Interface as Activism - The Designer’s role in defining the web

Christopher Robbins is currently working on a flash experiment in Web storytelling, in which the Web isn't merely the medium, but an active character as well.

MARCH 2001, by Christopher Robbins
I am examining webactivism in this article not as keeping the web in the hands of the people, nor as utilitising the Internet as an activist's tool. In this particular instance, I am discussing webactivism as expanding awareness of the web to encompass all it truly, well, encompasses.

Navigation as a paradigm for a new world order? Form and function attached only through metaphor? Interface as activism?

Hollow buzzwords and self-important hype?

Well, yes. To all of it.

A lot of highbrow terms have crept into the web designer's vocabulary, and for the most part, these have only been used as gimmicks to add to the smoke and mirrors through which we charge exorbitant fees for something which is still, to be perfectly honest with ourselves, experimentation.

But there is a reason these concepts have entered our dialogue.

In the past few years, the web designer's role has grown enormously. Three years ago, someone might have been considered a web designer if he or she could lay out content in a pretty way on a web page.

As our collective understanding of the ways people interact with the web has matured, the designer's role has expanded to include aspects of what has been primarily the domain of the software engineer, the industrial designer, the urban planner, the architect and the social-pyschologist.

Interface is no longer merely a candy coating; it has a deep structure of many levels and functions. This is a result not only of our experimentation with interface, but of the development of the tools we have come to rely on in our experimentation as well.

A 'front-end' designer is not merely expected to to use mark-up language (much as typographical designers did before the advent of WYSIWYG desk-top publishing systems), but must be able to implement more advanced 'front-end' languages such as javascript.

As such, the designer cannot be concerned merely with how elements look on a page, but with how the user will identify with and manipulate or use those elements.

User-centredness is not just figuring out how people map things, it absolutely requires recognizing that the artefacts people interact with have enormous impact on how we think. [1]

...even at the most modest level, the way the... details... relate to the human...has an enormous impact...[2]

And we geeks still think the web has something to do with computers... A computer is not media. It can read media; it can make media; it can display media; it can broadcast media. But a computer is just a tool. [3]

...inclusive public space, in all its forms from grand to intimate, is critical for social integration and cohesion... We are perhaps the first generation committed to equal rights and are therefore faced with the challenge of creating a public domain that is truly inclusive and accessible to all - we must persevere with our attempts to evolve this institution to reflect our new age. [4]

These people were talking about, in this order, Industrial/product design, Architecture, the Internet and Urban Planning, and these statements all apply to our work on the web.

As our role as web designers expands to encompass aspects from all these fields, our duties expand as well. We are working through a very powerful medium, and we must live up to our powerful roles in this medium if we wish to embrace this shift in responsibility.

This is how interface became activism. Designing an interface is about more than defining rules and navigational aids, it defines the boundries for our experience of the web itself. Take someone who considers the web a great big email inbox, an electronic shopping mall, someplace to find pictures of Ginger Spice naked. Bring them to once-upon-a-forest, to presstube.
Watch the jaw drop.

To quote a user comment on alt0169.com, translated from Dutch:
Wow! This isn't a web site; this is art...But it's a web site too!

To most of us, the ambiguous and varied nature of the Web is obvious, but to the average user, this is quite a conceptual leap. The Guardian recently (26 Feb. 2001) announced that the Web is now 'officially' art, due to, get this, an event sponsored by Reuters! What would the net artists of the mid-nineties say?

Yet this conception is only beginning to affect most of the web-using population.

As interface designers, one of our duties is to show the general public just how diverse the web can be. It is our duty to blow their minds away with experiences that have nothing to do with usability, to shock, surprise, entreat. It is our duty to show the world what the web can be, that this silly dotcom bust was a failure of ignorant greed and marketing, not of the Web itself.

At the same time, as we explore the interface, it would be irresponsible to ignore its practical aspects. While we may garner appreciation for the artistic merits of the web through wild, shifting organic interfaces, if all the practical tools on the web are still being built according to ancient dogmatic standards, then we've done little but assure ourselves a sideline in some of the most exciting aspects of web development.

As such, we must expand our dialogue on interface design beyond the polar simplifications in which many designers are currently engaged. This involves everything we are learning through our involvement in the many fields now applied to our role in web design.

Many paradigms can be sucessfully applied to interface. With our talent and passion, we can expand usability beyond blue underlines to truly expressive, intuitive , humanistic design.
And that is our second duty: to call upon all the tools, skills and fields at our disposal to create truly innovative and usable interfaces.

Plumb-design's visual thesaurus and itch.co.uk are two oft-cited example of creative, intuitive interfaces, and that's just the beginning of what we can do, as we work towards melding form and function in a world where form is entirely abstract!

Our third duty in designing interface is accesibility. Currently, accesibility guidelines similiar to those involved in Urban Planning and Architecture are being applied to the web. We cannot be resposible builders of the web while continuing to neglect the blind user, the sight-impaired, the physically challenged.

For someone forced by various impairments into a solitary or sedentary existence, the internet is a godsend, and to properly apply the interface as activism, we must be sure to include these people in our concerns as well.

In all this talk of the importance of the designer's role in molding the experience and comprehension of the Internet, it is important to note that our role still pales in comparison to that of the programmers, the hackers.

Who made Napster? Who made email? Who made message boards? ICQ? Linux? Open source? Who made the Internet?

Not Al Gore, and not the designers.

But we do still have a crucial role in the development of the user's experience on the web, and if we neglect our power in defining and expanding the definition of the interface to the web, we are not only shortchanging the web-using world, but ourselves.

As usual, I'll finish up with some resources for your own further exploration of the topics I've mentioned.

http://www.nettime.org
http://detritus.net/contact/rumori
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
http://www.alistapart.com

Cities for a Small Planet, by R. Rogers & P. Gumuchdjian, Buttler & Tanner, Ltd, England, 1997. ISBN: 0-571-17993-2

Hertzian Tales, by Anthony Dunne, Art Books Intl Ltd; 2000. ISBN: 1874175276

END NOTES:
[1] R. Robinson, in Design Issues 10 (1), p. 32, via Brian Carroll on the mailing list.
[2] R. Rogers & P. Gumuchdjian, CITIES FOR A SMALL PLANET, p. 23
[3] C. Cloninger, A CASE FOR WEB STORY-TELLING, www.alistapart.com/stories/storytelling/article.txt
[4] R. Rogers & P. Gumuchdjian, CITIES FOR A SMALL PLANET, p. 152