Interfacial Relations 4
Volume Number: 7
Issue Number: 7
Column Tag: Developer's Forum
Interfacial Relations: Part IV
By Joost Romeu, Huntsville, AL
Part IV: Designer’s Vision
Conventional design subscribes to the laws of a Newtonian hardware universe.
Computer software can create relativistic worlds which can separate fact from friction
and control interface relationally. The difference? Newtonian apples disintegrate in
time; Apple Macintosh software can be designed to mature with time.
Forgetting this fact, and motivated by short term rewards rather than long term
respect, we’re accepting impressions over improvements and designing software that
may, like other “labor saving” devices, enslave, rather than liberate us.
Symptoms are starting to show. The machine for the “rest of us” now requires
specialists. Reformatting, optimizing, ATMing, INITing, and CDEVing our way through
an increasingly complex desktop, we’ve moved from wide-eyed wonder to red-eyed
reticence. Substituting dealer support for evangelism, Apple seems more interested in
customers than believers.
System 71 will relieve many desktop anxieties and provide developers with
exciting software extension possibilities. But Apple’s metaphor-ridden fast track is
becoming a rush-hour quagmire. The human interface as we know it has become an
industry standard--interesting, supportive, and educational--but hardly visionary.
Part IV, calls for visionaries. It discusses differences between traditional design
and software design. It concentrates on the role of the designer, and the opportunity
interface provides for restoring vision to the Macintosh.
Design Principles
“The (software) designer, instead of simply making an object or thing, is
actually creating a persuasive argument that comes to life whenever a user considers
or uses a product as a means to some end.”2 The designer, expressing subjective issues
such as taste, direction, focus, etc. is attempting to convey a specific message.
Understanding the message requires studying the program in context.
Context includes the background of the discipline the program addresses, the
historical predispositions and present capabilities of the interface, the needs and
proclivities of the contemporary user, and the designer’s vision. A database designer
should, for example, consider the way information has traditionally been ga thered; the
computer’s ability to access, manipulate, and present that information; user demands
and desires; and finally his/her personal vision how the process might be improved.
(The call for vision is not farfetched. Industrial and architectural designs usually
require the user approach the tool or space slightly differently than the way he/she was
accustomed. Software interface design may be unique in that it often goes out of its way
to try to accommodate the way things have been traditionally done.)
Context spans time. From the past it gathers the skills, from the present the
promise, and from the future the hope. The designer combines these factors to form a
design “statement.”
Limited by the constraints of physicality, conventional design addresses the
world monophonically. The computer world--the world of visualization and
simulation--isn’t so constrained. It has the ability to radically change the static
“statement” into an interactive “ dialog.” Traditional interface design fills a need.
Visionary interface establishes directions. Relational interface epitomizes real time
dialog.
Design Rules
Good design is dictated by rules. But the rules that define good design are
fundamentally different than those that govern other disciplines. Whereas other