This is an article with its heart in the right place and some thought-provoking points, but it misses some big, important stuff. In my opinion, a better argument would have been titled "Why we should design things to be PERMANENT." So check it: There's some irony here, particularly as Japan has been branded with one of my all-time favorite phrases: a "technological Galapagos." It's like this: The Japanese have a cultural affinity for extraordinarily complex gadgetry. The average Japanese consumer regards every gadget they own as something to master - a device whose purpose is to provide you endless hours of fun as you explore all of its options. If you can figure it out quickly, it's obviously a piece of shit. This is why Japanese remotes look like this: And American remotes look like this: Japanese toilets have remote controls because if all it does is flush it's obviously a proletariat chunk of shit. Apple had a hell of a time selling iPhones in Japan. iPhones are sophisticated pieces of kit but most everything you need to do on an iPhone can be figured out without a manual. This is actually a design maxim of Ray Kurzweil: The more pages the manual has, the more you have failed at the design. I've always found that kind of ironic because my K2500XS came with three spiral-bound manuals of a combined 1100 pages but you know what? A K2500XS does a lot of things. A toilet it ain't. Which brings us back to the beginning: A Leica is a professional tool. Snapchat is not. Full-manual Leicas were created for professionals and for dedicated amateurs who wanted better shots than they could get from a Brownie. And that is where the discussion should go- complication for complication's sake is BS. But complication for function's sake is not. Slick web design is intended to make everything easy. Thing is, there's advanced stuff that needs to be done in configuring your Facebook privacy, your eBay account, all sorts of stuff where there are big consequences from glossing over deceptively "simple" design. Photoshop is a complex program. It takes a lot of mastery to figure it out. It's so unwieldy for photo editing that Adobe folded out all the "photo" stuff into Lightroom. Apple, for their part, decided they could do a better job with a simpler program - Aperture. But it was so simple people didn't use it. Same problem with Final Cut - FCP7 was a complex but feature-rich program. FCPX was "streamlined" to be easy - thereby eliminating lots of the features FCP's actual customers used every day. FCPX is much better for editing wedding videos - call it 'iMovie Pro' - and they sell plenty of licenses for that. But they lost the high end. Nobody professional uses Final Cut anymore. It's okay to have a complex UI if complexity is warranted. Complexity is warranted if operation is sophisticated. The problem is, it takes time to learn a complex UI so the program needs to have some permanence. And nobody is building anything to exist longer than 18 months. The command line prompts I used in AutoCAD 9 back in 1992 still work. So do the eleventy million menus and buttons and palettes added since. That's not complexity for complexity's sake, that's configurability by professionals who know what they're doing and are willing to invest the time. But the market for that sort of program is drying up. People use Sketchup now at 1/5th the price, and its UI changes every generation. Sketchup is great for fucking around with what your rec room should look like. It sucks ass for actually, you know, designing. And that's why things should be designed to be permanent. Not because complex is better, but because complex is often necessary.I’m not suggesting that everything should be designed to be more difficult to use. Toilets have a perfectly good user interface, except in Japan (why do Japanese toilets have a remote control? Where else are you going to be when you flush them?
I love my camera. I love it even though I took terrible pictures with it for a month. I love it even though I have to adjust the aperture, worry about depth of field and annoy my family while I twiddle with its metal knobs. I love it because it makes me think: about light, colour, composition. I take fewer pictures with it than I take with my phone, but much better ones. And I’m not alone in my love for my camera. While sales of point and shoot technology continue to decline, the market for fiddly manual cameras is growing nicely.
Slick web design keeps us in a kind of unthinking trance, where we buy things on Amazon or post photos on Facebook without ever having to stop and consider what we’re doing. While this is great for retailers, it’s also good for fraudsters. Phishing scams rely on our trance-like state: please reset your password. Follow this link. Enter your password. Thank you. Click, click, click, oops.
I agree. I posted this article because of those reasons. I did find it overall a bit lacklustre but thought it still presented an interesting point of discussion. I think this also raises a good point about how much a title can affect people's perception of your work. I'm reminded of a piece I read in critique of research last year. It was by Milton Babbit and was was about the place of 'specialist' (i.e. academic) composition in wider culture. Accordingly, he sent it off entitled "The Composer as Specialist." However, it was published as "Who Cares If You Listen?" As a result, everyone reads it as considerably more elitist and/or attacking than it was ever intended. Still, getting a bit sidetracked. I like your perspective of things being designed to be permanent. It certainly places a necessary onus on the decisions we chose to make. If things constantly keep changing with each iteration, that should signal a reconsideration of what your product actually is. It would suggest that either your initial or current considerations are unfounded. Which certainly demands close review. This is complete speculation, but maybe things like the Sketchup yearly UI changes are done because it attracts people who don't already own it or are not daily users ? "Oh wow, look how much they've updated it! That must make it great." I don't know. I think Jonothan Ive has always had a good view on simplicity: I think that reflects what you were saying about designing as if permanent. That approach demands acute attention to why something is the way it is. It's "purpose and place." It also doesn't dismiss the ability of something to be perform complex functions. It must just be warranted and well-implemented.This is an article with its heart in the right place and some thought-provoking points, but it misses some big, important stuff. In my opinion, a better argument would have been titled "Why we should design things to be PERMANENT."
Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.
Sketchup is Sketchup because Google's motive for buying it had nothing to do with design. Google bought Sketchup (and gives it away) so that people would draft up their house or a famous building or their car or whatever and then geotag it. Thus, Google has a massive crowdsourced database of the world in 3D. This greatly improves their machine learning and allows them to better model 3D from various 2D data sources. Sketchup Pro is the program they bought and still sell. If you want to do models of your furniture to put on the Sketchup Warehouse, you need Pro. You can get on there and find every piece of furniture Ikea has ever put out. And you can build your kitchen without ever swinging a hammer - it's cool. But it also means that "designers" aren't using big boy tools anymore. I think I read about minimalism on here not a week ago. The argument was that minimalism isn't a design aesthetic, it's the end result of perfecting something.
To your camera point - I recently partook in a project a friend of mine is putting together involving 4x5 cameras, wherein she will take your portrait and in exchange you have to take hers even if you've never used a camera before. Getting a crash course in a real camera like that was a great experience and it's really turned me on to the whole idea of buying a camera like this or something more robust that will cause me to think about photography as a medium instead of just blasting pictures with my phone (which doesn't happen as is). It seems like a wonderful medium and the nuance of the technology is interesting, much unlike things like snapchat and instagram which I've always been a bit uncomfortable with. Not exactly sure why.
Back in that uncanny valley when a DSLR was $2800 but nobody was developing film anymore, everyone was unloading their field cameras. I almost bought a 8x10 Horseman for $225. No lie. But then I started doing the economics on it. Measuring the footprint. See - Lemme interrupt. Do you darkroom? I darkroomed. Black'n'white darkroom stuff can be fun; I was mostly doing it in a friend's bathroom. Even then you're talking about a healthy supply of toxic chemicals. I stopped at 6x7 because I realized that I had to save up a bunch of rolls of film in order to justify rolling out all the chemicals. And I had a Voigtlander Bessa, too - an antique. Optics that put Zeiss to shame. Marvelous aspect ratio - think it was a 9x17cm or something. But then I started looking into cutting film for it. And that's where things start getting dumb. See, the film for that needs to be cut to size in total darkness. And loaded in total darkness. And unloaded in total darkness. And never mind that an 8x12 Velvia is $12 a sheet and you'd get maybe 3 shots out of it because unless you're willing to get into stupid chemicals you're shooting black'n'white anyway. And that was the ultimate problem. B&W you can do in a bathroom (if it's clean and if nobody else needs to use it for the 4 hours you'll be fucking with it. Here's where I should probably mention that I had a Beseler 23CXL with the dichro head: ...but if you want to develop color film, shit gets real. Color processing makes sous vide look like barbecue. Timing down to the second; temperatures to a tenth of a degree. I was almost there. But I realized that using that $250 Horseman would involve building a $25k addition onto my house. ________________________________ This is a mandarin goby. Isn't she beautiful? You can buy them for about $18. Problem is, you need about 80 gallons of reef tank to make them happy. Reef tanks, done right, are about $1000 per linear foot. So to keep your $18 goby alive you need a $5000 reef tank. So I celebrate your $150 4x5. Great idea. Just know what you're getting into. I stopped taking pictures for about 4 years because nobody remembered how to develop film and you couldn't get into a full-frame DSLR for less than $8k. Then you could for about $2800 and I bought one. I still shoot with it 7 years later. And I know for a stone-cold fact if I'd bought that Horseman for $250 I would have sold it, regrettably, for half that much two years later having never taken a single picture.
Yeah, I've got an old Polaroid lying around from the old days. I was so happy at first when i found it in old boxes but the funds to actually use it are too much. Not as much as starting to develop film on my own, but still, 5$ per shot is too much. Maybe I'll get a fujifilm. I hear shorts are about 2$ (Which is pretty much what it costed to take a polaroid back in the day apparently).
Oh man! Is that the Goby you were talking about?! I love those! The Aquarium on Sepulveda in Culver has 2 or 3 really phenomenally beautiful ones. Our little Blenny has come out from hiding and is now BFFs with the clownfish. Our female keeps chasing him away from the clownfish corner, but the blenny and the male clown are friends. It's like a weird affair of sorts. ps: I've slept now. Expect shit to get done today.
Damn, dude. That might have been one of the best analogies I've seen you make, point well understood. I'm also interested in something where I can put a Polaroid back on it. (Things from someone with no to minimal photography experience). The "taking the pictures" part seems much more fun than the "developing the film" part. But the latter still appeals a bit to the chemist inside me.
It appeals to the chemist inside me, too. You've got me thinking about that damn Horseman again, dammit. Big stupid Ansel Adams cameras'n'shit. They're definitely fun... but if you ever need to get 'em into the 'puter fuggedaboudit. The way to do it is to find a co op or do a darkroom class at a community college. You don't need a lab a lot, but when you need a lab you need a lot of it. It can be a lot of fun but I've had other fun things occupying my time for quite a while now.
You just gave me a great idea for meeting some new people out west. Keep thinking about those big ole cameras.
I'm head back for another shot of school this summer. Planning on web design and getting a photo cert. been messing around a ton with my girlfriends dslr. It's fun and I think I have som sort or knack for it. Had a fun time messing with longer exposure and led poi. Also took some picture of friends playing pool last night and was able I get alright contrast to outline their faces and the tables from the overhead light. Give me too classes before I realize I suck though. Having done other chem experiende I'm excited to learn about darkroom things.