, finally, to re-engage several of these natural modes of relation between self and other." |
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Even the earliest concepts of human-computer interaction (HCI) predicted technologies that would engage in traditional communication modalities, such as speech (HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey), physical motion (Minority Report), and touch interaction (“Star Trek”). Unfortunately, as computers developed, early processing power could only handle the most basic inputs. Checked by the limitations of emerging technologies, designers forced users to adjust their input methods to accommodate these constraints – a modification of natural behaviors that has not been reversed since. These adjustments allowed us to engage the general concept of HCI, but failed users in the desired fidelity, the comfort of direct interaction between person and product.
Today, we have reached the point at which new technologies can enable us, finally, to re-engage several of these natural modes of relation between self and other. Some of this is onscreen interaction: with robust new technologies like WPF and Flash/Flex, we are able to create interactions that resemble those of the physical world. Much of it comes down to touch. It’s so fundamental to the human experience, yet so far the modern computing experience has been devoid of it. We have a touch-vocabulary potentially richer than even our verbal dictionary. We deeply understand how to tap, drag, push, pull, flick, drop, and toss the world around us. Introducing these interactions into the computing experience promises to radically change our engagement.
The visual system of windows, files, and folders that makes up our PC experience originated in simple office equipment analogies, but has since exceeded its analog counterpart in conceptual depth and possibility. We’re even finding new digital-world comforts (searching, hyperlinking, rss-feeds, etc.) taking over early analog metaphors (“let’s drill down on that idea” becomes “let’s zoom in on that”), and even spilling out into our analog realities.
To delineate the interaction between the physical and the virtual, to embrace the underlying digital-, social-, scenario-, and intelligence-based nature of the products, we must expand beyond our traditional form metaphors to seek new, more dynamic cultural reference points.
While data infrastructure and underlying technologies have changed radically, the means of getting at these experiences, the interface itself, has remained definitively old-world. We still stare at screens, conceptually no different from those found in our televisions and movie theaters. Their form was derived from the notion of “moving pictures,” itself firmly rooted in the traditional arts of photography, painting, and drawing: the two-dimensional surface and the frame.
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"Today, we have reached the point at which new technologies can enable us, finally, to re-engage several of these natural modes of relation between self and other." |
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To naturalize the interface, we must do more than refine our analog-to-virtual iconography; we must embrace and evolve the technologies that dictate our input methods and outputs. We must move the screen and keyboard experience paradigm out of its modality (“time to use the computer”) into the rest of our lives. Pervasive computing, improved mobile devices, and more radical promises such as electronic ink promise to change the situation, but we’re essentially still stuck with the modality. Computing, and through it, access to the whole of the thing (Sterling’s spime), is still modal. We’re getting much better at weaving in and out of the computing experience (watch someone operate their Blackberry in the middle of a conversation) but regardless, it’s still two separate worlds. Cory Doctorow, in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, imagined a world where this boundary was obliterated. In his story, the characters can call up the full history, background, and statistics of any person or thing at will, directly from their minds. We’re headed in this direction, just short of a few technical leaps.
Singularity Overload?
So what do we do, as designers, once we have created a product that makes use of natural human tendencies of interaction and understanding? We make another. And another. Alone, these stand-alone expressions of value, function, and ideas waste precious resources. And opportunity. Connected, they have the capacity to change the world. The solution looks a lot like human society. We depend on each other, and so it should go with our products. As this computer-centric product universe becomes interconnected, the value of a given device no longer stands alone: an idea that is gaining traction with corporations just now recognizing the utility of product ecosystems.
Since the advent of crowdsourcing, products are now dependent, too, on the interactions and ideas of their users. Many of the most innovative new products are conduits for the content and conversations of their users. The greatest share of the value and purpose of these products lies in the hands of the consumer, rather than the original designer. As designers today, we are part of a much longer creative chain.
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"The future of product design is, indeed, convergence. But it is convergence of a scale much broader than hardware and software working together; it is a convergence of information and object, of politics, ecology, and business, of human being and technology." |
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These changes affect this ongoing virtualization of the product, the thing. In this new, interconnected digital world, a product is about more than its basic functionality: it’s about where it comes from, what it does, what it communicates, what we feel about it, and what happens to it when we’re done. And this information evolves over time. In this context, our products must also be conceived as processes in and of themselves, moving forward from production through use and reuse and into disposal.
The future of product design is, indeed, convergence. But it is convergence of a scale much broader than hardware and software working together; it is a convergence of information and object, of politics, ecology, and business, of human being and technology.
Bridging the “Uncanny Valley”
When a product’s map outgrows the value of its territory, when value becomes so bound up in digital- and systems-based qualities that we are left without anything to point to, it is the role of the designer to reintroduce the element of beauty, of appreciation for object as physical form. Faced with this thoroughly modern challenge, we must imbue a modern object with true singularity. People will always encounter objects with their senses, as well as their intellects. And this physicality is still a deeply desirable part of a product experience. Designers must provide a vessel for internal functionality that conveys an impression of purpose, cultural relevance, beauty, and value. Form carries the responsibility of setting the user at ease with technology; it should connote value, invite use, reinforce brand attributes. Even a product in motion will come to rest – and, like a beautiful painting, it must tell a story even in stillness.
Masahiro Mori, the Japanese roboticist, theorized that users would naturally encourage the humanization of robotics – to a point. Then, when computers came to resemble humans too greatly, these robots would elicit a feeling of revulsion. This critical inflection point, this space between robot and human, is known as the “uncanny valley.” When a designed artifact does not fully embody its authentic origin – in this example, humanity – it will always be met with some level of repugnance by the user. Crossing this valley is the essential challenge we face in bridging the gap between today’s outdated product design and the singular, meaningful artifacts we hope to create. What is this element that allows us to move from a mere aggregation of functional and aesthetic inputs to a smarter, more unified product vision? We can never say exactly. Bruce Sterling calls this quality “designery.” I might call it art. But whatever it is, Mick Jagger has it. And we, as designers, had better start looking.
Reprinted with permission from frog design MIND, October, 2007
This article appeared in the October
2007 eBulletin.
Feedback on DMI Viewpoints and article proposals
are always welcome! Please email jtobin@dmi.org.
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