These days, it seems that to be a web designer is to be an architect in networked space. It requires an analysis of the site, its environment, the technical and legal constraints associated, and of course, the people and how they are intended to use the final work.
I’m an architecture geek, and I’m not alone. I’ve talked with many web designers about the field, and found the same sort of fascination with the use of physical space. We envy architects, and some part of us identifies with the work of Santiago Calatrava, or Jørn Utzon, or maybe Mies van der Rohe, for creating designs that keep their luster over time. We build things that we hope will last for a year or two, maybe, while great works of architecture are lasting, living testaments to good design.
When we defend our work, we talk about the values of cardboard boxes compared to the palace at Versailles. Some have even built their own clubs or salons on Second Life, in a nod to uniting physical and virtual spaces. What connects us as architects of the virtual space with architects of the physical space is inescapable, and what we can learn from those architects who came up with T-squares and angled desks is immeasurable. Here are but three examples of what I’m talking about.
Encourage connections
I worked for a while in the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center. His stated intention in creating this building was to foster interaction between the various organizations within the building, if only by keeping them from indulging in the familiar, linear, parallel pathways that prevented many of those connections from happening in the old Technology Square buildings.
If there is a genius in his work, one that can be translated to our field, it is to never underestimate the power of serendipity in individuals’ lives. The individuals who work and study in that building need to collide with one another occasionally, if only because of what they can do when they put their minds together.
Remember your purpose
Blue Flavor’s photo shoot was done around the Seattle Central Library, in which Rem Koolhaas worked collaboratively with librarian legend, “Book Lust” author and action figure Nancy Pearl to create, in essence, the ultimate shrine to information sciences. What makes the Central Library great isn’t the glass-and-metal exoskeleton. It’s not the red floor, or the yellow escalators, or the Mylanta-blue washrooms (though each of those colors had well-thought-out practical and/or physiological purposes).
The greatest feature, in my mind, is that the stacks, which are organized by the Dewey Decimal System, were built in a spiral box around the escalator—using the same cheap, sturdy, well-known technology used in city parking garages. Any old hack could have made some crazy, curvy polycarbonate double-helix, or created some Frank Lloyd Wright-Guggenheim ripoff, or worse, buried the stacks simply to emphasize design for design’s sake. But this library gives them the order that is reflected in the card catalog, and money to spare for other features. And, it has an escalator running right through the center, immersing bookworms in the information they have to offer. We can learn from this building that colors are neat, and open spaces are inviting, but in the end, valuable content, presented well, is the only true, lasting asset.
Don’t design for the boss
We can even look at the current situation of the World Trade Center for insight, though it is probably too close for comfort in many of our lives as designers. In this ongoing saga, a power vacuum at the top causes a design contest (i.e., spec work) to be held for the project, and the organization that leads it (LMDC) picks a winner (THINK Team). But under pressure from a higher authority (New York Governor George Pataki), they reverse course and choose another design (Daniel Libeskind) instead. Meanwhile, the site’s titular manager (Larry Silverstein), who also asserts control over the land, hires another designer (David Childs), whose vision, unclouded by symbolic virtue or artistry, is to maximize profit for his patron.
The big boss and the site manager lock the two designers in a room together, and both emerge bloodied, unbowed, and with little to show for the effort. Meanwhile, external forces insinuate themselves into the process: make it 1,776 feet high, they say. Give us an as-yet-undefined space for a memorial. The end result? Nearly five years after the towers were destroyed, they have yet to break ground, and the consensus is that no one can create and execute a successful design in that environment.
Moral: know when you can’t win, and get out as quickly as you can. We all have people who depend on us to do our work, but when there are too many voices to manage, too many must-haves to take on, too many “bigger bosses” emerging, and no one who will take “no” or even “not yet” as an answer, nobody, least of all you as the designer, will be satisfied with the outcome. If you find that you’re answering to four departments, having more status meetings than working hours, and don’t have room to push back or a place to stand your ground, you should listen that voice in your head, find a fire exit, pull the alarm, and run like hell.
I totally agree with this from the first sentence. Now a web designer, I come from a landscape architecture background with an education focused on the organization of physical space, how people should (versus how they actually will) use that space, how that space connects to other spaces, and the microclimate within the designed area.
I never really thought about it but this is so close to the way I design web sites, it makes a lot of sense.
It’s funny for me, and architecture student from valencia, to see that you use Calatrava as an example of architecture to endure during time… But well, i’ve read the comment, and totally agree with you ;)