Mark Hurrell

Meaningful mediator

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:05:16 -0400

“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

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:37:57 -0400

“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

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:02:00 -0400

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

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:01:06 -0400

“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

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:57:00 -0400

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

Functional branding

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:27:23 -0400

“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

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:32:00 -0500

“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

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:02:00 -0500

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

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:32:23 -0500

“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

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:15:00 -0500

What came first, the building or the kerning?

Comprehensive propensities

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:57:02 -0500

“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

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:16:00 -0400

“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

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 13:34:00 -0400

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

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:06:00 -0400

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

The opportunity to buy something better

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:35:00 -0400

“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.”

— Michael DiTullo, Design Mind

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

The anti-social web

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:42:00 -0400

“It is tempting to see the internet as the ultimate fulfillment of the ideals of modernism – after all, the world wide web seems the perfect embodiment of Paul Otlet’s “Mundaneum.” Also, when you look at it from a strictly formalist viewpoint, the whole visual landscape of the internet is made up of exactly those elements that most people seem to associate with International Style: templates, grids, sans-serif type, the specific use of “empty” space, flush-left ragged-right columns. Even the use of all-lowercase letters in text messaging can be seen as stylistically linked to International Style. But still — we would say there is one fundamental, crucial difference between the print culture of modernism and the digital culture of the internet. In our view, print is still a more public medium. If a poster is hanging in the street, it is seen by every passerby in more or less the same way. Sure, the interpretation of the poster will differ from person to person, but by and large, the poster itself will appear in roughly the same way to every viewer, regardless of his/her class, race, gender, age, personal preferences, etc.

This is different on the internet, where websites and pages conform themselves instantly to cater to the personal tastes and preferences of the individual viewer. Google search results change from person to person, the advertisements that clutter online profiles are specifically targeted toward the viewer, etc., etc. This makes the online environment ultimately an individualistic, isolated experience, despite the promise of “being connected.” It also makes most online activity a somewhat unadventurous, undialectical affair, as you only will be confronted with stimuli that are algorithmically curated for you, based on what large corporations (such as Facebook and Google) expect you to want to see. Whereas, within the context of the street, you will be confronted with information that is not specifically intended for you — posters you might not immediately understand, slogans you might disagree with (or not), kiosks carrying newspapers that are not necessarily tailored toward your specific lifestyle, book stalls displaying secondhand books expressing conflicting opinions. In our view, it is this notion of print culture within the urban environment that offers the most dialectical, and therefore most modernist, experience. So it’s exactly that idea that we try to explore most in our work. And, as paradoxical as it may sound, it is this theme of modernist print culture that is also one of the main subjects of our online presence — whether it is our actual website or our Facebook group.”

— Experimental Jetset, Printmag

As much as I want to read Experimental Jetset’s opinions as just another reactionary criticism of modern communication from a traditional practitioner, I think they’ve touched on something uncomfortable about the way the internet has evolved as content medium. As the first liberated, democratic communication platform it has the potential to introduce us to a broader range of ideas & experiences than tradional media could ever provide, but in practice the sheer quantity of content online totally exceeds human mental bandwidth. The only way to manage the endless flow of information is to filter it down, with the bizarre result that reading a physical newspaper exposes me to a far wider & more eclectic range of experiences than browsing that same newspapers website - even though the website contains many more stories. The physical newspaper selects a wide range of stories to appeal to a wide audience, whereas on the website I get to choose the type of stories that I think I want to see. Instead of broadening my horizons, I’ve narrowed them.

But wishing away a technology is pointless (and ignores all the benefits that connectedness has brought), so Experimental Jetset’s focus on print as a reaction to the internet is really only interesting when considered alongside their use of Facebook. Rather than printed media being a safe default, they appear to be using posters and Facebook in much the same way - making tightly contained nuggets of content and then deliberately placing them within messy, social contexts far outside of their control. This is in direct contrast with most web content, which by technical-neccessity is architected context-first (although there are exceptions to this, such as RSS).

This physical contextuality is part of what makes the iPad such a satisfying way to consume digital content. Even though interacting with the iPad is still a closed-off, personal experience, the device can break that isolation by being handed between friends in a way that’s impracticle with a traditional PC. Taking the concept of a social interface for consuming digital content even further, this recent prototype by the NYTimes encourages multiple users to explore the digital paper simultaniously on a single device, even allowing them to exchange articles. It may not be a feasable product right now, but it’s exciting to see interaction designers starting to reclaim internet-connectedness as a social, communial experience.

Materials that barely decay

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:28:00 -0400

“We’re making things that don’t need to be cared for. The old aesthetics of wabi and sabi depended on constant care by someone, but we designers cannot govern this someone…

Furthermore, no matter how poor the material, if it’s polished with affection its value will grow. But even though the existence of someone to polish it is important, that very culture is fading. The interaction between human beings and objects has undergone a metamorphosis, and we designers are left trying to reach an unattainable goal.”

— Naoto Fukasawa, Haptic

From Templates to Algorithmic Design

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 14:51:00 -0400

The current issue of IDPURE magazine leads with a couple of features on ‘Magazine Designs and the Digital age’. Rather than dwelling on paper & printing techniques, the articles make a direct (and well justified) leap to responsive design - or ‘algorithmic design’ as they refer to it.

There’s already a lot of writing on the internet about responsive design from technical design perspectives, but until now I haven’t encountered any that acknowledge the deeper editorial issues that arise from algorithmically-generated content combinations. The article & dialogue in IDPURE doesn’t pretend to have any answers, instead they raise open-minded questions about digital content design and its relationship to the printed content it has disrupted.

If you’re working with responsive design and editorial content it’s worth reading.

Fluid grids and orientation

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:34:25 -0400

Designing for tablets is hard. Designing for tablets with a 16:9 aspect ratio is harder. If you’ve created web layouts for the iPad using fluid grids, you’ve no doubt seen your perfectly formatted layout change when shifted from landscape orientation to portrait (or vice-versa).

This happens because whilst the layout and embedded content (images, video etc) are sized relatively to the pixel width of the viewport, the typography is not. It’s not too hard to design with enough affordance to cope with the variation caused by the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio, but most of the Android tablets have 16:9 displays. These displays make the orientation difference even more pronounced.

In this second illustration the photograph is so large that it can’t fit onto a single screen when the device is in landscape orientation, yet the image is small and the text overflowing in portrait mode.

At this point I feel I should make a few disclaimers. I know there is no fold. I understand designing with affordance for the vagueries of CSS text flow and unpredictable content. But it should also be obvious that design variance at this scale is going to affect the visual hierarchy of the page in a significant way.

As I suggested earlier, this issue is caused by the typography being sized absolutely to the viewport rather than relatively to it. Even if we use ems or %s in our CSS to relatively size text, the base font-size (the value which our other font sizes are scaled in relation to) is still an absolute value* (‘font-size: 62.5%’ will be 10px no matter what your viewport size is). Although I could use a media query to apply a smaller font-size to the text when it’s in portrait orientation, choosing to branch styles might add significant hidden complication and cost for development and QA further down the line.

To style typography that can scale in relation to a fluid grid, we need the ability to specify the base font-size relatively. To express that the font-size for a 960px box should be 150% of the font-size for a 640px box. I suppose it would be simple enough to create this styling with javascript or a gradiated stack of media queries, but it feels like it could (should?) be as simple to set in CSS as setting a layout box to have 50% width. Something like:

.example {font-size[width="640"]: 10px;}

Whereby when the .example is 640px wide the font-size is 10px, but when the .example is 960px wide the font-size is 15px. Descendent elements would then simply have their font-size set in ems or %s.

*Until you zoom your browser window.

Product nurturing

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:15:00 -0400

“Verbalising design is another act of design”

— Kenya Hara, Designing Design

I had that phrase echoing around in my head as I discovered Takram’s website yesterday.

“Takram is a product and service nurturing firm based in Tokyo, Japan that integrates design and engineering skills to help companies create and nurture successful businesses. Takram doesn’t simply create products or services. Instead, we nurture them with our clients through cycles of prototype testing, evaluation, and redesign. Takram’s tight collaboration with the client throughout the entire process ensures high satisfaction and superior quality of the outcome. The product nurturing service includes market research, concept development, R&D, Engineering, Design, Prototyping, and Testing & Evaluation among others.”

— Takram Design Engineering

I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that their output looks phenomenal.