Go now and consume some ice cream cones. Savor them a bit. Notice how the experience moves from anticipation to elation to compulsion to satisfaction of resolution. Now eat a second and third. I’ll wait.
You probably ate zero ice cream cones, but likely conjured the experience of doing so.
So how different were they? Waffle? Sugar? Mexican vanilla? Vanilla bean? Sprinkles? Peanuts? There was one that was clearly made with love. There was one that was clearly phoned in at the lowest bid-least effort entry and there was one that was a chore, probably the last one. You were tired of the experience, full and ready to move on to something else.
In ice cream cones, the sums all operate more or less the same, the parts themselves fungible and the results moderately satisfying but not particularly memorable beyond the moment of engagement.
In design for interaction, we try to combat that sameness with gadgets, doohickeys, things to click, twist, slide, reveal and manipulate. We pollute the space that lets a message reach us undisturbed. We defy that memorable moment of engagement.
We too often decorate over the beauty of simple experiences.
Thinking we need to build bold, daring and innovative things can dull the sensation of content purity and prevent us from just moving on an idea and doing it. True, we would never achieve breakthroughs in ice cream without this kind of thinking or without the brave thought-leaders that bring these new ideas from bursts of genius or bouts of luck. (I would argue they germinate from the same place in the brain–sounds like another post). Nonetheless, most of life and vanilla ice cream doesn’t require edge-of-tomorrow thinking to make it useful to us. We want experiences to have a purpose for requesting our time. To be enjoyable and lift our day or improve our media-blasted brains. We want to be enriched in the minutes between our busy tasks and self-imposed immutable schedules. This pleasing enrichment doesn’t have to be exotic or provocative, but it does have to be uniquely valuable in some way so the investment I give it feels like a fair trade.
Given the amount of sameness and common topics answered with content-driven debris we encounter, being able to give someone that fair exchange is a win. Delivering on the same things with a posture that is entertaining because it is clearly your own is how we can give an opinion some charm.
“fashions fade, style is eternal.”–Yves Saint Laurent
When designing anything, once function is met, style is our real differentiator. Designers are asked more often than not to re-solve problems that were previously solved in a less than perfect way, to define a new take. Style is taking and re-taking everyday things, things we are all used to, things that are old, things that are new, things that we thought didn’t work for some empirical or knee-jerk reason and combining them in a new way. Style is our world-facing expression of our inner-space being. Applying style as expression is authentic–it is founded in ourselves. People can tell when you glom together yap and clammer from somewhere outside. It’s the difference between an infectious performer and a drab one. Invariably the one that believes what they are doing will somehow reach out and display the intangible. This is the science/mystery behind why you can see an artist or hear a song you detest and somehow still understand their appeal to fans.
Style is the personality of creating, of facing off against the dogma that says we have to validate every choice and idea with data; That we have to be in accord what the schools of thought are publishing this week to beat their competition to the search engines. We don’t have to do things because of best practices and other intuition–illiterate hype. If we can accomplish an idea with less, tell the tale a little more succinctly, even if it’s based on our personal observations, emotions and, dare I say, your beliefs, your style will show through and your work will be authentic, it will be translucent, it will be vanilla.