Mark Hurrell

Meaningful mediator

“The designer should not be looked upon by companies as a means of accomplishing a purpose, but as a meaningful mediator between the maker and the user, between company and product. In the near future the surveying of man’s real necessities will become increasingly important: to understand what man really needs — not only here and now, but tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Finally, the designer will have to be still more closely linked to company work teams.”

— Dieter Rams, republished interview from Domus in April 1984.

Perfect chess

“Many people immediately assumed that chess would be solved: fully known, in all its pathways and combinations. They thought a fast electronic computer would play perfect chess, just as they thought it would make reliable long-term weather forecasts. Shannon made a rough calculation, however, and suggested that the number of possible chess games was more than 10¹²⁰—a number that dwarfs the age of the universe in nanoseconds. So computers cannot play chess by brute force; they must reason, as Shannon saw, along something like human lines.”

— James Gleick, The Information Possibly see also this article on design studio culture; Brute Force Architecture.

Leaving BBC News

Three months have gone by since I left BBC News to join the team at Government Digital Service. A quarter of a year. It feels like a few weeks at best. In my last couple of weeks at the BBC I started to write a blog post gathering together some ideas I had about how I felt digital news might evolve next, shaped by my 3½ years engrossed in the product. Ideas that existed only in my head and were too vague for me to have really promoted as product concepts, but were still relevant & (I felt) worth discussing.

But before I’d even had a chance to finish writing that post, ITV News launched a fantastic redesign courtesy of Made By Many, somehow beating me to every clever point I thought I had worth making and actually getting it built in the process. The bastards. If you haven’t done so already you should check it out the thinking behind it. It’s a great product, and although I’d probably tweak a few details here and there I’m very jealous of it.

Which left me without the constructive, poignant blog post I had intended to write. And before I knew it, at GDS we were delivering cool stuff fast and often. Then a family member died. A quarter of a year.

I was fortunate enough to work on some cool stuff for BBC News, and now I’ve found myself again in the fortunate position to be working on cool stuff for GDS. For me, both of these organisations are super important, leveraging the internet to empower normal people through provision of accessible and unbiased information and services. Both are also stuffed to the brim with clever, dedicated people. The difference is that unlike the BBC, the government is a sole service provider. Whilst The Guardian and Channel 4 News can pick up the slack for the BBC, no-one picks up the slack for government - and the difference between good and bad government services can cause real suffering.

Visual language

“I’m interested[…] in a visual language, where you can almost trick people. I’ve always felt that the responsibility is on the viewer, not on the artist. You trick the viewer into thinking that you’re telling them something, but you’re revealing something that they already have. It’s like that Bruce Nauman piece where you’re always looking at the back of your own head as you walk through it. You don’t even need to put into words what that means, but it means something spiritual. And then it doesn’t”

“I realised there was a sort of joy to colour, but then my problem with colour was that stupid happiness. It’s seductive, but devoid of meaning if you’re not careful”

— Damien Hirst, extracts from ‘Damien Hirst’ published in the Evening Standard

Burrill, de Botton & Burrows

Louise has great taste in prints, but sadly both of these are heading to her studio

Functional branding

“What really got the ball rolling was that Nokia had a hardcore deadline for the user interface environment. The UI needs to carry the brand really, so when we started to develop the criteria for what the typeface should do, we had to look at pure functionality: it needed to be legible at the smallest and largest sizes”

— Bruno Maag, in Twenty-six characters

Perspective

“In April 2005, a series of aluminium stools I designed for Magis was shown at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. When I went to see the display at the trade fair, in contrast to the other exhibits drawing attention under the spotlights, I found my three stools places in a corner of the booth serving as rest seats for tired exhibition-goers. People probably didn’t even think that they were design pieces. I must admit I was a bit shocked by this, and a little depressed. Of course I’d designed stools that anyone might normally use in different situations, and was also hoping that they would prove popular with many different customers, so the fact that people went ahead and sat on them instead of viewing them as exhibited objects was, in a sense, perfectly in keeping with that aim. Or so I tried to convince myself, though it was hard to take an enlightened view of things in such a showcase venue. That evening, however, Jasper Morrison called to tell me he’d seen my stools. Here I’d been feeling dejected, yet he was enthusing like a child who’s discovered some new treat: ‘That’s Super Normal!”

— Naoto Fukasawa, in Super Normal

“As a designer at Vignelli Associates, I had followed the work of M&Co. with interest and admiration, noting how often they broke every design rule in the world with cheekiness and impunity. I arrived at my meeting with Tibor, brimming with notions about how my book design would embody the irreverence of the M&Co. worldview.

Tibor listened patiently to my ideas — there were lots of them — and then paused for a long time. ‘Well, yes, you could do some stuff like that,’ he responded carefully. ‘Or, we could do something like this. You could work out a good clear grid. We could edit all the images really carefully. Then you could do a really nice clean layout, perfect pace, perfect sequence’ he added with a smile, ‘and then we could fuck it up a little.”

— Michael Bierut, in Design Observer

LX3 to DP2

I’ve been using a Lumix LX3 for a few years, but today I became the proud owner of a Sigma DP2x. Took a few test shots this morning (auto exposure, manual focus) and I’m really excited with the results.

Acceptance

“Everyone says the 21st century is the information century, and even complains of too much information, but I disagree. All the information we get is fragmented, halfbaked. I’ll give you an example of lots of information: I was in Bali recently, and I walked around barefoot on the hotel’s stone floors. Eventually my feet began to go numb. That actually felt really good. The amount of information my feet were picking up was enormous. The human brain likes to receive massive amounts of information. The technology and media today give us very little, so our brains are unhappy. I’m looking forward to a sense-driven world, after the end of the technology-driven phase.”

— Kenya Hara, in Theme Magazine

Attention to detail

What came first, the building or the kerning?

Comprehensive propensities

“Of course our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialisation is the key to success, not realising that specialisation precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specialisations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realised.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The news

“But what’s most interesting, to me, are the assumptions baked into the Trending Topics algorithm in the first place. On the one hand, it’s perfectly fair — in fact, it’s perfectly necessary — to define ‘trends’ as brief ruptures of the ordinary. Spikes, you know, speak. But the algorithm’s assumption is also one that’s baked into the cultural algorithm of journalistic practice: We tend, as reporters and attention-conveners, to value newness over pretty much everything else.

Again, on the one hand, that’s absolutely appropriate — ‘the news,’ after all — but on the other, the institutional obsession with newness often impedes journalists’ ability to address the biggest issues of the day — the economy, the environment, the effects of the digital transition on global culture — within conventional narrative frameworks. Just as #OccupyWallStreet, in Twitter’s algorithm, competes against #KimKWedding, we pit the long-term and the temporary against each other, forcing them to compete for people’s (and journalists’) attention. We accept that the slow-burn stories have to fight for space against the shocking, the spiking, the evanescent.

Which is unfortunate, since the most important topics for journalists to address are often the ones that are the opposite of ‘trending.”

— Megan Garber, Nieman Journalism Lab

Courier, like new

Areaware’s alarm clock app woke me up to the fact (pun, hah!) that Courier New has a lovely set of numerical characters. Who knew!

Purchased

Well-considered, inspiring & beautiful. I’ve hardly put this book down in the week since I bought it

The opportunity to buy something better

“When I was a kid, my first printer was an Epson dot matrix, hooked up to a Tandy 1000. While it could only print two fonts, serif and san serif, it was as reliable as a tank. I bet if it were still around, it would still be running. At that time home printing technology progressed at such a fast rate, that the Epson became obsolete before it broke down. I believe this rapid progression in performance influenced a commoditization in the printer market. No one wanted to invest in a home printer when a higher resolution, faster, quieter one was just a few months away.

Today, the resolution and speed of printers have relatively plateaued. I asked a group of IT professionals if I could buy a printer that would last several years? I figured I could spend up to maybe $500. If it would last me five years, it would cost $100 per year. Which is less than I had spent over the past five years on new printers that broke every 18 months or so. I was willing to invest up front if it meant preventing wasting materials on more printers down the road. Unfortunately, according to my cabal of IT experts, it didn’t exist. The market has stopped producing a printer that will last. There was no company like Icon, making the sturdiest printer in the world.”

This article doesn’t even mention Apple — it doesn’t have to.