256a Reading Response 3

Wesley Larlarb

I found chapter 3’s meditation on visual design interesting in its emphasis on strange design loops made from simple elements, where the design makes a link between the expected function of the object and its form, subverting the user’s expectation in some way. Personally, I find these loops the most convincing when the designed object still serves its original function just as well or perhaps even better than the user might have hoped. For example, the pencil case which is a zipper, Kunwoo’s Sound Bulb, and the Converge photo album all stand out as designs which still work well for their functional purpose. Taking principle 3.11 to the extreme, if we think of design as a joke relating elements, then perhaps we could say a strange design loop is like a joke that subverts a user’s expectations about how a thing which serves a particular purpose will achieve that function. In the case of digital technology, I would argue that we expect technology which exists solely to achieve a function, spending most of our time in apparently “value-neutral” programs like Outlook, Messages, Google Chrome, and so forth. Because of this expectation, we can find humor in programs which unexpectedly speak through their design, imparting a message which we didn’t expect, but which in a strange design loop tell us something about the nature of the program itself. But in my opinion, this moment of clarity only has a spine and a weight to it when the program itself still performs the function we were expecting, otherwise the program in some sense hasn’t yet earned the right to tell us its opinions, because it isn’t doing what it promised in the first place. You can’t have a plot twist if you don’t have some plot leading up to the twist, I suppose.

It seems that sometimes, knowing one’s audience is also critical in getting this kind of design “pun” to land. For example, if I was a visual artist trying to draw a specific picture and I downloaded Golan Levin’s Yellowtail, I would be pretty frustrated and feel like the program was pretty unhelpful. Yet despite the fact that it doesn’t actually work as a sketching program, Yellowtail still creates an interesting experience to use or even watch someone use, or even read a comic book about someone using it. In this sense I would call it a very successful design, although I would say its success is categorically different from that of the earlier examples which subvert the expectation for functional technology to be value-neutral.