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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

The role of the designer...

21:47 / 26.03.04

So basically I was having a conversation with my boss, Dan Hill today about the problems I was having with the reworking of Barbelith and he's like a proper designer rather than the weirdo jack-of-all-trades multi-hack that I am. So after he kept trying to reassure me (not particularly successfully) that the redesign was going Ok, he suggested to me that design was a humble art and that I should be trying to step back and allow the essence of Barbelith to communicate itself.

My feeling is that while Barbelith has certain resonances and an identity that could express itself in terms of design, it is unable to articulate it by itself. It requires someone to be that articulation point and that inevitably means that the process is very clearly a negotiation between the object to be designed and the designer - or more specifically it's an object that cannot express itself even to its designer asking the designer to represent that designer's understanding of the object - as a result the amount of 'me' that will be - in my opinion - in this design will be enormous. This seems to be in direct oppostion to his position, and as we rapidly reached an impasse, I thought I'd open up the discussion to a variety of other people on the board itself.

21:59 / 26.03.04

The way I see it, the essence of Barbelith is the content provided by the people who post. From a layman's p.o.v. one could therefore argue that as long as the site retains a mechanism that allows the continued ease of posting and dialogue, with a minimum of distraction, the design fulfills the needs of Barbelith.

If we take it as a given that the site's essence is the content posted here, then the main problem is the etheral nature thereof. In other words, the essence that would influence the design and visual identity of the site is constantly changing.

I think you've hit the nail on the head by saying that the design would reflect the personality and attitude of the designer. In an ideal world, we'd all be able to design our own interface for the site. Either that or a tool would exist that somehow figured out the 'mood' of the board based on a variety of factors and modified the design accordingly (a kind of html mood-ring).

Tryphena Absent

14:50 / 27.03.04

I've always thought that the construction of a site controlled people's responses just a little. Barbelith has a harsh posting style and its partly because people are always responding to each other in a linear fashion, the first question in a thread is not the one that posters reply to and that's arguably a design feature. So the designer is creating the essence of the board and the nature of discussion here.

15:40 / 27.03.04

Well that's certainly true. Perhaps I should distinguish between the architectural design and the aesthetics of the place. The architecture has enormous consequences, and the linear (rather than sub-threaded) conversations are here for a reason - to force people to keep each other in check rather than encouraging people to wander off in different directions. But what are the consequences of the board looking more green or grey / being fixed-width or fluid / using serifed or unserifed typography?

Tryphena Absent

16:37 / 27.03.04

Well when the board changed from red and grey to the mustard and erm... off white(?) colours that we see at the moment I found it easier to interact with because it seemed far more open and bright. Colour is extremely important, I prefer it a bit sunnier and friendly because it makes me want to read rather than shrug it off. When I look at Livejournal comments I find them difficult to follow because of the diagonal thing that they have going on so I like the straight and uniform aspect of the thread width here as well (and it really gets to me when pictures stretch the boundaries).

10:36 / 29.03.04

I certainly think that this content can be affected by the design of the board -most of this morning, I've been wondering whether I'm going to post differently as a result of changes on the board. The fact that the rest of the thread is no longer visible on the 'reply' screen, for example ; that could mean that the rest of the thread is open in another tab / window, so more of the thread than previously is visible (and the reply is more detailed as a result). Alternatively, it could mean that people try to remember the rest of the thread, and the reply could be less detailed.

This seems to be a really long way of saying that the designer decides how the thing expresses itself. I think that the design does affect the posting style, or how much of the board people are likely to read. Athough I think that's partly my own preference / laziness because every time I look at boards which are laid out like LiveJournal comments I think "That's going to be so! Much! Effort!" and don't read very far.