The Death of Detail

I use Skype to keep in touch with a close friend that I've known for some 15 years now. We met on a forum back in the days when they actually served a purpose. Forums fell by the wayside along with much of the earlier attempts by millennials to create social spaces online. After meeting on a forum we spent years chatting through MSN before that too fell by the wayside. I've been thinking a lot about these applications and the purpose they served, and whilst there are modern equivalents they all lack the soul of their predecessors.

When you look at the modern design of software one thing stands out, or rather nothing stands out, and that's exactly the problem. There has been a movement in the last twenty years to promote minimalist design when it comes to software, everything is flat, and uses whitespace or I guess you'd call it blackspace now since everything has a night mode or dark mode and that's increasingly used as the default interface.

If I had to describe Skype's design I'd call it businesslike because that's really what it has become. It has 3 billion registered users which is almost half the planet, and 300 million monthly active users which is almost the population of the United States. It's not hard to see why Microsoft wanted to acquire it in the first place and from a business perspective wanting to use it in place of MSN was a decidedly corporate decision.

MSN Messenger, or as it was known in its twilight years, Windows Live Messenger, was a technology that catered to the millennial generation, at the time we were in our early teens through to early twenties when it experienced its peak. Its design reflected that audience, it was designed to look interesting, it had features that allowed you to customise it, and plugins that allowed you to add more functionality to it when needed. The chat clients and instant messengers that have taken its place now all share a basic design, list of contacts on the left, chat panel on the right, whitespace a plenty, a few buttons to call, video call, and attach files but that's about it. Save for the logo of the app itself and maybe a colour scheme variation, they're otherwise identical.

The same thing happened with smart phones which rose to prominence around the same time, their design increasingly conformed until they all took the same physical characteristic of black rectangular touch screen of varying thickness. Even the peripheral devices built into those smart phones now deviate less than they once did, there's less reason to buy one specific model over another beyond brand loyalty.

I find it kind of sad that the details have died when it comes to design; this has happened before, there was a movement in the early 1900s called Utilitarianism that focused heavily on functionality pushing for a design that was driven by the utility rather than aesthetic appeal of the product. This movement eventually peaked however, first it was challenged by Art Nouveau [literally New Art] which sought to incorporate artistic design back into production, but it wasn't very successful in unseating the stranglehold Utilitarianism had. The industrial revolution gathered pace and with it Industrial Design came next which lead into the Art Deco movement, literally decorative art. Industrial design sought to establish iconography, brand identity and symbolism and to do that your design had to be unique and stand out, art deco was the end result.

100 years later I wait with baited breath for a new era, Art Deco Revival, driven by the rise and accessibility of 3D printing, it's now possible to print designs it wasn't possible to manufacture before, just as the first Art Deco period reaped the rewards of Industrialisation making the manufacture of designs possible that were beyond the creative output of the craftsman. I want a new era of composite materials and a revival of concrete as a building material - only this time we can print it, which opens up endless opportunity for artistic flourishes.

Back in the virtual realm I am tired of the emptiness, the soulless nature of design that adds nothing of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, or frivolity to the mundane services we now use every day. It's not hard to see why some people feel so abysmal and consider life so monotonous when everything we do has become so stagnant, generic, and repetitive. The only thing that changes online is the memes we create and that says a lot about our desire for something new and different that we latch onto anything that pops up that offers something we haven't seen before that gives us even a modicum of excitement or enjoyment.

Design is dead, derivation reigns, but it doesn't have to be this way, sometimes the easiest way to innovate, is to recreate, or to be more precise, get recreational, play around, or to put it another way it's time to fuck around and find out.