Laurel Schwulst
When all of my friends are on at once
A Website by Laurel SchwulstMemories of being online
A shifting house next to a river of knowledge
An Essay by Laurel SchwulstMy website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
Craft and Material in Digital Design
A little bit more about the stone
In the documentary Rivers and Tides, artist Andy Goldsworthy repeatedly struggles to stack stones into a sculptural cairn. Over and over the stones fall. Each time, Andy’s sculpture stands a little taller before the moment of failure. At a penultimate moment in the episode, the ever-patient Goldsworthy begins to look exasperated. He’s just staring at the rocks scattered on the ground, studying them intently. A curious passerby has watched him fail a few times, and Andy tells the man, “Every time, I learn a little bit more about the stone. I’m learning how it works.”
It is how we come to understand our medium
There is such a unique quality to experiential learning, through direct experience with a material. It cannot be substituted through lectures or books. It must be felt. It must be earned through time well spent, through making and failing and re-making. It is how we come to understand our medium.
If you’re a digital designer who doesn’t understand basic principles of computer science, or has never written a bit of code, or has never built a website, what are you doing? What can you say about the material you shape?
The idea that designers in the information age shouldn’t waste their time with this skill baffles me. It is woefully misguided advice.
A digital designer who has not learned the nature of their medium is a designer unprepared to argue for their vision. This is a designer who is unable to push back against the criticism of skeptical engineers. This is a designer who risks offering opinions instead of solutions.
If you are crafting experiences in the digital space, you should know what’s required to implement your ideas. You should try implementing it yourself, (if only to build empathy with your developers!)