Reading Response #3

to Artful Design • Chapter 3: “Visual Design”

May-Ann “Gray” Wong

14 October 2023

Music 256A / CS476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Imbue Personality

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond primarily to Artful Design Principle 3.3, which argues that “In the digital domain, where the default is rigid and mechanical, nuance must be imbued. The finished design should feel organic and living, design in expressive verbs” (119). I think that it is interesting that design seems to be a bundle of contradictions, perhaps reflecting the fact that our own experiences and perspectives and values are also often just that—engaging in constant conversation and discourse with each other, manifesting in cognitive dissonance. Design is a living and breathing creature, but can also serves as a didactic tool or deliverer of a narrative (Principles 3.2, 3.7). Design can be complex in its value and meaning and implementation (Principle 3.5), but also simple in the method of delivery and value and interactions (Principle 3.4). Design can be a chicken-or-egg problem, but it is also at the same time both chicken and the egg. Design can be alive, but it can also be dead at the same time.

Design is at once living and alive in our conception of it and interactions with it, but also finalized once the design has been crafted and delivered for interaction to the public or private; there often comes a time where, as creators, we disengage with a piece and it “dies” in the sense that it’s completed, but it maintains its life through the interactions with others as it bestows a meaning or story unto the viewer. Further, when an author dies or a “death of the author” approach is created, the art itself maintains this sort of zombie state, at once divorced from the creator that could explain every aspect of its inception, but still alive to the rest of the world and open to interactions with others. Additionally, I agree of course with Principles 3.2 and 3.9 that animation and interaction in real-time does make a creation alive, but I think that it’s also true that things without animation or real-time interaction can remain alive in an almost-dead way by haunting those who interact with it. Many times have I felt haunted by designs, by still and unmoving paintings, by still and unmoving narratives. By things that I think about for months, years, and interact with them in dialogue with new experiences and new understandings; “Indeed, design is always the result of intentionality exceeding methodology, and it is always dependent on context” (120), and as such, it is ever-changing and evergreen and alive.

For example, after viewing the painting below at a museum and realizing the ghosts of other ballerinas painted over in favor of the main subject, I continue to digest its meaning and its secrets to this day and to think about how the painting in all respects, from the perspective of the artist, the viewer, the ballerina. Artful design is something that is a living-dead zombie that eats away at me, and I think that eternal nature is what makes it so artful.