Design

My wife and I made a conscious decision to live in the city. We both grew up in smaller areas that didn’t have as much access to culture and the arts. Even in the face of the high expense, heavy traffic, and crime, we still find living amongst culture a benefit that’s strong enough to keep us here. We want a place that invests in its parks and public arts in addition to having great food, music, and theater that can come from a large city.

For all the people like myself who live in urban areas and want their cities to invest in culture, we tend to have a big disconnect between how we view the physical world and the digital spaces in which we’re spending more of our time. We are escaping into our social media sites and apps at an ever-increasing pace, and we need to be thinking about how we shape culture in these spaces too.

The internet age is still in its infancy. We’re shaping this culture with how we’re tackling online bullying and anonymous harassment. With how we’re handling privacy. With disinformation. With how we’re handling the mashup of other real-world cultures that we’ve never had this amount of access to. 

If we don’t think this through and consciously shape our digital spaces, they will shape us.

We want our digital spaces to have a point of view, but not to the point of being difficult to figure out. We want to have a chuckle, but not slow down what we’re trying to accomplish. We want thoughtful software that shows that it’s crafted with care — not because it’s made by people who are trying to squeeze every dollar they can, but because it’s made by people who care about solving a problem well.

Some of these examples are just cute, and some of them really matter — but they all show intentionality. We need to be more intentional and focus on the details of how we create a healthier digital space. If we don’t, the worst aspects of our collective psyche will shape it for us.

We intrinsically know this when it comes to our cities, and there are real benefits to doing so. Introducing culture and the arts into a city has been found to reduce stress, make people feel happier with their lives, and satisfied with their health. Communities with high engagement in the arts are more involved in their area. There are tons of economic benefits, as culture and the arts gentrify neighborhoods (which, I know, is a mixed bag itself). The arts make people more empathetic to the world around them.

Good design means caring about how things feel, and not just how they function. If our cities deserve beauty, joy, and meaning, so do our digital spaces. These platforms aren’t just tools—they’re where we connect, create, laugh, cry, and live. If we don’t shape them with the same care and intention we give to our streets and stages, we’re letting algorithms define our culture. These platforms are becoming the new public squares, parks, and performance venues of our time. Culture doesn’t just happen — it’s built, detail by detail, by people like us.

Discuss on Mastodon

Interesting:

1. Designer dreams up a redesign of American Airlines’ website and chastises the company (particularly their design department)
2. An employee from the AA design group writes back to say, “You’re right.”
3. AA fires said employee for breaking their NDA.

Lots to take away from this. For me, most of all is that I’ve been in this employee’s shoes and this story reaffirms that I will make sure to never be wearing shoes like his in a company like that again. It sounds clear that AA is a seriously messed up company, and, as folks have said, the original critique is a little naive of the situation: A little screenshot does not a website make.

The best thing to come out of web-design icon Doug Bowman’s resignation from Google is this well thought out article by Scott Stevenson. Doug on his departure:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.

This particular point set off Mr. Stevenson to put into words concepts that I’ve always been aware of, but have always struggled to articulate as well as he did in his post:

The most contentious point between software engineering culture and visual design culture is the question of whether important things can be always seen in absolutes. The engineering approach values measurable, reproducible results which can be represented in a graph or a checklist. Unit tests and benchmarks illustrate progress. […] Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.

Through out my career, I’ve regularly been in similar environments; and one of my biggest problems has been figuring out how to hurdle that divide. I feel that part of my role is as a visual taste maker. You might test to find the most crowd pleasing shade of blue at the first pass, but I might come up with a blue that might not be your instant choice, yet will grow on you when taken in holistically. Like Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” There is a point with visual design where logic starts to breakdown in ways that only experience can answer.