<aside> 🔍
This lecture exists as slides.
</aside>
We begin with a simple premise: it is often more visually compelling to evoke a subject than to directly reference it. Direct reference comes across as didactic or obvious, and it can leave the viewer with a lingering lack of investment. In my opinion, viewers have more investment when they “figure it out” themselves, rather sitting through a lecture. This is not to say that viewers value obscurity outright, but rather than they dislike obviousness. Perhaps in the future as viewers grow more comfortable static in the observer position, sensibilities will change and didacticism will gain popularity. But for now I believe this to be true: the indirect path is regarded as clever.
This may seem counter to most traditional design education. Many graphic design instructors will preach that efficiency of communication is the ultimate goal. Taking the most obvious path means the viewer receives the information quicker, and in an attention economy that is extremely important. Although that line of reasoning often strikes me as excessively commercial — as if the only use of graphic design is to sell products — I think it holds water. In fact, I don’t believe what I’m advocating for here contradicts the value of efficient communication. One of the core gestures of graphic design is to distill entities into simple marks. What is a logo is not the distillation of a company into an image? And that it exactly what I am advocating for here. In the same way that a logo should not be a photo of the company’s headquarters, your works should distill some essence from your subject and represent it.
To that end, I would like to propose two methodologies for identifying the formal essence of technology.
In brief,
Sycophantic
Hallucinate
Model
Token
Window
Technology is often explained through metaphors. For example, let’s consider “the cloud.” What exactly is it?
When you use Google Drive, or Figma, or Canvas, you’re using software that lives on a server somewhere far away from you. We call that “remote” as opposed to “local” — as in it’s a remote location. That software scales itself to your needs. When you make files, they don’t take up space on your computer’s hard drive. They just exist online. Still they are taking some hard drive space, but just somewhere remotely. And this software is doing that for many, many users. It’s designed to share resources among all of its users. The appeal of this is that your computer doesn’t need that many resources. It just needs an internet connection. And therefore you just rent time on a more powerful machine when you need it.
Sharing time on a powerful machine predates “the cloud.” From the 1960s to 1980s, mainframes were the primary machines that ran large applications. If a company was using computers in their operations, they were probably using a mainframe, as opposed to a personal computer. Mainframes were huge and very expensive. They required climate control and reliable power supply. Thus “time-sharing” became a thing. Companies like IBM and the Computer Sciences Corporation rented time on a mainframe to smaller companies who would submit “jobs” for an “operator” to run. Sharing was a means of keeping things economical. These companies would provide technical diagrams to customers. They would use the cloud icon to mark the separation between the customer’s own machines and the provider’s remote machines.
Tim Berners-lee (inventor of the www), “Information Management: A Proposal” (1989)
In the 1980s and 90s, computers got smaller and more modular. Around this time the worldwide web was invented, which is basically most people’s access to the internet. With it came the concept of servers, which are modular computers that respond to requests. Servers might have discrete functions and they would work together to “serve” data to the client. In this era, the cloud icon was still used to describe something remote, but in this case it was describing a set of diffused computers.
2 years after the world-wide web was introduced, Andy Hertzveld, a majorly influential designer of Macintosh computers, is credited with the first usage of “the cloud” as a shorthand for shared, remote services made available for users. He was describing his new company General Magic’s new programming language for mobile devices (like pre-smartphones) to access the internet. Early mobile devices has limited computational power, so it was important to be able to offload difficult tasks on to a more powerful, remote network of servers.
“The beauty of Telescript is that now, instead of just having a device to program, we now have the entire Cloud out there [...]”