The Shapeshifter
January 9th, 2007
It’s a really good thing I didn’t let the title of one of A List Apart’s latest articles put me off from reading it. “How to Grok Web Standards” is Craig Cook’s thoughtful and elegant contribution to the ever-growing body of literature surrounding how we transform good web designers into great web designers.
As I read the article, I though to myself, “This is awfully tender for an ALA article,” by which I meant that that article was written with heart, with soul, with an almost spiritual underpinning. Aspects of the article reminded me of my own article, “Gentle Reader Stay Awhile“, published on ALA back in August, in that his ideas reached beyond conventional web wisdom and touched on something even more fundamental and ultimately more important: the philosophy of why we do what we do.
Although Craig outwardly only asks us to “think like” a writer, an engineer, and an artist, the subtext really says, “Become what you need to become in order to breathe life into your work.” The article doesn’t advocate imitation, though the language might suggest that at first glance. What the article really does is guide the designer through a process of emotional and intellectual metamorphoses. Designers have a very peculiar job: though we are often classified as artists, what we do is even more subtle and complex than that. Designers are translators, shaping myth, nuance, need, and desire into usable objects, ideas, or theories. We take abstract thoughts and impulses (”I need a place to sit down!”) and form them into something concrete, something that we use (a Lazy Boy, a stool). In doing this, we use many tools, most of which are not tangible or obvious. We use what we know of history, of culture, of the present zeitgeist to create something intuitive and delightful to use. What designers really do is orchestrate meaningful and engaging experiences. When it comes to web design, that means using the mental tools of the writer, the artist, the architect, the engineer to mold order out of chaos, beauty out of the mundane. But mere imitation isn’t enough: we can’t simply pretend we are writers, or engineers. We have to, if even for a moment, be those things. We might not be terribly adept at it, but we have to make an honest effort to channel the wisdom those disciplines offer in order to shape the best user experience possible.
What could we accomplish in this industry if we tossed out what we think we know, what we assume, about the various roles and processes of web publishing, and simply started doing from scratch?What if we didn’t allow designers to say, “I’m not a writer”, or writers to say, “I’m not a programmer” and simply asked each person involved in the web creation process to imagine a web experience as it ought to be experienced? What could we do, collectively and individually, if we didn’t think of ourselves in restrictive terms, and didn’t worry about what we didn’t know how to do? What would we create is we created with an eye toward what might be, instead of what currently is? Every person in the web creation process should ideally have a holistic view and understanding of what it takes to create a complete and fulfilling user experience. And, to quote philosopher Ken Wilber, “if you want to know this, do this”. If writers want to know what graphic designers know, writers should become designers and do design. And I don’t mean that they should learn to use the artist’s physical tools. Rather, they should learn to think of writing as an act of design. How do the words come together to create a certain effect? How do the visual aesthetics of a block of text contribute to a page? Similarly, if designers want to know what writers know, they have to become writers, and ask the questions writers ask: what does this shape mean? What are the connotations of this space? What does this combination of elements mean, and what does it say?
The internal metamorphosis of the designer is a subtle but important aspect of shaping the web into something personal–the real end goal of Web 2.0. If the web is to be human the way that literature and art are, if the web is to shape this culture in the same elegant and definitive ways, those of us who lend our hands and voices to its shaping have to learn to transform. If we leave our assumptions at the door, what can we create? What can we do? Where will we go from here?