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New video just posted to YouTube channel in bio. #youtube #video #doc (at Milwaukee, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CmF2bUpN75x/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Week Fifteen — Final Thoughts.

For me, what I immediately consider when I think about the future of design is augmented reality and virtual reality, autonomous transport, and audio-exclusive interfaces. AR and VR exist in capacities today, but the former hasn’t really been cracked as of now: it is rumored that augmented reality devices by Apple and Meta are imminent, and before they are released, they must overcome a whole host of design challenges to succeed. An augmented reality device must reckon with issues in interface design and industrial and fashion design. These are all unsolved issues in the AR space, and so they are exciting future-forward areas where designers of all varieties must work together with engineering constraints to produce something successful. I think that autonomous transportation is a design issue because, beyond its engineering difficulties, self-driving vehicles have an immense psychological hurtle to overcome. Some people don’t want to relinquish control, and so, when you’re designing and marketing such a product, you have a unique challenge in implementing it in such a way that gets gradually accepted by the market. If the design is overzealous and counterintuitive, no matter how safe it is, it will be met with resistance. The last area that I think, while contemporary, still is very nascent and in-need of additional thinking is the area of personal assistants. The primary design issue with most voice-only interfaces that they, by nature, have no real hierarchy or sense of place. Like all of these issues, I think that this is an area where design is constrained by engineering: but such is the way with all areas of design, and indeed the entire field of graphic design is contingent on fairly recent technological advances. I think that, in the future, as these voice-first interfaces become more prevalent in AR, VR, and autonomous driving systems, that they will have to be redesigned to accommodate more than just ephemeral interactions and allow for more than just a speech-to-text-to-answer pipeline, instead being able to reify your vocalizations into imagery with the help of machine learning, allowing the virtual assistant to actually, well, assist you with your work much in the way that a human will provide you feedback or draft up responses and critiques to an idea you have.

Week 14 – Your Choice.

My predilection for design is primarily software design and industrial engineering. I find software design particularly interesting because it is a nascent field that is continually expanding and learning how to meet new and different demands. While we may say that the desktop operating system experience, with its indirect pointing methods (mouse, trackpad), numerous, overlapping, resizable windows, and direct file manipulation with drag and drop and access to the directory structure of the drive has aged into a mature interaction idiom, those in the software design field, through observing some of the complexities and counter-intuitive shortcomings of the interaction design, decided to, with newer operating systems oriented around a direct method of manipulation (touch), forego all the complexity and overwhelming mess that can come with allowing users to have multiple programs overlapping each other and organize and directly interact with files. Indeed, most people on desktop operating systems keep all of their files on the desktop, anyway, as that is the only metaphor that makes intuitive sense, the Finder or Windows Explorer file browsers being a bit nerdy and arcane and unsexy. Seeing this, allowed with a mulligan during the advent of mobile operating systems, they sought to abstract away the files and have each app manage all of the complexity of their data storage behind the scenes.

I think this is a major thing to consider: the concept of having a mulligan and learning from the pain points that marred an older system. However, in siloing away a lot of the janitorial and managerial duties from the user with these newer, more user-friendly operating systems, there is some loss in liberty for the power user who wants to quickly drag PDFs or images or whatever into multiple apps and send them away without having to jump through carved out hoops. This is also a critical aspect of design to me: ideally, you want a single idea to cater to a comprehensive continuum of people: from a grandma or young child who is uninitiated and wants things to “just work” to those who are willing to spend the time to buy into the system and discover complex (and even build their own) ways of working.

This is why software design is such an exciting field because I don’t think that any other form of design has to deal with such a wide gamut of scenarios as computers allow. Indeed, I think the idea of interactive design itself is a very new thing: games are perhaps the only other area that I consider analogous. A game like chess deals with a similar learning curve; however, its problem space is much smaller, I think. But the problem is, in essence, very similar. When you are designing a game, you have to deeply consider the onboarding process because we all, of course, are newcomers at some point. But you also have to thoughtfully think about how the game will grow for all of those who have bought into your initial design and have dedicated hours upon hours interacting with the rules you have set. Easy to learn, difficult to master is an aphorism for a reason. This is probably the area of design that I found most intriguing and that I think would be nice to look at a bit in this course.

Week Thirteen — New Media.

The book defines the “digital aesthetic” as an idyllic kind of contemporary design ideology that is galvanized by the highly precise, infinitely reproducible and non-destructive nature of working that is allowed by the relatively recent technological advancement that is software. We can see this same exact trend occurring in the photographic industry. Whereas designers now have the ability to control their layouts and designs with exacting, endless reconfiguration and rapid iteration, photographers and videographers, since the advent of the digital SLR and then the entirely mirrorless camera, while still left ultimately to contend with the real world when it comes to actually capturing their material, now, with the help of digital technology and the precise instrumentation it affords, are compelled by their practice to adhere to a similar sort of “digital aesthetic” to maximize the image quality during every step of the production pipeline. Digital artists who work with photographic content have access to histograms, waveforms, vectorscopes, zebras, metering, false color, focus peaking, and frame guides that aid them in attaining proper exposure, focus, and framing. Ultimately, all of these are forms of data visualization that work at the operator’s avail and strongly guide them to a certain “digital aesthetic”: that is, maximum precision and proper optimization of the signal to maintain a certain aesthetic, pure accuracy to the original analog physical source that is being captured. The same goes for those who produce audio content. Generally, what our contemporary “digital aesthetic” values is fidelity and ever-improving definition so that the content we consume has an increased dynamic range of creative possibility. Some say that, as exacting quality has been democratized, that the end result is more clinical, sanitized imagery that lacks artistic flair—and while it is true that you can become complacent when you become entirely beholden to the concept of reproducing reality as it was without much artistic input, it is also far more true to me to say that, as technology improves and the ability to output visually pleasing imagery becomes far less temperamental, that this is incredibly empowering to artists of all kinds.

Week Twelve — New Media

The immediate example that comes to me and probably most people concerning interactive design has to do with technology. Firstly, responsive design is a critical core to web 2.0 that was necessitated by the emergence of mobile web browsing: typically, websites were designed to accommodate precision input and large, widescreen displays, but with phones a whole new set of parameters were hoisted upon the web designers. Tall aspect ratios and less accurate input methods required new technologies to be developed so that websites could adapt to and provide a good experience for those using these radically different devices. Another technological example is how software has made such a massive shift toward portability as of late. And what I mean by this is that, for example, if a developer wants to write an app that users can download on both an iPhone and an iPad, they used to have to essentially maintain two different code bases and submit two different app binaries to the app store. Now, they can create apps that are far more scalable but still customizable to each platform they are on. The video game space is also inextricably linked to interactive design, given that the whole medium is interactive. We can also say that new forms of social media like Tiktok and Twitter foster a similar sort of interactivity between the user, the platform, and other users, and that their success is linked to their ability to design an experience that allows people to interface with each other.

Week 11 — Graphic Design.

The issue of the “citizen designer” plagues almost all fields. The problem is one of reconciliation. How does a person reconcile their internal values and systems of belief with the artificial world’s implacable demands that command such a hold over our natural existences? How do we enact upon our desires to do good and impart a meaningful change on our surroundings when we are ultimately confined to play around in our corner of this capitalistic sandbox and protect our own hide? Can your lofty idealism pay bills and put food on the table? Will society value your view of the world, or is there some reason that the masses want something less opinionated, firebrand, irascible, and/or flagrantly intellectual? Is there a middle ground to be had wherein you can exert your personal perceptions and artistic predilections upon an apparently anodyne object? I think that film is an example of this.

To create a successful movie, you need to reach a mass market. But a mass market is not stupid, and they don’t always enjoy being pandered to. Even in a system so monolithic and with so much money being pumped through, by participating in your own, subtle way, you can influence the final project and push it toward what your eye wants, if in the most infinitesimal of ways. This isn’t always true, but it is true of the best films that they thrive off highly opinionated collaboration. This is true in design, too. People think that designing a phone or a mouse or some kind of mundane, guileless object void of explicit values is just work that designers do to keep food on the table, and while that may be true a proportion of the time, in any good object you can see remnants of artisanal ideation, however small. And that ideation, while not expressly political, is inextricably human because it showed that someone else who is not you carefully considered you and your usage of the device and stepped out of their own shoes for a moment to carefully contemplate how you, a hypothetical yet wholly tangible individual, would interface with their work. While it may be a bit mundane, making something that people tacitly accept and don’t even think about is perhaps one of the most honest ways of making the world in aggregate a better place.

Week Ten — Graphic Design.

I found the section “The New Typography” (p. 224) from the textbook to be a type of typography that strikes me. The whole Neue movement was ahead of it time and still widely influential today in graphic and software design, with the ubiquitous typeface “Neue Helvetica” and its derivative “Arial” finding themselves available on a plethora of platforms. These grotesque typefaces are in vogue right now, with Apple’s custom San Francisco and Google’s Roboto typefaces acting as contemporary continuations of Bauhaus’s innovations in sans serif typefaces. If you look at the graphics 6.26, 6.27, and 6.29, you will notice just how modern these designs created in the 1920s still feel, and this is primarily due to the typefaces.

What I also found interesting from the readings was on page 325 in the section Postmodern Typography, where they show examples with 9.27 and 9.28 that demonstrate, in my opinion, a more refreshing take on the standard, highly commercial and clean aesthetic that accompanies the Neue sans-serifs of the world that we all know so well. I found the Souvenir Typeface designed by Ed Benguiat to be particularly striking in that its a serif font with clear sans-serif, slab stylings that applies a certain anachronistic impression to a sharp, highly modern appearance.

Week Nine — Industrial Design.

I think, with someone like Brooks Stevens, who was born in Milwaukee and produced most of his designs in Mequon, Allenton, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that it’s an interesting case study of how fame is relative. Indeed, like most designers, Brooks Stevens is nowhere near a household name, and yet his work on the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the Miller High Life packaging were able to permeate across the country and perhaps even the world. Most designers work entirely behind-the-scenes and do not receive explicit credit for their work: I mean, how often do you see designers credited? Only if their name holds a certain cachet and serves a marketing purpose. They create art as a result of their employment, all of their creative assets owned by the corporation that serves them a salary in lieu of posterity.

In light of that, it’s impressive that Brooks Steven was a person of local renown at all, if not national fame. To be a person known in your community and producing content within that community is a kind of fame that can’t be sneezed at. He stayed where he grew up, with what he knew, where he had a relatively inexpensive, high quality of living. Milwaukee, like my hometown of Kenosha, is part of the “Rust Belt,” a former, relatively loose colloquial collection of cities around Lake Michigan that thrived off of strong manufacturing industry. This is important to seeing why Brooks Stevens designed and manufactured the Weinermobile near Milwaukee, as the labor here was skilled and willing for that kind of task.

Week Eight — Industrial Design.

A mouse is an interesting example of industrial design because its form is entirely tailored to fit the contours of the human hand rather than reach some aesthetic minimalistic ideal. It doesn’t matter how visually appealing a mouse looks if it is uncomfortable to use for extended periods. A mouse like this one is an example of the fact that industrial design can be more about how something works, not how it looks.

An example of a mouse designed for utility (left) and one designed for aesthetics (right).

Week Seven — Architecture.

The first relevant principle of Universal Design that I will discuss relates to the following image:

This church near N Downer Ave has a fairly expensive-looking ramp entrance. This design exhibits the tenet of Equitable Use in a couple of ways.

Firstly, ramps are a more accessible (if land-intensive) way of allowing users to reach higher elevation places. Gradual inclines allow fewer instances of catastrophic failure than steps do, each step’s sheer vertical rise introducing a potential moment of disaster for users of all ages and abilities. The smoother the grade, the less noticeable the incline is, and the more peripheral the experience of its traversal is—which also borrows from another principle of Universal Design, Low Physical Effort. Steps can be a similarly unconscious endeavor for most people, but for kids, disabled, and elderly people, where moving through the environment is less passive, stairs are markedly more strenuous.

Secondly, the railings that flank the ramp’s walls provide another instance of equitable use because they provide an affordance that everyone will want to take advantage of and require from time-to-time irrespective of their physical ability.

The second principle of Universal Design that I will discuss and that I alluded to earlier is Low Physical Effort, which I believe is exemplified in the following image:

In this image, there are four different remotes for four different devices. Indeed, the whole motivation inspiring the invention of the remote was predicated on this tenet of Low Physical Effort, but, of course, there are plenty of implementations within the space of this invention, each to varying degrees of success. The design of TV remotes is a combination of graphic design (glyphs, logos, typefaces), industrial design (materials, its form), and software design (translating presses into actions users intuitively expect).

Along each step within this pathway, the sacrosanct concept of Low Physical Effort is to be contended with. The controller is the interface between you and your device, and you don’t want to have to use any effort to use your device. All of these remotes necessarily require little physical effort, so, if we focus solely on the physical side of things and ignore the cognitive element (as interesting and complex as that topic is), the lightest remote, the one on the right-hand side, would probably be the winner in a purely physical sense in that it weighs the least. However, being made out of aluminum, its metal exterior is far more variable to the temperature, and so it may be uncomfortably cold when the other remotes are not.

Week Six — Architecture.

I took this photograph of the Locust Court highrise. Before I knew better, I actually believed that this was the Sandburg dorm. It is a remarkable building in that it is a very tall decagonal prism (which I’ve confirmed is a valid name through a cursory search) with regular indents between its faces—a unique shape that imparts a striking, out of the ordinary presence.

This is a rudimentary sketch of Sandburg west tower. Last year, I lived in Sandburg south, where my room faced westward, so I had a good oblique view of Sandburg west. I find the buildings interesting because while they are parallel in design, if you live in one of the dorms that meets a corner, you get a small window as I drew as small squares in my sketch. The towers, like Locust Court, call attention to themselves, but I think they are more unique than Locust Court due to their arrangement and their overt imposition of “education” on the skyline, if you will: you see the buildings, and you wonder why they’re arranged like that, and when you realize they’re dorms, the reach of UWM extends far and wide to anywhere the structures are visible.

An an unrelated note, a thing about Milwaukee architecture that I find interesting is how, in places like Walker’s Point, there are plenty of old brick buildings with ghost signs painted on their otherwise ordinary sides. The ghost signs painted on these buildings create a dichotomy for me: on the one hand, you could say that they are a sign of dereliction and lack of interest in the area, as no more contemporary marketer has used the space to their avail in quite some time. But also, I suppose it is probably fine that there isn’t much big-money interest in the area bent on renovating and removing these anachronistic images atop these properties, as they function as a quaint kind of art installation, as well: indeed, as time marches on, and the relevancy of the information included within the signs fades away, they begin to turn into murals of sorts—fascinations of the past that add color to the architecture of the area.

Week Five — History of Design.

When reading about the architecture of the Bauhaus building in Dessau (page 216, image 6.16) I began to think of this apartment complex near campus: “The Park at 1824.” While not an exacting example of the Bauhaus idea that function entails the form—the biggest contradiction being the rectangular perimeters of beige that loop around a few second and third-floor apartments—I still think that this apartment complex does imbue the technologically forward ideology that permeated the Bauhaus school of design, being unapologetically contemporary in appearance with no real anachronisms in view.

In Chapter Three, image 3.9, the “At the Front!” poster romanticizes the war experience, appealing to a putatively innate masculine desire to be on the frontier and in the middle of the action. While not as stylistic as the poster portrayed in the book, this contemporaneous image sourced from the Facebook header of the US Army Recruiting Station in Wiesbaden, Germany, displays a similar set of idyllic appeals: ones that do not revel in the violence of the work as the “At the Front!” poster does but still paints the army as a place where you can stick your head in the sky and explore the world. Similar ads to this are prevalent on contemporary television and the internet.

This cover of the most recent New Yorker issue elicits ideas described in the chapter “American Modern and the Second World War.” Specifically, The American Magazine and its art deco abstraction. The typeface that The New Yorker uses elicits image 7.18 from this chapter, “Oils & Watercolors Exhibition,” with its wavy width and all-caps styling.

Week Four — Found Object.

This object caught my interest because of how it acts as an anachronistic analog to the UWM emergency safe phones that you frequently find around campus. This is more of a relic than anything else at this point, but it’s an interesting one at that, as it shows an early implementation of this idea. As for how this concept of scattered safety beacons has progressed from then, we can see that the contemporary example with the UWM safe phones, with their bright blue lights, assure the person in need that they are operational, and with their UWM branding, that they are to be trusted. This older implementation predates cellphones, so the main affordance that it offers the user is advertised slightly differently, with text saying “use telephone inside for emergencies.” It’s styled with this crown molding kind of look toward the top and a pastel blue paint application without accent, a color probably chosen to match the police’s blue uniforms.

Week Three — History of Design.

It is fascinating to me seeing two very different light switch designs coexist, one anachronistic and outmoded, the other more modern yet similarly dilapidated. The older design is more satisfying, but that is perhaps because it is irregular and comparatively more laborious and commanding, less second-nature in its interaction.

Its housing acts not only as an aesthetic veil for what’s underneath but also as a crucial step in the conveyance of its purpose.

Translucent, the design intends on providing some level of privacy for the person showering yet never allows complete occlusion from onlookers.

Tough to see here, toward the point of the pen and on the black element there are two sides forming toward a triangle, allowing the user to rest their finger on a flat surface.

I photographed this recently. This watchtower is a very interesting design for me as it is a whole different level of design: that is, woodworking and its bespoke quality. A person had a desire to build this structure and filled the need by using the materials inherent to their surrounding environment.

Rubberized, ribbed focus ring design for tactile differentiation but is liable to particulate build up between its ridges.

A note I found interesting in the reading was how newspaper influenced design. Before color print, to exert emphasis, bold typefaces were used. Of course, they still are today, but now we have a different hierarchy of priorities to our avail by being able to inexpensively use color in online interfaces.

I also noticed that logos have progressively become more and more minimal as time progresses—or, really, more abstract and representative rather than literal and skeuomorphic.

Week Two — Design Thinking.

Design is both the process of meeting and defining the user’s expectations. What I mean by this is firstly that: a well-designed tool needs to be designed through the advice of tradespeople who use it. Indeed, if you are crafting something for people, you need to be receptive to feedback and design a product or service that suits and envisions its real-world application.

Visual design firstly needs to meet people's expectations. For example: how do you intimate that a door is a pull door or a push door? The obvious answer is to place a sign. But the thing about signage is that people don't really read them: or, at least, they tend to tune them out when they appear frequently and when they are fixated on other, more pressing and exciting things. So how do you telegraph that a door is a push door without interrupting a person's cognitive flow: how do you meet the user's expectations rather than require the user to conform their intent to yours? I think the most straightforward visual indicator that people will unthinkingly accept and understand is simply the lack of any door handle at all. If there is no handle, your mind is saved from any ambiguity and solves the door quite quickly: if there is no affordance for pulling the door, then pulling the door is an option that is ruled out, and since this is a boolean problem space, the answer is immediate. If there is no handle on an installed public door, you have to push the door to open it. I believe this a pretty elegant if perhaps obvious and insipid example of visual design: remove superfluous options that ask the brain to second-guess itself, and the whole intent of your design will streamline itself and satisfy the user.

The second piece to designing, as I initially said, is to anticipate and, to some extent, define what the user even desires in the first place. Another Steve Jobs quote, “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” This, I think, is the most exciting task for a designer, but it is also the most perilous. Indeed, in the reading, the entire ‘Kaiser’ example is predicated on the former design axiom: responding to what the users want. But if you exclusively listen to the solutions that your users provide you, you are neglecting your onus as a designer: to be forward-looking and solve issues in a way that considers the issue in a new light. Balancing these two principles is what I believe thinking like a designer is all about.

Week One — About Me.

Hi! My name is Andreas Beyer-Bowden, or Andy Beyer-Bowden if we want to be more conversational and loose, which we do. I am a film major at UW-Milwaukee, but before I ever concluded that the photographic arts were to be my destiny, graphic design was, indeed, my passion.

Throughout the list of interests that have, well, caught my interest over the years—videogame design, industrial design, photography, film, graphic design—the throughline is an interest in the visual arts. It is tough to do a retrospective on this issue given that the discovery process is certainly not over; still, I think that as these various interests of mine's presence of mind continuously ballooned and shrunk within the finite volume of my mind over time, the one constant throughout it all was a general attraction to the liberal arts and its intersection with technology. I frontload my statement so because I have a heavy predilection toward the liberal arts that admittedly unbalances the scale: indeed, I knew I couldn't be an engineer simply because I found that math was presented to me in a manner utterly uninterested in the humanities: and a subject that has no interest in the humanities has, well, no interest in humanity and fails to demonstrate an intuitive corollary to reality, I think.

But to say that the liberal arts are a kind of diametric opposite to more scientific endeavors is to present a false dichotomy. As a minor example, if we consider something like the JPEG encoding process for photographic imagery, some interest in the lossy nature of the compression, or its lack of alpha channels, and so on, is necessary for the artist to understand, even if the logic that underpins the scheme such as the "discrete cosine transform" may as well be arcane, black magic to us. The liberal arts are not devoid of rigidity. They are, I think, a science of their own: an observational science. Indeed, design, irrespective of what form it is found, is fundamentally a science of presentation and, as such, is omnipresent—even within putatively unrelated fields, such as film.

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