Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

This past weekend, I played music at a friend’s loft party in Greenpoint.
It has been a few months since I purchased Traktor Skratch from NI, and this is the second time I would bring it outside of my house. It’s good to take it out because problems arise that you would never face by keeping it safely set up in one place.
The first time I tried to bring it out, everything seemed to be on but the timecode would not get read into my computer. After about 15 minutes, my nerves got the best of me and I reverted to the 15 or so backup records I had brought with me down to Miami.
Little did I know the problem was due to a little button labelled input mode on the front of the box that must have been set to cd or something else. I checked my setup about a dozen times but didn’t think to look at this switch. This was a last obstacle, a stupid oversight… but I’ll know this for next time. There won’t be anymore setup blunders!

I was wrong. I thought I encountered all the difficulties I ever would, but this weekend after making sure the loft would have cd decks there, carefully packing my timecode cds and selecting music (the input mode switch still burned into my memory), I get to the party to find an all-in-one-cd-and-mixer-jammy, with no outputs for my computer to get to the timecode. I winged the rest of the night and played directly from my computer, which actually went pretty well and forced me to learn some shortcuts.

That being said all the djs there had different setups. There were no turntables - I would’ve brought them but I wanted to try to use what they had. There was the all-in-one cd jammy, I was using Traktor Skratch, sans Skratch, and another dj was using Ableton live. I’m trying to think of a comparable field or hobby. It just struck me as funny that we had three different setups.

I’m still on the fence about the benefits of djing digitally. It’s similar to the tradeoffs of owning mp3s, in general. In a way, its faster and more accessible because you have immediate access to your library in your computer, but it feels farther away and harder to get your head around this spaceless, faceless, massive amount of music. Now I’ve transferred this problem to my djing. I spend tons more time tracking down high quality files, making and organizing my playlists (since I can’t recognize an mp3 as fast as I can an album cover) than flipping through stacks of records and dumping them into a bag. Or at least it just feels like it.

I have recently decided to shift gears in my career path a bit. The few jobs I’ve had in the professional sphere have been in web design of some sort - either visual, markup, or ui/interaction. I did some client-side programming in Javascript, but now I’m deciding to take a bite out of Cocoa and Objective-C and try my hand at becoming a “User Interface Developer”.

One of the biggest changes is that I’ll be spending at least half (if not more) of my time writing code - that means staring at syntax-highlighted text files, compiler progress, and error messages. Although I did go through at least six months of this kind of work on the GMT, Objective-C seems (note I say “seems”) like much more of a serious undertaking than Javascript does.

One of my major motivations for this change of scenery is that I hope this development experience will make me more literate when it comes to evaluating and adopting new frameworks for my own projects (e.g. Noesys). The design patterns and algorithms I will (hopefully) learn will also help me better architect my own applications.

My other motivations deal with interaction and interface design. I have been reading about and trying to practice methods that lead to good goal- and user-oriented design. The web design that I have been doing lately hasn’t allowed me to follow these methods to their end. My present work is more about informational sites/portals, which focus on IA, site flow and presentation, less so on interaction and use cases. Advertising and click-through factor heavily in this world - sometimes at the expense of the experience.

Previous to this, I worked on the GMT which, as a web application, had a more task-driven design process. However the tasks and users were still loosely defined, in part are users were nobody, since we really didn’t have a client, and partly because are users were everybody - the app was primarily for searching and reading news stories, which can appeal to a wide variety of users and goals.

I see my new job as a more serious interaction design challenge, since I will be designing an application for a defined set of tasks and for a specific profession. This application will also be sovereign one - the users will be using only this application for an extended period of time. They will also be using it on a weekly basis (hopefully), so I will be able to consider most of the users as intermediates, rather than always as beginners (as is the case with kiosks).

The bottom line is - this application has to work well for people that will be using it often, and more efficiently than its competitors. I know that sounds obvious but I’ve never felt this burden of proof so strongly in anything I set out to design. My team mates and I will really have to strive to take into account facets of the users’ tasks and goals that other applications that do similar things may be overlooking. I will have to bust out all the tools I have learned in order to find out what users’ really need (not what they say)… code something that we think answers those needs, then test it to make sure it does. There’s no hiding behind entertainment, coolness, or sales numbers.

The other aspect I am thrilled about is that I will be doing some coding, which is necessary to me. I know I brought this up earlier, but when it comes to interaction design, it is important for my process. I need to see the behavior and try the alternatives. Its the same as a graphic designer being able to move type into different positions in Photoshop, step back and see if it works visually. Being able to make adjustments on the fly also shortens the design cycle, making room for more iteration (the guys at FAW summed it up nicely) We shall see.

So I may be saying goodbye to the web for a while. I don’t know how I feel about that. In a way I am very excited to learn something new (Cocoa) and really test my knowledge of design methodology. On the other hand, I’m going to miss things like CSS, browser idiosyncracies, and trying to fit everything in a 1024×768 screen for the masses.

I recently read a post on Create Digital Music about the makers of a new virtual audio synth called Circle. What the makers at Future Audio Workshop (FAW) aim for with this design is to keep you in flow while you produce your music and sounds. In fact, they take care to make this reference to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of Flow in their product description:

“Circle – stay in flow

Flow refers to the state of mind in which you are at your most creative and productive, a place where hours pass like minutes and musical ideas become reality. Staying in flow becomes increasingly difficult however, when dealing with the complexities of modern software synthesizers.”
- Taken from FAW’S site

Flow refers to a sweetspot when it comes to humans doing things. Symptoms of Flow include time passing quickly, being focused, not distracted, feeling adequately challenged, feeling in control and not stressed, enjoying yourself. These are the characteristics of a person in Flow, and an interface can play a big role in helping a person reach this state in one’s activity. Perhaps Flow can be somehow related to the “unmonitored” feeling that is necessary for authentic creation - (think about component #3 - A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness).

Back to Circle and the interface:

I would love to experience how this interface measures up to Ableton Live in usability. What I have noticed with past midi sequencing software such as Logic, Cubase, Reason is that, even ignoring the fact that the learning curve is high, the interactions are somewhat longwinded or nondescriptive. Longwinded in that they take too many steps, involve disparate controls or menus etc. I know that much software is not intended for performance, but even if you had all the time in the world to tweak a loop which was never to be performed live, you would still want the process to be intuitive and feel hands on so as not to drain on your creative energies.

I would love to see these principles of workflow and usability at the center of more sound software, especially djing programs like Traktor and Serato, where flow in performance is key (haven’t been too happy with either). Information design/visualization can also be utilized in conjunction to surface what is happening digitally to the sound - and to give different forms of feedback.

The new audio-visual software instruments that will be developed now and in the future need to take these principles seriously if they wish to be considered more instrument than computer program.

I guess I should put my $ where my mouth is and post my ideal djing interface soon.

In the face of the challenge of making our creative interfaces more transparent, I do think that there is a limit - and that ….

Interfaces are necessary for the creative process

Aren’t they? I mean, we have all thought about plugging our brains in directly to manipulate sounds or images, to get total control without requiring interface (um, haven’t we all?) But the best interfaces are actually engaging to deal with and add to the final creation, shaping the output and allowing us to be submerged in a process.