Printing On Water

Approaching the River

I am not a Luddite. Let’s start with that. I work in the interactive new media industry, but I have both a healthy respect and a healthy suspicion of technology. I look for the reasons why we design things the way we do, for reasons why some things inexplicably “work” and others don’t.

In trying to explain design, sometimes stepping back to look for context – historical, cognitive, technological – and the re-approaching the project, is helpful. Communication has an immensely complex history, one that has been examined on many levels by people in a myriad of fields. There is a lot that we don’t know yet, a lot more that we “know” but have not articulated well, and – related to this – a lot that we know but that we have forgotten that we know.

Tibetan monks used to sit on the banks of streams ‘printing pages of charms and formulas on the surface of the water with woodcut blocks.’1 While the religious significance of this act is not to be trivialized, I would like to cautiously borrow the image to serve here as a reference point.

The beauty of the scene, allegorically, is in the combination of the discrete (the woodcut blocks) and the continuous (the stream). Much of what we are wrestling with as designers is wrapped up in this simple idea.

We begin here then by stepping back. This in order to gain perspective.

Perspective

When Red Sky begins new projects – especially with new clients – we work hard at finding a different perspective, a different angle on the opportunity at hand. Clients are typically very close to tactical objectives, their particular “brandedness”, how they market to others right now, etc. At the beginning we attempt to “pull back” from the tactical, forget about limitations, and blue sky about what we’d love to do if we were unfettered by the realities of production or technology.

Perspective, the word, has great application here because it has meaning in both physical and temporal senses. While a lot of new media design mirrors notable events in the development of art (including perspective, realism, dimensionality, impressionism, etc.) that’s not the point we want to focus on here (although it would make a great discussion). Instead, I’m more interested in the temporal sense of perspective; in looking at the macroeconomics of new media design in order to better explain some of the microeconomics.

Here are the points I would like to try to establish in this essay:

• New media does not afford us the luxury of ignoring traditional media and communication, but rather relies on our ability as designers and information engineers to leverage what we have learned in the recent and distant past, to do things we have not been able to do before.

  
  

• There are two aspects of media – the discrete and the continuous – and two aspects of communication – broadcast and interactive – that can help us better understand the implications of designing for the combination of these represented by on-line.

  
  

• Technology changes, many principles of communication remain the same. While renaissance designers will need both creative and technical experience, the emphasis is on the creative, grounded firmly in a deep understanding of storytelling, metaphor, and symbol.

Four States, Three Transitions, and a Full Circle

My point is difficult to make without grossly oversimplifying a few things. With all due respect to the cultural anthropologists, who will flinch at much of this, I’d like to describe four states of communication that we can begin to group all communication methods into, and three significant transitions in the history of communication. This is all in an attempt to say that in some ways we have come full circle, as others have pointed out besides me, with technology ironically affording us the ability to communicate with a richness and interactivity that has not been a regular part of life for centuries.

Let’s set up a few ideas before we get started.

Four States of Communication

I’d like to suggest that almost any form of communication can be logically grouped into four categories with certain characteristics. I define these as:

Category Example

Discrete / Broadcast Communication Book

Continuous / Broadcast Communication Television

Discrete / Interactive Communication CD-ROM

Continuous / Interactive Communication WWW, ITV

Three Important Transitions in Communication

Three great transitions in communications history are of particular relevance here. These are:

• The transition from speech to writing,

• the transition from writing to printing, and

• the transition from printing to new media.

Coming Full Circle

In Orality and Literacy [Father Walter] Ong argues that computers have brought us into what he terms an age of ‘secondary orality’ that ‘has striking resemblances to the old [oral, preliterate culture] in its participatory mystique, its fostering of communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas.’2 Designing for this ‘secondary orality’is another transition on the scale of the three I’ve selected from history. But let’s go back to examine why.

Remembrance of Songs Sung

The Transition from Speech to Writing

Preliterate communication was far richer than today. Plenty of people would argue with me, I’ll stand by the point. Without the means to physically record ideas, people relied on mnemonic, iconic, anthropomorphic, and – most importantly – poetic and rhythmic techniques to “store” information. Storytelling was an intensely interactive and rich endeavor; the “technology” of the medium – voice, facial expression, body language, and instrument – greatly exceeded in many respects what we consider the richest electronic media of today – film, television, the computer.

The vestigial remains of preliterate communication can be found in opera and theater and other venues, but have evolved to meet the needs and expectations of a post-literate audience; we have over time undergone subtle, yet irreversible, changes in response to literacy and technology that would make the comprehension of pre-literate media – if it were even possible to reconstruct accurately – difficult.

Good design for ancient Greek storytellers and performers involved the use of mnemonic cues, allegorical references (which evolved into myth and the anthropomorphism of nature), signs, symbols and icons. Communication was very personal and highly interactive. Close proximity to audience allowed virtual control of performance through human response – facial expression, sound, the throwing of fruit.

Theater, opera, and other public forums still retain vestigial characteristics of our pre-literate culture. But much, as the historians will tell you, is gone. The first significant transition – from spoken, pre-literate communication to written, post-literate communication – resulted in a pervasive cognitive change (over a long period of time granted) in society.

“Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself.”3 The transition from an oral culture to a written one introduced formal introspection and the concept of the “privacy” of a dialogue between author and reader, performer and audience. This is also the first example of a transition that in a sense ‘disabled’ certain ways of communication that we may never discover again.

As Father Ong eloquently put it, “learning to read and write disables the oral poet ...it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are ‘the remembrance of songs sung’.”

Because there was no mass literate public, this transition tended to result in archives and libraries for the elite class strangely similar to a period in recent history of document management and technical communication that was the Internet before it was “discovered” by the masses, the elite class being academia and government,

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274-7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. These included: writing is inhuman, a manufactured product; writing destroys memory; a written text is basically unresponsive; writing cannot defend itself as in the oral give and take. Print created similar misgivings when introduced.

Characteristics of Spoken Communication

• falls in the category of Continuous / Interactive Communication

• characterized by emotional, non-sequential thought

• a public, collective experience

• multi-channel, benefited from performance

• strongly influenced sign, symbol, icon, mnemonic development

• strongly influenced allegorical and mythological development

• examples include storytelling, theater, opera

Characteristics of Written Communication

• falls in the category of Discrete / Broadcast communication

• characterized by sequential development and self-containment

• an individual vs. collective experience

• single-channel, benefited from elaborate, formal verbiage and ornamentation

• strongly influenced the development of logical, sequential thought

• the written word brought a “legitimacy”, sometimes false, to points of view

• examples include medieval manuscripts, letters

The “Splendid Isolation” of the Book

The Transition from Writing to Print

The transition from writing to print is a subtle one, but of extreme importance to thought and social development. The fifty years after the popularization of the Gutenberg press – roughly the first half of the 16th century – is popularly known as the incunabula (from the Latin “in cradle”). Since books were previously copied by hand in very limited numbers their use was primarily limited to royalty or the wealthy literate – which were few. The incunabula represented what many have called the first true Democratization of the Word. The cultural impact, however, was not immediate (a point we will refer back to later) because there was not a literate public.

Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity.6 It was also a major factor in the development of the sense of personal privacy that marks modern society ... setting the stage psychologically for solo reading in a quiet corner, and eventually for completely silent reading.

So long as text is married to physical media, readers and writers have taken for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed.8 The book marks the primary and best example of discrete media.

Characteristics of Printed Communication

• falls in the category of Discrete / Broadcast Communication

• characterized by emotional or logical sequential thought and self-containment

• print led the evolution from elite individual to mass individual experience, especially with the development of the novel

• strongly influenced the development of the “ideal” audience and first principles of “mass” communication\

• print frequently associated with the “democratization of the word”

• examples include books, magazines

The Transition from Print to New Media

“New media,” like the term “multimedia” has been used so promiscuously that it has almost lost real meaning. The “digital incunabula” of the past 50 years has nonetheless required of us to coin new terms to describe the impact of electronics, communication, the computer and binary / digital information processing. I loosely refer here to new media as representing most of what has happened since the development of print. On the historical timeline, even the telephone and film are “new media”.

The transition from print to new media marked the modern (20th century) rush to build what McLuhan called the Global Village. In my ongoing tendency to oversimplify things, the most important of the sub-transitions of the period included:

• the transition from text-based to graphical / aural communication (film, television, radio)

• the transition from linear to non-linear communication (hypertext / on-line)

• the transition from discrete to continuous content (from books / film to television / multi-user experiences)

We are moving, inexorably, back toward forms of communication that are richer visually, aurally and experientially – new orality – that we, as audiences and designers are not necessarily prepared for. At present we seem to take visual literacy as a given despite the fact that our entire educational process aims at verbal literacy at the expense of the visual.9 We’ve now come full circle in a sense. Technology has re-introduced a macro-community through networking, increased bandwidth, and hence richness, that will allow a new oral discourse.

“The earlier historical transition from orality to script – a transition greeted with considerable alarm by Socrates and his followers – changed the rules of intellectual procedure completely. Written texts could be transmitted, studied, and annotated; knowledge could rear itself upon a stable base. And the shift from script to mechanical type and the consequent spread of literacy among the laity is said by many to have made the Enlightenment possible. Yet now it is computers, in one sense the very apotheosis of applied rationality, that are de stabilizing the authority of the printed word and returning us, although at a different part of the spiral, to the process orientation that characterized oral cultures.” (Ong)

In terms of advertising (an inescapable reality), we are back to talking to individuals again, but one-to-one marketing, which is all the rage right now, is somewhat of a myth. If you are talking about one company out there, and many consumers, that company can of course tailor messages to each of those consumers. Easy. The reality, however, is that there are thousands of companies (or will be) vying for that consumers time now. It’s really many-to-one marketing (a complete flip from one-to-many marketing, the traditional mass marketing of the “past”). Jerry Mander, in his book “Five Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” related mass media advertising to a “standard guage railway”, with marketers marketing to an “ideal” public that did not in reality originally exist, yet began to over time as advertising had its Darwinian affect on the public. One-to-one advertising will require an “infinite guage” railway (yes, one-to-one marketing), but only the best content, the best storytellers, the best creative, will get the patronage of the public.

Characteristics of Conventional New Media

• currently falls (with a few exceptions) in the category of Continuous / Broadcast Communication

• characterized by passive consumption, minimal participation, manipulative content

• examples include radio, television, film

Characteristics of Future New Media

• should (a very important point of this essay) fall in the category of Continuous / Interactive Communication, which, by definition, includes some form of online (including wireless)

• however, designers should understand those aspects of discrete media that are still important and use them as competitive advantage in the pursuit of audience / participants

• characterized by active consumption, high participation (physical, cognitive), self-exploratory, collaborative and/or unpredictable content, high volatility

• represents a new form of individual as well as collective experience

• examples include online interactive media, e.g. the web

“Alone” on a Wide, Wide Sea

Alone, alone, - all, all alone;

Alone on a wide, wide sea.

Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner

The combination of extremely powerful computers and increasingly extensive and friendly communications have combined to create a medium that is actually the amalgam of many (I refuse to use the word “convergence” anymore). Along with that has come the need for designers with new skills and perspectives, and an audience that is able to play a role they have never played before. Are we “alone” as we surf the net? Or is this a massively participatory and collaborative environment that is simply waiting for the right stage to be set?

The New Democratization of the Word

The shock St. Augustine reports he felt the first time he saw someone reading silently to himself beneath a tree is hauntingly similar to the consideration of the individual logged onto the web, silently (figuratively speaking) participating in the most massive communication environment we have ever known.

While the book spread knowledge at an astounding rate, and began to level the playing field of privilege, the creation of the content was still largely autocratic. The printed word was not quite the true democratization of the word. Getting published has always been difficult. Now the problem is only getting audience.

Ironically, we have in some respects seen a swing from the autocracy of the word (the publishing, broadcast industries) all the way to something that looks a bit more like anarchy. The web frequently reminds me of the Mel Gibson Mad Max films. While Ted Nelson and others have taken a swing at bringing some suggested order to this anarchy, what it really will boil down to is good old fashioned supply and demand. The new democratization of the word is really the democratization of publishing. The barriers to entry are, right now, pretty low. But as demand drives the provision of content to the richer and more responsive end of the spectrum – toward a new orality of communication – which requires deep creativity and high interactivity, the barriers to entry will raise. We will approach the need to craft and distribute “experience”.

The Democratization of Experience

“Infinite processing power will only get you so far with limited bandwidth. But the coming era of nearly free bandwidth will liberate the computer to fulfill its powers. Just as the 1980’s saw the demolition of the vertical structure of the computer industry, so the 1990’s will see the demolition of the vertical structure of the communications industry.” (Ong)

A “literate” public is required before the impact of a new technology is really felt. In a sense, on-line marketers are increasingly seeing the “consumer as apprentice... learning by discipleship, by participating in the message, practicing, helping to craft.”12 The WWW and browsers have in effect become the Gutenberg press of the digital incunabula, but we have not yet seen the true realization of the potential. “In 1997, multimedia as we know it dies. Interactive telemedia takes its place.”13 We are seeing now the collapse of the boundaries between ‘author’ and ‘reader’, between ‘filmmaker’ and ‘audience’.

Transparency of the Delivery Mechanism, Immersion

I wasn’t sure where to put this point, so I’ll put it here. It needs to be made. With the introduction of a new communication technology the focus is usually first on the mechanism itself, the wondrous box. The technology is always invasive, but never more than at its introduction. Early theaters prominently displayed the technology (as the “new” IMAX theaters still do). “Magic Lanterns” smoldered in the same room with the audience. Early televisions were all box and knobs with a tiny screen. Today’s televisions are an expanse of glass seemingly floating in space, with controls hidden behind panels.

The important comparison here is with today’s browsers. They’re all box and knobs surrounding a screen. I’m sure we will see them recede to the edge of the screen soon, once the novelty of their function has waned, and allow the content to take over. Jerry Mander refers to “the illusion of neutral technology”. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” speaks also to the invasiveness of the delivery mechanism. But its receding to the edge of the screen and then off underlines the point that we are moving back into a space where the content, the story, the image, the sound, the natural interactivity, is all.

Printing on Water

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
T.S. Eliot

In a sense, we are reliving the early days of television when filming radio shows was novel, but did not represent tremendous added value. When cameras were taken out into the world and to the scene of events and stories, television came into its own. Interactive new media is still a “horse-less carriage”; we have not transitioned into realizing the “automobile” yet. In other words, the industry is largely viewing interactive new media and online as incremental “improvements” to traditional media – which is evident in tentative, lackluster design – and not as a combination of molecules that have made up an entirely new element. We can now build things we have not built before.

“The page is flat, opaque. The screen is of indeterminate depth – the word floats on the surface like a leaf on a river. Phenomenologically, that word is less absolute. The leaf on the river is not the leaf plucked out and held in the hand. The words that appear and disappear on the screen are naturally perceived less as isolated counters and more as the constituent elements of some larger, more fluid process. This is not a matter of one being bettor or worse, but different.” (Ong)

Historical analysis is just a lot of rhetoric unless some practical application is derived. I hope the discussion to this point has induced a different perspective on new media. But just in case, a couple of very specific ideas are worth exploring in a little more detail. Try applying these to current projects and see if anything happens.

Ask Why First

If certain content can be better served in an alternative medium, do so. Don’t put it online unless you can instill a perception of clear value in the user. At Red Sky we refer to the violation of this rule as “gratuitous digitization” or “gratuitous conversion”.

Posting your corporate brochure to the web is succumbing to novelty. It is neither good design or good communication. It will probably not help you much. Most of what I see on the web today I would be happier to have received in the form of a brochure (saving the earth aside).

Depth works alone for now, breadth does not. Providing comprehensive information about a particular concept is far more acceptable online than providing very general information about a range of concepts. One of my favorite ironies is that the specific is always easier than the general.

Tell Stories, Make Connections

Almost anything can be improved by a story. If you buy the idea that we are living the new orality, then you buy this.

Balance High-Tech and High Touch

It’s tempting to lean, conceptually, on the high-tech rather than the natural when designing for new media, because that is the aesthetic of almost everything involved in its production; computers, software, programmers, engineers. Red Sky was founded in part on the concept of balancing high-tech and “high-touch”. We have, in fact, become known for our ability to “soften the edges” of digital interactive experience and to create environments that are “hauntingly familiar” to users through soft metaphor.

Our basic rules are simply:

• do not let technology over-influence design, and

• do not let design over-influence technology.

What this means is, once there is a “shoot for the moon, land on the roof” concept, do not let the technologists reduce it too far with their patent comments like “can’t be done.” (I can say this because I am a programmer first and foremost.) Similarly, do not let the aesthetisists (the creative department) constrain the functionality of the product with their patent comments like “I really don’t think we should animate that.” (I can say this because I have done plenty of animation and know how hard it really is.)

What we’re really trying to do is avoid what Mander calls “the bias toward technique as replacement of content,” and, I would add as corollary, the bias toward content as replacement of technique. We see the former in the current twitch games on the market. We see the latter in most of the current CD-ROM offerings.

Try Soft Metaphors Instead of Hard

Red Sky frequently applies a technique we call “soft metaphor”. Something we have never quite understood from a cognitive perspective is the much-overused technique of creating literal physical space on the computer screen. Why put a bank lobby on screen as a navigational aid? Really. When you think about it does it help, or does it just get in the way?

What we mean by “soft metaphor” is the creation of environments that break some of the rules of physics, of interface design, of “high-tech”, and yet still are “hauntingly familiar” to the user. Familiar enough that, while it is not something they recognize from the physical world (e.g. a modeled bank lobby), it is something they very much recognize from their own aesthetics (e.g. wood, brass, green felt, engraved paper).

This is all well and good, but, as designers who work frequently with large corporations, one should never lose sight of the “brandedness” of the product where that is important (which is usually every job we work on). It’s OK to stretch the brand a little bit – there are new things to do in a new medium – but do as we do and compare your designs with those of the company’s in their other advertising channels; outdoor, broadcast, print, even radio.

Balance “Continuousness” and “Discreteness”

“The volume of information presented by a seamless information data pool implies that more information is better or more inclusive. In reality, more information simply requires the user to consider and process more information that may be indiscriminable.”

What we also think is dangerous, and violates the balance between what you can do and what you should, is invoking a feeling of “choice shock” in the user. This happens through providing so many options, typically without concept or metaphor, that the user comes nearly to a stop – much like the tale of the donkey stuck midway between two hanging carrots. “Enter and explore” is a condemnation, not a solution.17 We are balancing here the absolute narrative control of the book with the total anarchy of hyperspace. And there are all kinds of balances that work. Consider for a moment the regulation that must be behind the signage on a typical American superhighway. Crack the Yellow Pages. Think about flying all the way across the “virtual” country in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Quantity is easier than quality.

Shoot for the Moon, Land on the Roof

Another favorite Red Sky motto. What we mean by "shoot for the moon, land on the roof" is to throw out reality for a while when designing new content. Imagine what would be the most effective way to communicate a message in a world where there were no technological, logistical, financial, or political constraints. Got it? Ok, now work back from there. Usually we find that on the way we have developed a strong concept that, even after paring back to what can be done, retains enough magic to be exceptional against the field.

When you take this approach, a few things happen. You irreverently throw out “traditional” interface design for one, which, as studied and “safe” as it is, was still developed for pre-multimedia communication. You begin to see the “automobile” instead of just the “horse-less carriage;” the paradigm shifts instead of just the incremental improvements.

The web is not a “quaint” extension of books, radio, or TV. Why treat it as such? Just as in the early days of television, we are still, figuratively speaking, standing in the radio station pointing cameras at radio personalities doing monologues. Time to take the cameras out of the studio.

A Theorem of Truth in Design

I’d like to end with a developing theorem, one that binds much of this together but is, by definition in its relation to new media, never complete.

The combination of new media and online has created a vast new territory to explore. Design, on technical and creative axes, will range more widely than at any time in history. Innovation will be tremendous. Public response to design will shift like big weather patterns across the surface, and be subject to about the extent of predictability we have now; we can look about a week out. That’s all.

We’re printing on water here. Some aspects of human communication will always stay the same; our love of story, of music, of symbol, of myth. Some aspects of communication, without a doubt, are ever- changing. Technology is moving at such a pace that it constantly distracts us with novelty which we frequently misinterpret as improvement. The key is to let go of technology. It is the stream that will always run. You won’t be able to stop it. You can print on it, however, at any moment. Use whatever technology that is in front of you at the time.

Ultimately, the real power is in the wood block, the content. The best designers will find truth in design not from technology, but by a clear focus on what has always made people communicate; information that is compelling, well-crafted and performed, and that responds well to applause.