Maintaining the integrity of design in a virtual world

Last week, I finished my article reviewing Adobe Creative Suite 3 as a toolkit to maximize productivity and creativity for knowledge workers that rely more on the right side of their brains. It will be in print and online soon at www.kmworld.com. Meanwhile, I had some leftover miscellaneous and incomplete thoughts.

The article is about two issues you don’t hear much about in KM:

1. The KM needs of design and creative professionals as knowledge workers
2. The role of real design in knowledge and content management

The last few years are just a hiccup in the 1600-year-old understanding that anything worth reading is worth illuminating with a little graphic design. Graphic design changes the absorption properties of the meaning to be derived from information.

It’s all another example of how the digital age has delaminated text from context--the document delaminated from the page. The value of typography, layout (and too often editing) is left behind. When documents are digital and/or disposable things, we tend to forget that in anthropological terms they have tangible power in their form as well as their function.

Although Web design has come a long way in terms of what Jakob Nielson thinks of as usability, it mostly lacks the other attributes identified by Nielsen’s partner (at Nielsen Norman Group), Don Norman.

In Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (Basic Books 2004), Norman says that people relate to products on three different levels:

• Behavioral—the functionality and performance of the tool or toy
• Visceral—the emotional pull of the item, regardless of how well it works
• Reflective—what a product says about the user or owner

Technology products typically fail to do meet any of these three challenges. Web pages, software interfaces even most office documents fail, too.

The promise of desktop publishing to revolutionize the paper world by democratizing page design was outstripped by the appeal of turning every form of content into a dynamically generated catalogue.

All of these things trace back to Xerox PARC: Adobe’s Postscipt page description language and Aldus’ PageMaker DTP and the Apple laser printer. Xerox, of course was in the copier business—and DPT positioned copiers as a replacement for the press itself in many ways…as hoc knowledge sharing.

The modern page delivered by either the printer or the LCD monitor poorly parrots the original experience of reading a well-laid page in a book, newspaper or magazine. (Although there are interesting developments at the New York Times and other publications to address this.)

Meanwhile, I would actually add two more points to the first ones:

1. KM also under-appreciates the importance of non-personalized information.
2. Even before the invention of the printing press—or even writing for that matter—knowledge was transmitted through rich media in terms of stories, songs and performances

Non-personalized information creates common experience and shared context. John Seely Brown makes this point very well when he points out the social and linguistic benefits of a ubiquitous newspaper, for example.

The rich media question is interesting too, because in the last few years, we are actually seeing ways that interactivity and rich media can be incorporated into designed documents in ways never before possible.

So while the online environment has been catching up quite rapidly, we have to be careful not to design designers out of the process. While the corporate world has demanded process efficiency from software tools in ways that handicap good design, the popular, personal, quasi-amateur adoption of social tools have been a much more powerful force for keeping the issues alive.

Comments

[Steve Barth]

But then, I’m a strange case, since I’ll obsessively waste time to cut and paste online articles into a form with fonts, columns, kerning and leading just so I can print it, read it, think about it, and drop it into the recycle box