A recent post on 24 ways by Simon Collison provides a nice chance for reflection on the state of affairs in web design here at the beginning of 2011. A lot of is pretty vague (frankly I'm not completely sure I understand what Collison is suggesting), but let me quote a bit to you that I found suggestive:

Taking stock: Where we're at is good. Finding clarity through web standards, we've ended up quite modernist in our approach, pursuing function, elegance and reduction. However, we're not great at articulating our own design processes and principles to outsiders. Equally, we rely heavily on our instincts when deciding if something is or isn't good. That's fine, but we can better understand why things are the way they are by looking a little deeper, thereby helping us articulate what goes on in our design brains to our peers, our clients and to normal humans.

That seems true to me, and worth thinking about. If we can't explain what we're doing in clear and understandable language to "normal humans" (in another discipline of my interest, these are sometimes also called "the folk"), then we don't know what we're doing.

Try it yourself. Look at your last web design and ask yourself, frankly, if you can explain every decision you made. If your elderly parent asked you, "Why did you do n in thus and such a way?", what would you say? You might all be surprised at how tough answering a question like that is.

Maybe a New Year's Resolution?: This year, I resolve to make the reasons for my design decisions explicit.

My Sweets are candy bars designed by London-based Tithi Kutchamuch. Specifically, they are candy bars designed to aesthetically deliver you less candy.

From his statement:

Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc.

Can design make people buy food that offers less?

Something to consider for this weekend: Is selling less candy like this really ethical?

The whitepaper on Civil Branding compares the role of brands in today's society with those of church and state in the past. Brands now "engage [in] wider conversations about how we should think about ourselves as a society." They play a primary role in informing what we find important, and help us tune our perspectives on it. God help me, I think this is right. But the conclusion - that it is the duty of marketers to help brands advertise with value-based messages, to promote good values - is dead wrong.

When marketers suggest that companies undertake vague, value-based advertising campaigns that are contradicted by their unethical business practices, they are promoting a culture where values are handed down by institutions lacking the moral authority to do so. When companies use advertising to promote values that they don't instantiate, they drain the meaning out of those values.

Making value-based promises requires moral authority. If you're a marketer, and you help a company promote a value it doesn't instantiate, you're cheapening that value. You're making a world in which that value means less.

The Stockholm-based design firm BVD is advertising their new line of products, available from the Japanese office supply company Askul. Among them is this clock, which I find worthy of reflection.

Consider the following: This is a beautiful clock, whose form follows its function. It is as easy to use in the context of an office as it is clever and visually striking. It is, by these counts, very nicely designed indeed. Things get less clear, though, when you consider that its core function seems to be reminding you every time you look at it that you're somewhere you don't want to be.

There is an anecdote that I once read in my childhood, for which I have long since lost the reference, which I'd like to relate today. No doubt I will get the names wrong, but you'll have to forgive me that (meanwhile, if anyone has a reference for this story, I'd be glad to have it). Anyway, here it is, in all its mangled glory:

The Lady X, upon returning from a formal event for the first Derby government, was asked by her friends to recount the experience of meeting the many famed diplomats and politicians. She said: "First I met the Lord Palmerston, and in talking to him I was captivated. I was certain that he was the smartest man in England. But then I spoke to Chancellor Disraeli, and forgot all about the Lord Palmerston, as I became convinced I was the smartest woman in England.

Here's something to ponder: Is your brand Palmerston or Disraeli? Both can work, I think (with my respective examples being Google and Apple), but only one of the requires you to not be the smartest person in the room.

The right honorable Benjamin Disraeli

(If you have joined us recently, you may not know that Weekend Ponderables are our way of throwing our various concerns about open problems in advertising and branding out into the Internet soup, hopefully to engage a bit of thought and discussion.)

Today's ponderable really bothers me. It concerns a variety of products, but I'm going to pick on Apple.

Apple advertises to you that if you have Apple products you will live in a cool, modern world of bright flat color and expensive furniture. More often than not, this turns out to be true, because so many of the people who buy Apple products go out and paint their world with bright flat colors, and buy expensive furniture on installment plans. This phenomenon literally boggles my mind. When I think about it, I reel.

So, this weekend, let's all take a moment to think about the self-fulfilling prophecy in advertising. Let's ask ourselves: If we advertise a world that's desirable enough, can we actually get consumers to go out and make it? If so, this seems to gesture towards a rather mind-blowing imperative from a design ethics standpoint.

I like Jay Rosen. He's teaches at the NYU School of Journalism and, more importantly to me, is the author of PressThink, which is a blog mainly about journalism, but which often focuses of educating traditional journalists about blogging.

Trust Fall by Lauren Nassef (August 27th, 2008)

His most recent blog post is titled If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue. (one of the reasons I like him are his witty, prolix, and often multi-sentential titles). It makes the following point nicely:

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, says a blog is not defined by the software or features in the format (like comments) but by a person talking: "one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think." Blogging, he says, is "writing without a safety net" and taking personal responsibility for the words.

To trust a blogger is to trust in a person, talking to you, who is working without the safety net of an institution.

This weekend, Nick and I are going to be thinking about trust, which will be our topic next week. We invite you to do the same.

Paul Arden says: "What is a good idea? One that happens is. If it doesn't, it isn't."

Is this egg drop a failure, or a success? (via xkcd)