Clutter and overload are a failure of design

I think… I’ll write this… like Edward Tufte… speaks. That was… the… longest… five minutes and forty six seconds……….. of my life. Including the time… when I really… really… had to pee… and hit every red light… on my way home…………… last night.

Enough of that. Tufte’s demonstrations, though tedious, were very helpful to me as I continue to go about designing an alarm clock/radio/calendar app for class. I’ve always been aware of administrative debris, but not what to call it. So that’s helpful. I designed my clock app with that in mind, mostly because that’s something I dislike. But you know, I said the other day that if I were on Chick-fil-a’s design team, the first thing I would do is nix the cow ads, and apparently they’re still very popular, so I probably would have been fired over the public backlash of the disappeared cows. It’s nice to know that at least one thing I dislike about a specific instance of design is supported by one other person. Makes me feel a little fuzzy inside.

He also makes a point of explaining (yawningly) that clutter and overload are not attributes of information, they are a failure of design. He says, “If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information. Instead, fix the design.” Well, actually he says, “If… the information is in chaos… don’t start… throwing out information… instead… fix the design. And that is exactly… what the iPhone… platform… has done.”

He’s much more entertaining in text. For example, he uses phrases like “dopey design” and “Ding-a-ling design” and really, who doesn’t think that’s hilarious? Basically, he’s arguing against the computer standard of stacked information – users don’t want to explore a site that forces them to take tiny, irritating steps to get to a specific point, much like customer-service callers don’t want to navigate a quagmire of pre-recorded messages to talk to a person. We’ve been sort of coerced into accepting these systems as the norm for the past century or so, but I think the current trend is bucking that idea. Obviously Apple products have redefined the standard for what is “cool” in gadgets. And thus what is expected in gadgets changes also. It’s not just tools that are being redesigned either. If we look at our education system, we can clearly see that it was designed with influence from the industrial era and assembly line systems. People are beginning to notice that it just doesn’t work in our society, it doesn’t mesh with our culture anymore.

And that’s what we were discussing a while back with the Story of Stuff and the 30 Conversations on Design: How can we design better solutions? Not just for advertising, but for the betterment of society and the improvement of life in the future. Everything that is, is designed. We might as well design well.