I had another post all lined up for today and then my delicious feed alerted me to a recent presentation on surface by Michal Migurski: Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles, and Flair. I thought the last section was such a good read, I just had to share it and offer some comments.

Greebles are a great little design trope that is not widely known outside modeling circles. In my earlier 3D modeling days, I used to play with them quite a bit. Sci-fi aficionados will recognize greebles as the texture that covers the Death Star, Star Destroyer, and Borg Cube.

Migurski describes them thusly:

Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture.

Migurski’s thesis is that while greebles themselves don’t do anything, they do serve a purpose. They are the “slight of hand” that suggests complexity and activity—which can be very important to an audience’s impressions of an experience. For example, the experience of social networking.

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Rick Poynor, writing for ID last month, made an impassioned defense of the much-maligned visual element of the design process, an element he sees as one that designers should be willing to defend to its many critics, paramount among whom are the "design thinkers" who seek to supplant visual designers with vision-hungry corporations worldwide.

Quoting Dori Tunstall, he argues :

"There is an inherent intelligence to beauty, which is about the depth and passion we feel for the world." Design thinkers like to wax lyrical about the elegance of their strategic thinking as a form of design in its own right, as though this could ever be a substitute.

While my tendency, coming as I do from an interface design background, is to recoil at the very idea that making things look nice is somehow "good enough", Poyner does have a point, and some downright alarming quotes to back it up. Including Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz quoted as saying, “Designers like the shiny-shiny...That’s often why they got into design.” Poyner volleys:

Is an encounter with an everyday brand — a bottle of soda, a power tool, a packet of snacks — the place to go if you want to be moved, to seek education, or to grow as a person, and aren’t there better places to find those kinds of experiences?

The bad news is that both Merholz and Poyner are right. Essentially, the shiny-shiny isn't good enough, and also all the corporate vision in the world isn't going to help Miller Lite stir my emotions. The good news is that both of them (or at least their respective sound-bytes) are fighting straw men, the silliest representatives of design culture, visual or otherwise.

I suppose, though, that one does have to say those things, because often enough the silliest elements of culture are so often highly successful.

We don't want the most salient representatives of our profession to be associated with, on the one hand, mindless Photoshop junkies casting drop-shadows and ripple effects on the once-powerful identities of their clients, or, on the other hand, academic blowhards, spouting rhetoric intended to, "dazzle prospective clients into believing that they are dealing with rigorous professionals who work with precise methodologies and defined, quantifiable outcomes."

The problem, then, as I see it, is not so much the concrete philosophico-strategic position of one camp or the other (insofar as they ever exist atomically), but the general mindlessness that allows any design firm to internally justify that either a mindless visual kludge or else the Emperor's New Clothes is a legitimate result for a consulting engagement.

Adaptive Path wrote a nice post a while ago answering a question they had been asked by a client. The client, showing uncommon wisdom, asked them "how they might make the most of [their - the client and AP's] design engagement."

This is a sort narcotic story for designers (or at least myself), who, qua Shirky's arrogant designer, fantasize about a world where clients ask us how they could make the most of our time. Unfortunately, it's a rare occasion when a client is going to ask you a question like that, much less be capable of hearing and internalizing the answer.

In the remainder of situations, unfortunately, our interactions with clients are going to be influenced by, if not symptomatic of, internal disorganization, a lack of project clarity, monetary shenanigans, or any combination of the three. This means more often than not, being a design professional means putting our ability to be humble to the test.

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