It is a little world
- Cubed
In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
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.”
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!)