Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

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 previously brought up the idea of a taxonomy for musical visualizations. Maybe taxonomy is not the right word, but I do feel that each of our endeavors at expressing music visually can be placed between two poles. These two poles are also present in visual art - there is that which is highly abstract - consisting of shapes and colors that do not refer to anything outside their own forms - and works that are much more suggestive, figurative, they refer to elements in the world around us.

With these two extremes there is another polarity - visualizations that are directly tied to a musical quality so that they are affected by a change in that quality, and those that are influenced “indirectly”, relying on the artist to create an effect in the visual in response to their perceptions of the music. I am not trying to make a claim right now that one is better than the other, although a direct tie between musical and visual expression would make the visual more of an information visualization. It would be based on something quantifiable.

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.

Sunday, May 12th, I saw artists from Raster Noton perform at Issue Project Room, between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. The environment was intimate and well suited for their music - there were a network of speakers throughout the room which were able to handle the frequency and sound limits these artists play in. There was also a large video screen.
I had previously seen Olaf Bender (Byetone), Frank Bretschneider, and Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nikolai at Mutek in 2004. There the show had a very important visual component, so I knew that this show would likely be an audio-visual one. Actually, Carsten Nikolai also does installations on the side for extra cash, many of which explore this audio and visual relationship. On Wikipedia it says he used principles of cymatics for creating visualizations. Thee principles weren’t apparent in his visuals for the evening.
The visual accompaniments differed from those of Meat Beat Manifesto - they represented the other pole of the sound-visualization spectrum - (which I have yet to lay out). There were no literal visual samplings, video clips of people talking or objects making the sounds being lifted for the music. The Raster Noton aesthetic is abstract in the sense that I have yet to hear anything in their work that refers to something outside of sound itself. With this strict abstraction comes a visual component of abstract forms and colors.

Static and lines, feedback dominated the performances of Alva Noto, Byetone, and Signal (Signal is the collaboration consisting of all 3 artists). It reminded me of Scott Arford’s Static Room
What stood out among the 3 was Bretschneider’s performance. It was done in such a way that the visual and sound components seemed to be interdependent - he seemed to be playing his visuals - or his music was coming from a visual instrument that we were all watching on the screen.

(Sorry for my lousy clip that doesn’t do it justice)

This is a good example of differential dynamics.

Most of Frank Bretschneider’s visuals were white light on black, mostly consisting of cylindrical or spheroid constellations that were directly affected by the music. When I asked him after the show about how he hooks his music and visuals up in real time, he said most of it is done beforehand, and he uses Modul8 for basic things like having amplitude control the visuals. “I like to keep it simple” he said.
I was a bit in disbelief when he said this, since his visuals and sounds seemed to be so inseparable. It definitely looked like one could generate the other - which is the mark of a good audio-visual work. There is an inseparability, which I think both this highly abstracted pole, ad the direct video sampling method can accomplish.