A Lesson in Science Fiction
Do you remember the television series Star Trek? It doesn’t really matter if you specifically recall the original series from the 1960s, Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, Mr. Spock Goes to Washington, or any of the other infinite spin-off series, feature films, or franchise action figures for this article to make sense. What matters is that you are familiar with the little communication devices the characters used. In the original series, the main method of communication was with these little cell phone/walky-talky thingies ironically called communicators. In the later series, the communicators were less like cell phones and more like an attractive broach one wore on the left side of their chest. Both versions pretty much had the same function. All it took was one tap on the broach (or a flip of the cover in the case of the earlier models) and the characters could talk to someone important like the Science Officer, the Engineer or the attractive nurse on Deck 27.
In the days before cell phones (and even up through the days when the average cell phone was about the size of a toaster), these little science fiction devices were considered pretty cool. Sure, starships and phasers were nice to have, but they had been around since the Buck Rogers stories of the 1930s. These hot little items were something that let you talk to another person on the other side of the planet – now that was real technology!
From a historical point of view, the little communication devices used in those television shows are pretty amusing. They represented the pinnacle of where we thought the best technological advances would take us in a couple of hundred years, yet they were so limited. While it was possible to ask Mr. Scott when the warp drive would be repaired, the great science fiction minds of the age couldn’t even begin to imagine what similar devices would be able to do in the real world, just a few decades in the future. The typical twelve-year-old girls of today would scoff at the primitiveness of the single function device and they would do this while posting a link to a “Charlie the Unicorn” video on their Facebook page and texting their BFF.
Let’s talk about smart phones. You can use them to take photos, shoot video, access the vast amounts of information on the internet in an instant, stream movies, tell you where you are and how to get where you are going, text your mom, store all of your favorite music and videos, locate a decent Italian restaurant in your price range and slingshot irritated avian creatures at swine. The new iPhones have about 1,000 times the processing speed and eight million times the memory of the computers that were used to send men to the moon. That’s right. Comparatively speaking, using your iPhone to do something simple (like function as a calculator or as an alarm clock) is like using the entire U.S. Marine Corp. and several members of Congress to microwave a little popcorn while you watch Netflix. That little phone has more technology crammed into it than entire nations could produce a few short years ago. Actually, the GPS systems that everyone takes for granted were probably still a military secret within your own lifetime.
Imagine what Spock could do if he beamed down to a planet with an iPhone! The Romulans wouldn’t stand a chance and there would be no need for the Vulcan Mind Meld – Spock could just suck everything out of your phone with a little Bluetooth app…including the plans for the Death Star, all of Yoda’s emails and a hidden picture of Princess Leia in her brass bikini.
But what about design? Well, the short version of all this is that we didn’t see it coming and now we designers are trying to catch up. It wasn’t that long ago that everyone was designing for the Web; a Web that was viewed on larger and larger monitors had ever-increasing bandwidth and Flash – lots of Flash.
Now everything has changed. We watch videos on tiny touch-screens, and Web pages that once looked good on a screen the size of a small third-world country are now a frustrating mess of scrolling. The nature of how we communicate is changing. It is all because of the Internet and those little devices we carry in our back pockets, yet we are using the same design ideas that worked for us with the old forms of communication. The same thing occurred with the advent of the Web; designers used all of the tricks they learned for print media, but didn’t always do a good job at making the jump to the new technology.
It wasn’t until we began using Web pages in new ways that we had some real design breakthroughs. The best example I can give is a comparison between the first Web pages and the more interactive sites that allowed viewers to actually participate and contribute content. Those first pages were just the same as printed pages, except they were displayed on a computer monitor. “Interactivity” was clicking on a link that took the viewer to the next page. Heck, you could do that with a magazine, but at least with a magazine it had more than one function because you could always roll it up and whack your annoying little brother with it. Try doing that with a computer.
Finally, someone figured out that the computers were more than just expensive magazines and began allowing viewers to not only read, but to write things as well. This was something new and designers changed their approach to accommodate the use of the site. While it is true that this new communication technology gave birth to “flame wars” and “trolls”, it was still all a major step forward. For these sites, the goal of the design became less about forcing the ideas of some company (or some really weird conspiracy theorist) on the viewer and more about making the site better for viewer participation.
The nature of how we communicate is changing.”
But what is it that designers are doing differently? To answer that question, it might be beneficial to take a look at the typical design process and then try to make some adjustments for this new concept. From a pragmatic design perspective, the first question you should ask yourself (or your client) before beginning a design is “What is the goal of the project?”
If you have the answer to that question, most of the design decisions you deal with will have an obvious solution. For example, if the project goal is to sell people items on the Internet, then you should probably include an e-commerce section as a part of your Web site design. Or in the case of a magazine ad, the goal might be to encourage readers to go to a certain store and purchase a certain product. If that is the case, the name of the store should be included in the design.
All of this might be painfully obvious, but you would be surprised how often the obvious is completely overlooked by stressed out designers trying to make a deadline. Just a few months ago, I received a beautiful, multi-page flyer in the mail. The flyer had page after page of great deals on pool supplies. As a pool owner, I was very intrigued and I saw many new, fanciful items that I was certain I needed to purchase right away. Unfortunately, the name or location of the store was not mentioned anywhere in the design. I searched every page and the only place I could find it was on the return address in the mailing information. Needless to say, I never made it to the store to buy the inflatable “singing shark” pool scrubber. The lesson here is that there needs to be another part added to the “goal” question. With so many different forms of media, the new question should be “What is the project’s goal and how will the audience use it?”
A great example of how a little modification to the Prime Directive of design questions can make a good design, great design is an app I have installed on my iPhone. This entire app really only amounts to a simple star chart, which gives the location of the planets and constellations. Of course, something like this can be done on paper, but this app really understands how a user will use the iPhone. Instead of just showing you the stars and planets on a tiny, little screen, it uses the camera and GPS system in real time. You simply aim the camera at the sky and all the stars on the phone’s screen appear with their name and constellation beside them in a nice san serif font (because the designers knew that serifs might not show up very well on the monitor). Touching a planet or a star on the screen gives you instant data straight from Wikipedia. Even Captain Picard would be jealous! The design is a simple, pure visual display that has taken into consideration what the user would want and how the user would use the design, rather than just making a poor attempt at creating a star chart that fits on a tint screen.
So there you have it – the birth of a new design trend! As designers, our mission is to boldly design for new media, instead of just forcing new media to look how we designed other stuff before.
James Bennett
Dean of Instructional Technology
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