This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
New Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of public spaces. Through walking tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen pushes pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.
At the core of the Brutalist ethos is a tension between two philosophies that have been the topic of a long-standing debate in information design: the merits of “seamless” and “seamful” design, “seams” in this context taken to mean revelations of an object’s inner workings.
Designers typically take seamlessness as the de facto standard for our work, emphasizing clarity, consistency, simplicity, efficiency, reducing cognitive load. We seek to minimize distractions.
Yet what if we can achieve a clearer understanding by intentionally revealing how a system works?
Hunstanton Secondary School (1954) in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson. Photo by Anna Armstrong (2011)
When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?
Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?
This, I think, is the brilliance of Notion, and what makes it one of the best examples of “fidelity to digital information” that I’ve come across. The structure of the app reflects the structure of the web itself: digital content is purposefully formatted, like semantic HTML elements, and exists in a hierarchical structure (directories on the web, nested pages in Notion), yet can be linked and referenced to create a complex network of information. And pages in Notion reveal the structure of the information: when nesting a page within a page, the child page always displays on the parent page. There’s no way to create a child page that doesn’t display on a parent page, no way to obscure the structure of the information. The semantic structure of Notion reflects the semantic structure of the web itself.
The concept of seamfulness prompts designers to ask how an object can aid understanding and usage by showing its users what’s going on inside. How can we create what Mark Weiser, later revising his ideas of seamless design, calls “beautiful seams” — thoughtfully-crafted moments of revelation? Notion doesn’t show us how it’s literally working — the background processes constantly running to enable editing, collaboration, and the like. We don’t need to see our car’s engine to know it’s running. But it shows users how their understanding is working, how our ideas are structured, connected, and evolving.