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Radio, Radio

Maybe the rule is that outdated media will skip a technological generation before coming back into vogue. Take radio, for instance, which was ailing for a while under the decades-long, imagistic regime of television. It’s not exactly back at full health, but with the advent of Internet audio, it’s more interesting than it has been in a long, long time.

If you count podcasts as radio, which I do, then you can say that I’m an avid radio consumer. In fact, many of the podcasts to which I subscribe are produced by the various public broadcasters available in the Western world: NPR, obviously, as well as PRI and the BBC too, so long as we’re using broad categorizations here.

Which is why I approached NPR’s new ‘youth-oriented’ program, “The Bryant Park Project,” with some trepidation. Any time a media outlet publicly declares its intention to reach a younger demographic, chances are good that the results will make me cringe. And I’m not even young anymore!

But as it turns out, “The Bryant Park Project,” which debuted on Monday, is not rife with affected jargon, zany sound effects or comedic narrative. To be sure, it’s cheekier than your average NPR show, and it has more than its share of ironic commentary. But it also happens to be substantive and entertaining — like a less stuffy version of “Morning Edition” that, hopefully, isn’t going to spend a lot of time interviewing Bob Dylan about why he’s such a genius. (At least I hope not.) The best thing about it is that it spends zero percent of its time condescending to its listeners. Well, okay, there is a fractional amount of condescension to be heard, true. But there’s far, far less than you’d expect from a program like this. I like it a lot and, more than ever, I’m convinced NPR knows what they’re doing in 21st Century media.

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Operation: Bring Nothing to Work

You know those people who show up for work in the morning with nothing with them except, say, a newspaper or a notebook or maybe a jacket slung over their shoulder? They look like free spirits, right? What with their conspicuously absent shoulder bag or briefcase or other such encumbrance — they seem as if nothing holds them down, as if they’re unshackled men and women at one with nature — or with their commutes, anyway

That’s not me. I feel compelled to load up every morning with a bag or briefcase in which I carry a stack of papers, my checkbook, a wallet, a small attaché for credit cards, my New York Times identity card, a point-and-click digital camera, extra pens, my iPod and my iPhone, the latest issue of The New Yorker and my keys. Whew. As much as I would like to do without this uncomfortably extensive inventory of must-have items, I can’t.

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Standing in the Drop Shadow of Usability

There’s a crucial part of interface design that vexes me and it’s iconography, the discipline of crafting highly communicative, aesthetically efficient pictorial symbols in miniature. It takes a special combination of artistry, patience and visual economy in order to get it right, and I’m in awe of everyone who has this skill. (I’ll say also that there are many folks who are competent at this art form, but exceedingly few who are truly good at it.)

What confounds me about iconography, though, is only partly the fact that I’m astoundingly no good at it. It’s also the idea that the idiom of icons, at least in its current state, stands at a polar opposite to my own sensibility. To be specific: the majority of commonly accepted and commercially functional icons in use today are visually literal — they represent objects or combinations of objects, even if they are intended to stand in for abstract concepts — and they’re almost exclusively dimensional.

By contrast, I like incredibly abstract and minimal graphical elements. For me, a simple, one-pixel straight line is practically a revival of the Rococo style. If I had my way, the only pictorial components of my design work would be the pictures: photographs or illustrations. Everything else would be simple and elementally native to the browser, or whatever other rendering mechanism I’m working with. Which is to say, you’d only ever see lines and boxes — and flat ones at that. No shading, please, and no three-dimensional modeling.

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Sustainability, Schmastainability

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in print, so I don’t often think about the wonderful world of paper. As a print designer working in a design studio, you tend to think a lot about the stuff; what paper to run a job on, what it costs, who stocks it, where it comes from, etc. To be honest, it bored the living heck out of me; there were few things that I found more tiresome than rifling through an endless and disorderly stack of paper samples, each one obtusely named in a vain attempt to differentiate white from, um, really white.

I almost never think about paper companies, either. Until I got heavily involved with AIGA again, I had almost forgotten about their enormous influence in the design community. And their deep, deep pockets. In spite of the portents of doom for printed matter, paper companies continue to spend freely to promote their wares, or at least that’s my outsider’s impression.

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Sleeping the Sleep of the Must

Okay, I need to set all modesty aside for a moment in order to write this post, mostly so that I can start with the premise that, all in all, I get a lot of crap done. I’m not saying it’s all amazing, wonderful crap, but I’m pretty proud of most of it. Somehow I manage to work a demanding, full-time job; I write fairly lengthy posts for this blog; I keep up with a nontrivial set of duties at AIGA New York; I design and co-publish A Brief Message; I maintain a robust enough social life that I get to see friends I genuinely like several days a week; and, not least of all, I take pretty damn good care of my dog.

Now we’ve established that, I can address the fact that, fairly frequently, people ask me how I get all of it done. It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard, either, mostly because there’s not a thing on that list that I don’t care about passionately. I like my life, my career, my work, my friends and I love my dog. All things considered, I feel like a pretty lucky bastard.

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Preserving Preferences

One of the more popular posts that I wrote in July was “Designed Deterioration,” in which I observed that digital hardware is rarely intended to get more beautiful as it gets older.

Governed mostly by the modern business principle of planned obsolescence, today’s hardware products are meant to get scrapped and replaced when they age beyond the near future. By contrast, older hardware goods — like the cast iron skillet I mentioned in my original post — often seem to have been designed with their eventual deterioration in mind. As they get older and become more heavily used, they get better.

That post might have led many to believe that what I’m advocating is that digital products should all be developed with designed deterioration in mind. While I wouldn’t object to that, I wouldn’t expect it to happen any time soon. By now, planned obsolescence is too strongly rooted a concept to allow for that.

I also happen to think there’s a lot to be said for designing for the current moment, designing something that addresses today’s values without feeling the pressure to create something that will last for all time. Which is to say that I have a bias towards what I consider to be ‘timeless’ design, for sure, but I also believe that our craft and our culture don’t progress when everything tries to appear timeless.

There’s one more part of this discussion I want to bring to light. So far, I’ve been harping on hardware and industrial design. But my original thought, when I sat down to write that post, was that designed deterioration seems like an idea that software could benefit from, too.

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Think Like a Dog

When you live with a dog for five years, as I have with Mister President, you get to know him pretty well. They’re a beautiful, complex species, but really, they have some fairly simple, predictable behaviors: eat, sleep, play, eat some more. That’s part of what makes them so lovable.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at how straightforward and consistent Mister President’s behaviors are. I often joked with my ex-girlfriend how easy it would be to plot out most of his operating logic in flowchart form; heck, his decision-making flow is so simple I could describe it to most folks in a few words and they’d get it.

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How I Spent My iRebate

No big ideas or design insights today; just a few Mac-related things I wanted to clear off my notepad.

First, I tried hard to spend my US$100 iPhone rebate at the Apple Store in SoHo yesterday — without going over the hundred dollar-mark. So I bought myself a Contour Design Showcase for my iPhone, and one of those slick new Apple keyboards.

Total price, including tax: US$90.98. So close; now I need to find something for US$9.02 to spend the balance on. I know I can just put it towards something of a greater value that I probably would’ve bought from Apple anyway (e.g., iWork ’08) but for some irrational reason, I’m feeling defiant. I guess I don’t want to feel like a sucker for letting Apple’s rebate offer trick me into some larger purchase… though as one of those faithful drones who waited in line to buy an iPhone in the first place, it’s hard to make the argument that I haven’t already got “SUCKER” written all over my face.

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Illustrate Me No More

When Liz Danzico and I launched our new site A Brief Message last week, it was also effectively the end of Illustrate Me. That project, which started in May of last year and ran more or less into early this year, was my first attempt at trying to actively integrate illustration into my online work; each month I invited a designer or illustrator to create art to accompany the previous month’s archives of this site.

I had a great time doing it, and I was lucky enough to get some truly wonderful contributions from some terrific artists. Ultimately, however, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t yet and was unlikely to ever reach a point where Illustrate Me achieved that satisfying effect that I look for in the meaningful use of any illustration.

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Elevator Expertise from an Expert

Back in June, I wrote a rant about the unorthodox and not entirely successful innovation baked into the elevators at the new Times building. As I learned afterwards, they were designed according to a principle of elevator service called destination-based dispatching. The basic idea is that, rather than putting passengers on the first elevator car that arrives, the system routes passengers to the cars that will deliver them to their destinations most quickly.

This approach somewhat upends the traditional way passengers interact with elevators. Instead of hopping on the first car that arrives and punching a button for a floor, a passenger punches the button for her floor first, on a keypad available at the elevator bank. The system then directs her to, say, car number three, along with other passengers heading to the same floor. Once on the elevator, there are no buttons, nothing to push. It’s a little strange. At least the way it’s been implemented at our building, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

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