It goes without saying!
Exploring the interesting things that make our world work, and the people that make them happen.
Blog Archive • Questions?You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.
via Sweep the Sleaze | Information Architects
People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.
“Most valuable” is an over-exaggeration, but good experience is imperative. For any company, delivering that experience isn’t just a matter of hiring designers who can nail down a sexy UI. It’s about rallying everyone behind something they can be proud of.
Then, ship it and figure out how to make it better.
via cdixon.org
At lunch one day last year, a co-worker mentioned a game called Minecraft. You built stuff during the day, he explained, and at night the monsters would come out to kill you. It sounded like an interesting concept?
The first few times playing didn’t make much sense to me. I was running around a world with trees and sand and snow and lakes. Eventually, the sun would set, and, as promised, that’s when the monsters would come out and start shooting you with arrows, eating you alive, or blowing up in your face. There were also spiders and sheep and cows and pigs that hung out in trees. It was wondrously wacky, but strangely alluring.
* * *
I recently came across a wonderful photo-blog called Cabin Porn. Every once in a while, I’ll visit and oogle at the large images of simple homes in endless landscapes. The guy who runs the blog — Zach Klein — does a nice job curating a beautiful collection of images in snow, sand, forest and water with fascinating architectural twists and misfits. There are rarely people, and the images often times are mostly filled with landscape, rather than building.
There was recently an article in The Atlantic titled What It Means That Urban Hipsters Like Staring at Pictures of Cabins. The author argues that the blog’s audience’s fascination with the solitary architecture is disconnected from the actual lifestyle of a person that lives in a cabin:
There are some who chose to actually live in the cabin, but few leave society completely to become self-reliant modern homesteaders. Rather, this broad range of cabin lifestyles has become part of exurbia — suburbia’s manifest destiny, the urban frontier.
Cabin Porn’s images create the illusion of idyllic urban escapism for #twentysomethinghipsteryouths:
This deep romanticizing of cabin lifestyles is completely unrealistic, as most other porn, but it still has value. Looking at Cabin Porn, trying to articulate exactly what is essential and desirable at the cabin, we are looking at our lives and societies. In dreaming about an idyllic past, we are also imagining the future.
In the comments, Zach Klein responds to the author, to which the author reinforces his main thesis, which isn’t intended to criticize the content or intention of the blog:
I’m particularly interested in what happens on the way from the Cabin Porn dream - if we can call it that - to actual ownership and use of a cabin.
* * *
After the first few confused hours of getting blown up by jumping monsters and eaten by spiders, I started getting the hang of Minecraft. Collect wood. Build a bunker for the night. Then build tools, weapons, make fire. Explore.
Visually, Minecraft achieves stunning beauty with deceptively simple building blocks. Everything in the game is a cube. Stack these cubes high in rounded piles, you have a mountain. Put some green textured cubes around a 6-block high stack and you have tree. Fill deep hole of yellow, sandy cubes with transparent blue cubes and you have a river. A lake. An ocean.
Trekking across the landscape alone, you come across herds of animals, mountain ranges, jungles, and ponds. Digging down underground you find winding caves structures, abandoned mine shafts and jewels.
If you haven’t played Minecraft, this all sounds bizarrely dramatic. But when you climb to the top of one of these “mountains” or “trees” and look around you as the huge glowing square — the “sun” — sinks behind the horizon, you can’t helped be impressed by…the beauty?
And then each night, you need to get back to your house. You need to sleep in your bed, which updates your spawn location (otherwise you’ll come back to life where you first entered the game) and fast-forwards through nighttime (which otherwise lasts ~10 minutes IRL) to the morning. This simple twist imparts a powerful feeling of domestic responsibility upon the user. You can could dig a hole in the ground and cover it over with dirt, or…
What if I dig my house into the side of a mountain, facing the sunset, surrounded by a stone wall with glass windows above? What if I put the door over here, with a staircase leading down to that coal deposit few levels down? That would be so convenient! And the bed will go over here…
A compelling combination of solitude and endless opportunity, inhibited only by the player’s imagination and patience, inspires architecture explorations both large and small.
* * *
I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether or not Cabin Porn is scratching an escapist itch that many urban youths feel right now. I would think it’s natural to want to “get back to basics,” and maybe people in cities feel this even more since everything around you in a city is moving, everyone is going somewhere. The complications of rent, transportation, work, fun, crowds, weather, relationships, events and stuff happening can drive you crazy. I’d guess that’s why many people don’t like cities, especially Manhattan.
A desire for a sense of space, freedom, expansive landscapes, independence and simplicity is built into all of us. While space and comfort only comes at a premium in dense urban city-structures, city-dwellers must have a perverted fascination with simplicity, right? They want the space, but minus the probable destitution that forced someone into that charming cabin — not penthouse apartment — in the first place.
Fuck it. Don’t over-think it. People like space because space is nice. Cities are complicated, so city-dwellers crave the opposite. Am I crazy for thinking it’s that simple?
For me, this is the very allure of Minecraft. The gameplay taps into something that I didn’t really know I cared about. The more you explore, the more you begin to understand the world’s physics. As you attain some level of command over how things work, you can build cool stuff. After a day of roaming around a foreign landscape (10 minutes!), you return to a simple dwelling with a bed to sleep for the night.
Sure, if you build a huge castle with turrets and hallways and libraries, it ain’t so simple. But in the context of the game, the essential function of “home” — where you can sleep at night, safe from the monsters — is always consistent.
I believe that people enjoy playing Minecraft for many of the same reasons they enjoy gazing at the photos on Cabin Porn. There is a sense of simplicity and essentialism. There is a feeling of freedom to roam and explore without interruption. You’re not part of an ambiguous authority. You’re living off land. Self-sustaining.
I don’t think we’ll see any Minecraft homes featured in Cabin Porn any time soon, but I were to submit something, it would would look something like this:
NJ Transit unveiled a the newly redesigned rail map on Wednesday. The most striking features are New Jersey’s weirdly morphed geometry, and cramped layout of lines nearest to New York City where the network is most dense.
The map was done by an in-house design team, and the final result helps reinforce Erik Spiekermann’s point that government agencies are awful design clients:
We have great architects, we have great designers, we have great engineers. We don’t have clients. What we need is culture of clients.
There are plenty of talented (and opinionated) designers who would kill to work on a project like this, but there doesn’t seem to be any impetus for agencies like NJT to invest additional resources in design. Complications like budget and hiring processes undoubtedly make it challenging — maybe impossible — for the NJT to hire a professional designer. I’m also sure that one of the biggest fears is likely that a pro designer would make something too “design-y,” high-brow, abstract, indulgent or inaccessible to most people.
Sure enough, “over-designed” is exactly what happened with Vingelli’s 1972 map, which squished NYC’s geography and made Central Park look like a small square. From Visual Complexity:
The result was a design solution of surprising beauty. However, Massimo Vignelli reached a level of abstraction that quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. For instance, Vignelli’s map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide. It is said that Vignelli had planned a second, complementary map that would have been more tied to the actual above-ground geography, but the city never let him do it.
It’s still debatable whether or not people would have eventually figured out Vignelli’s abstract leap of faith, but that leads to a bigger question: Are public transit maps a forum for adventurous design moves? And how do we define “adventurous”?
All that said, I’m an apologist for government transit agencies. Whether or not they have a good handle on visual information design (which I think ultimately stems from having someone in charge with good design taste), they’re doing the best they can. Releasing an updated version shows that NJT is cognizant of helping customers figure out where they’re going. And the MTA, despite the persistent news budget troubles and service interruptions — still gets a lot of people from here to there and wants to do better, and is always tweaking their map.
From Transit Maps:
Far from being the paradigm of customer friendliness that was promised, this map comes across as sad, tired and amateur.
I feel that there has to be a better solution than this, where the light rail systems around Hoboken and Newark are crammed into a tiny space with miniscule station names, while vast amounts of space remain empty throughout the rest of the state.
Unfortunately, despite its best intentions, this map is hideous.
And from Second Avenue Sagas, regarding the scope of the map:
Still, despite the upgrades, there’s no small bit of state-based protectionism involved. While the PATH system gets its day in the sun and the Port Jervis line branches into New York, New Jersey Transit pays scant attention to SEPTA’s connection from Trenton to Philadelphia and beyond. Transit networks are regional, but this map doesn’t extend far beyond the borders of the Garden State.
See the PDF here on the NJ Transit website.
via twitter.com
Erik Spiekermann on the problem with getting good design done:
We have great architects, we have great designers, we have great engineers. We don’t have clients. What we need is culture of clients.
via fastcodesign.com
“The Japanese have a term for this, ‘Wabi-sabi’. Wabi-sabi can be used to describe the aesthetically pleasing wear of an object as it decays over time. It’s a notion that embraces the transience of objects and celebrates the purity of the imperfect.”
The trick is to figure out what you’re good at.
via observatory.designobserver.com
via Sage advice, for the design student: Observatory: Design Observer
