Categories
Archives
Slide-rule Picassos, Newtonian Graphic Designers and Gatesian Warhols, Oh my!
Website design and development is a defined science and, at the same time, a practiced art. How is this so?
There are many potential comparisons to be drawn in positing an explanation. In broad terms, design is almost always a methodical, sometimes rhythmic process of anticipation and preparation. The anticipation of “what” is most frequently directly pulled from accounts of the past and/or indicators of future trends. Preparation is the right-sizing of appropriate measures to match, counter and/or complement the anticipated event; then categorizing and queuing up these “responses” to be best prepared to face the flow of inbound “requests”.
So where’s the science? Where’s the art? There is science in the measurements of past tendencies and future projections. Human behavior and demonstrated needs are empirically accountable. Ranked catalogues of these expectations are often derived from real, quantifiable data. Of course, where there are numbers, there is invariably a science attached to explain or validate them. From this perspective, it’s easy to see how statisticians and accounting-types can become a driving influence on design development for any process. But where’s the art in that?
Business requirements are, by definition, exactly that—the required end-product of an application or process relevant to a business goal. It stands to reason that it would seem elementary for numbers-types and process planners to rule the roost when choosing how and what to do with Website design. After all, hasn’t a certain Redmond, Washington-headquartered enterprise already addressed every possible business workflow?
That’s where the art comes in, especially the practiced application thereof. Website design is a union of the probable demand, anticipated response, and, hopefully, the enabled outcome. But what to do with the “in between”. Science and history define and enumerate the probable. It follows that if every element constituting “the probable” were categorically uniform and finite in variations, then the science-types wouldn’t have need for the artsy-types. Of course “the probables” are as infinitely and distinctly different as you and me, as unique in taste and perception as the fingerprints of those users that wear the buttons on their pointer mouse or track pad smooth with repeated use. Hence, the artsy-types get in the game.
The practiced art of Website design is the application of solutions known and unknown in proportional response to expected events, or “the probables”. Where art gets to differ from science is that applications of the most likely solutions to drive success can extend well beyond categorical definitions. And, in the practice of harmony, they can be applied or offered serially or in parallel.
Of course, the palette an artist in this discipline gets to wield is only as deep as their knowledge of what works where, and why. To this end, the artist needs to have at least a journeyman’s level of comfort with the numbers game. Ideally, to relate to the statisticians and accountability types, it would be best for said artist to be able to speak in terms of business performance for the real toughies. And to fairly represent both sides, the science and objectives guys would be best equipped if they can adjust knowledgably, on-the-fly, based on a full-spectrum understanding of all the artists in the equation have to offer.
What I’m describing here is a cadre of slide-rule Picassos, Newtonian graphic designers, Gatesian Warhols.
I’m describing the technogenic creative team at The Sutter Group.
by
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet.