Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)

The second of The Guardian’s series on rules for writing from a survey of established authors. (Part one is here, in case you missed it).

Desktop magazine are republishing some of my previous Foreign Policy columns for their website. It’s good to see these get a new lease of life. The first one, Trying It On is a profile on Swiss/German studio onlab.

Domus Magazine, Intersections #923, March 2009, illustration: Tobias Krafczyk, Publisher: Editoriale Domus, Italy. You can watch the folding on YouTube.

I have enjoyed all of Jonathan Franzen’s books, in particular The Corrections, his novel about the complexities of family relationships, careers and, for one character, writing. The irony that 80,000 copies of his new book, Freedom will have to be recalled and/or pulped because someone used the wrong file can not be lost on him. Aside from Charlie Brooker’s amusing take on the sloppy way we all handle our digital filing, Stephanie Merritt’s piece highlights our fascination with imperfection:

It remains to be seen whether readers will want to exchange their “flawed” copies, though. As soon as Franzen spoke about the error at a public reading, there was a run on the venue’s bookshop with people desperate to get their hands on what might become a collectors’ item. People love the idea of imperfection and, for many readers, there’s a curious pleasure in the thought of seeing behind the scenes. A glimpse of the work in progress can give a sense of the writer’s process that might be almost more interesting to a fan than the final draft, especially if you’re obsessive enough to compare and contrast.

We love blooper reels because they show those people as human (and are funny) and behind the scenes looks on our DVDs. Despite the enormous amounts of money spent on creating these highly polished entertainment forms, we still want to see the man behind the curtain. We’re more fascinated by how things are made than the things themselves. In the end, we’re curious creatures and a good dose of randomness in an interactive work, like Brendan Dawes’s excellent Accidental News Explorer sets the field for serendipity that, as Liz Danzico argues, is often takes effort to design. Writing is such a private act, it’s rare to see behind the scenes – perhaps more writers should make use of a blooper appendix.

I’m very pleased to have been asked to be a columnist for the Core77 blog. It’s been in the works for a few weeks, but my recent trip to Ethiopia and our new daughter delayed my ability to get down to some writing.

I’ve long been a fan of “industrial design supersite” Core77 (now re-taglined with “design magazine & resource). They have consistently grown Core77 into a rich location for design articles and insights as well as providing great resources such as the Coroflot portfolio and job board and the Core77 Design Directory. They’ve managed some great scoops, such as their rare interview with Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4.

I have contributed to the Core77 broadcasts in the past (Nik Roope, Hector Serrano, Troika,Jason Bruges, and Matt Clark from UVA) as well as a few other articles, such as 19 Books Every Professional Should Own, A peek inside the Revo Heritage and Talk to the hand: Dan Saffer and gestural interfaces. So it’s nice to become a more regular contributor in the form of a columnist (a Columnista sounds more glamourous, don’t you think?).

With other columnists including Bill Moggridge and Liz Danzico, I feel I’m in far better company than I deserve.

My opening piece argues for access, not ownership of products as not only a more sustainable approach to production and consumerism, but also for a better customer experience.

The current issue of COFA’s Incubate magazine has a piece by me in it called Mentoring Creative Minds, which is a reflection on 15 years of teaching (that I have been teaching that long came as a bit of a shock). They also used a scarily large version of my head logo (I can see some bezier points that need work there).

You can download a PDF copy of the magazine here (14.4 MB) to read the whole thing (my piece is on page 33), but here is an excerpt I wanted to share:

Unfortunately, the Vice-Chancellor does not whisper the secret to success in your ear while handing over your testamur. Fortunately, I can deliver it to you here: there is no secret.

Getting students to trust in this, and the knowledge that some projects succeed, others fail and that there is always another one around the corner, is really what teaching is all about. I’m sure there are academics who thrive on being the source of brilliant knowledge. For me, nothing beats the moment when the smart, creative student sitting opposite me realises their own brilliance and doesn’t need me anymore.

I’m sure my current students will be only too willing to remind me of this, but it’s true.

“Verbalizing design is another act of design. I realised this while writing this book,” writes Kenya Hara in the preface to his book, Designing Design. But writing itself is an act of design, whatever the subject.

Over the years I have done quite a bit of writing and recently my PhD is the largest block of words I have ever tackled. I have learned more about design and the creative process through writing than I have through designing.

The Guardian has a piece today titled Writing for a living: a joy or a chore? in which nine authors give their views on writing. There is the usual mix of tortured writers and those that love it and go into a “special place” in their heads, but it’s a good insight into the process because they are all pretty honest. My own feelings about writing are probably closest to Ronan Bennett’s.

I enjoy writing. I like it because it is a slower process than designing on the computer. It takes longer to make something polished because you need to write, edit and re-write several times.

One of the problems with working in applications like Photoshop or Illustrator is that it is easy to produce something glossy, but empty, very quickly. The finished-looking nature of the roughs can be a real handicap to generating new ideas or developing further iterations of an initial one. For this the sketchbook is king.

Tomato’s John Warwacker once said to me that he used to like the days when computers were slow because you could think about what you were doing whilst the progress bar was chugging along. Nowadays, we multitask. A quick Twitter or e-mail whilst Adobe applications crash around and update themselves in the background.

Thinking time is important and the slow, sometimes tortuous, pace of writing is perfect for thinking whilst creating.

Word processors make it easy enough to endlessly tweak, but I prefer keeping things simple with Mellel or Writeroom. Following John Cleese’s advice, writing is one of the few times when I happily ignore everyone. Even Twitter. No, really.

Natalie Goldberg’s advice in Writing Down the Bones is “allow yourself to write junk”. If you don’t, you never get to the good stuff and it is the imperfection of the written first draft that has taught me the most about design. I am happy to write a rubbish opening few paragraphs because I know that I will eventually find what it is I want to say by the time I reach the end. Then I can go in and re-write it.

Teaching students has taught me the value of the rough draft too, for students often hold their first idea as sacrosanct. They want to immediately make it, polish it, without realising the first idea is just a stepping stone to the next one and knowing where to stop is the real trick.

I find that much harder with visual design (and I’m not really a graphic designer, but an interaction and experience designer, so I cheat with graphic design). The tools are too distracting, there are too many possibilities and glossy options. I think it is why I prefer working out the concepts and wireframes – the bare bones are almost completely about the experience not the gloss. I’m thinking of downgrading to the earliest version of Adobe apps that will run on my machine. Perhaps I’ll even install Sheepshaver and run Photoshop 1.0 (which I remember using) and PageMaker 1.0.

If you are a designer I can recommend writing as a way to hone your creative process. You can even write about other designers’ writing if you want.

I suspect other people who are sporty have similar stories. Yoga has taught me a lot about slow, steady practice too, as has playing music.

What has been your greatest creative influence outside of your design life?

[Random shout out: Someone called Leigh got in touch with me from my contact page about my PhD. There was a bug in the form that meant I didn't get the e-mail address. Leigh, can you mail me again - the form is fixed now or you can just use andy at this domain.]

Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future devices and the way design agencies need to shift to a much more multi-disciplinary way of working if they are to survive.

I’ll just point you to “Talk to the Hand: Dan Saffer and Gestural Interfaces” on Core77 rather than spill more beans here.

I seem to have been writing about Jonathan Harris rather a lot recently. Following the piece on Flash on the Beach I wrote in Creative Review in November, an interview I did with Harris has just been published on the Creative Review blog.

He had some interesting things to say about the nature of software and blogging in terms of human experience – surprising, perhaps, given his use of both of those technologies in We Feel Fine. We were discussing the nature of blogging and its lack of emotional context on the micro level and I felt that the snippets of blog posts in We Feel Fine reminded me of the beauty of found objects and notes that are usually removed from their context. Harris replied:

“The reason why that touches is you is because micro is beautifully done. A found object is powerful because you found it in the gutter. If you saw a digital representation of the picture with the text in 12pt Times New Roman it wouldn’t have the same nostalgia, it would be like a blog post.”

Whilst I was at my parents over Christmas, I dug through all my old photos and I know it was a very different feeling from browsing my Lightroom archive. I wonder what kind of experience it will be for my grandchildren, or whether I will have generated so much digital data that they won’t even bother.

It is an issue that really hasn’t been dealt with much, but is going to be a future headache and/or interaction and user experience challenge. It is an issue much like wondering what will happen to my online presences in the event of my death. For some reason I have been thinking about this quite a bit recently – I have some ideas for potential solutions, but they would need funding and security expertise that I don’t have, should anyone out there be interested in taking this further.

The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you click on video and then “Run Before You Can Walk” in the widget above, you’ll get a reasonable taster of it.

One of my favourite parts of chatting to him was hearing about the interaction design issues that came up in terms of the relationship between the suit known as Jarvis – the computer that Downey Jr.’s character, Tony Stark, interacts with – and Stark. For example, what should come first when his eyes look in a particular direction? Is he looking at something and then the HUD responds, or does the HUD show him something and he looks at it?

“We would just get these plates of him in front of a green screen and say, ‘Okay, now he’s looking to the left, what should he be looking at on the HUD? Put something cool in.’ But no matter how cool the thing you put in it’s not going to look right or seem real unless you know what story it should be telling.”

“I asked John Favreau and he said, ‘He’s having a conversation with Jarvis, it depends on who’s asking the question’,” says Rauch.

“If Tony asks a question then Jarvis responds, if Tony is flying and he’s hit then Jarvis throws up some information and Tony looks at it. Once I started looking at the shots like that it became so obvious. What was really interesting for myself and the team is that we weren’t just making visual effects, we weren’t just doing design, we were filmmaking and we were making stories and doing it in a very collaborative way.”

It’s an interesting set of interaction issues to deal with and they’re only a tiny bit in the future. We’ve all seen disastrous versions of this with Microsoft’s Clippy, after all.

I also found the discussions they had about interface colours and design approaches insightful:

“Amber is kind of the 80s and cyan is the 90s, what’s the colour of the future going to look like? What’s the next iPhone or Motorola going to look like? We really had to pull out all the stops for the Mark II and then think about how to make things more simple for the Mark III, because that’s how design usually works. It’s starts out complex and then gets more simplified.”

In midst of the searching for the perfect user-experience I think we forget how influenced we are by fashions and also how fashions and Hollywood movies affect audiences’ and users’ mental schemas of interfaces – think Minority Report and multi-touch, for example.

In a few months I’ll be able to post the whole interview here – Dav also chatted about some of The Orphanage’s commercial animation work and their experiments with a kind of 2D/3D hybrid.

But for the moment go and buy a copy of Desktop!

Daniel Brown – Flower Power

(In an earlier unpublished draft of this I so wanted to title it “Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Coder”, but good taste prevailed. Now I get the chance to share the awful pun with the world. I still prefer it to ‘Flower Power’ though. – AP)

Some of the most successful people seem to thrive between the cracks of definition. The lack of a clear pigeonhole allows for interesting combinations of skills that pique the interest of those in overlapping disciplines. Daniel Brown, winner of the London Design Museum’s coveted Designer of the Year Award in 2004 is one such chameleon. He won the award for his web design when, by his own admission, he’s not really a web designer and would be considered more of an artist by many.

There is a mix of genetics and good fortune at play in Brown’s past. His father, Paul Brown, produced Europe’s first piece of computer animation for television way back in 1981. Like many of us that have ended up experimenting with interactive media, he had a home computer (a Commodore Vic 20 with 3k of memory) when he was very young. Early Hypermedia pioneer and family friend, Roy Stringer, invited Brown to experiment on his office’s Apple Macintosh in 1991 (it was worth $10,000 back then).

Brown joined Stringer’s company in 1996 and started working on research there. Long before the likes of Joshua Davis’s Praystation, Brown was publishing his experimental work on his micro-site, Noodlebox. Some of the works were simple experiments in generative graphics, others explored ideas of interaction. Using Macromedia Director and its Shockwave plug-in, Brown brought life to the web and Noodlebox’s popularity unexpectedly soared.

“I thought at the time it would be well received in the web design community,” says Brown. “But what I never expected was how well it would be recognised in the design/media/advertising community generally, and even in the public. Nor how long it would live. It probably had the height of its popularity about 2000/2001, almost five years after it was made, and still accounts for a large amount of requests to my site.”

Brown is now working with renowned fashion photographer and image-maker, Nick Knight at his experimental cross-media workshop SHOWstudio in London. The fashion world and the projects have helped him come to terms with the thorny question of whether he is a designer, artist, engineer or all three.

“It is the old ‘engineering, design, crafts, applied arts, arts’ question I think. I would have had a much harder time answering this question ten years ago than I do now. And that’s partly due to having worked alongside the fashion industry for the last few years. The so-called ‘traditional’ view of a designer is probably more akin to an ‘engineer’ and that designing is completing a brief to the best quality at the cheapest cost. But we’re living in a Post-Modern society, where the mere fact that something was designed by a particular designer makes it more valuable. Branding and fashion have permeated the process itself. It’s easiest to see this in the fashion industry. Sure, some designers choose cost or technical innovation as their focus, others glamour and beauty. But one thing holds them together as designers – money, or more specifically, demand. And that’s why a fashion designer is not an artist.”

Winning Designer of the Year was very special for Brown. Not only was he following in the footsteps of Apple’s legendary vice-president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, but it also came shortly after a swimming accident that left him paralysed from the shoulders down. It is gratifying to see the award go to designers who are willing to experiment and it also recognises the influence they have had over others. “I was flattered that web-design won full stop – I thought it was a great thing for the industry,” was his typically modest response.

Although much of his upcoming work is under wraps, a recent favourite was his collaboration with Nick Knight on Dazed and Confused’s 10th birthday issue. “[Nick] had a huge amount to do in a short space of time – and he remembered a prototype tool I had shown him,” he explains. “Basically it was like a scratch-card, each time you ‘drew’ with the mouse you were revealing another random image. So he photographed all the models wearing clothes from the last ten years, all in the same ‘pose’. We then fed them into the software, and Nick produced these realtime photomontages. The end result was fantastic, and to boot we put the tool on SHOWstudio – so people could use the actual software/images.”   The other project that has been absorbing Brown’s spare time is his generative flowers series on his Play/Create site. They are based on the “mathematics of nature” and are constantly evolving works, stemming from the early days of Noodlebox. “I’m up to about the eighth piece in the series, and yet I can still sit and stare at one of them for hours. They simply never get boring. And they’re selling well as private commissions to art buyers, which makes me happy.”

Anyone that has tried to exhibit a piece of interactivity will know the pain of watching people not “get it” and wander off disappointed. It is something that Brown is keenly aware of and it is guiding his future work. “The piece has to become apparent in less than about ten seconds,” he says of gallery works. “This is what interests me now. The idea behind Play/Create is very much ‘interactive music videos’ and as such the pieces have to be simple, and they have to be engaging. They’ve got to be as instinctive as listening to music, simply moving the mouse has to produce an elegant reaction if that’s all the user wants to do.”

This simplicity of engagement is something that often gets overlooked in the technology lead world of new media and it is often undervalued by the art world because it is so afraid of seeming trivial. But when you watch people in a gallery, they quite often spend less than ten seconds in front of a Picasso.

The mobile sphere is the obvious venue for future experiments. “[The] problem is that a lot of fashion people don’t do ‘computers’ so we’re looking at what kind of platform on mobile we could come up with that is more ‘visual’ more ‘fluid’ more ‘check this out’ when people are in a bar say. You know, what will people be using their games consoles for when everyone - including granny – has one? What will be interactive entertainment as opposed to games? This is what I’m thinking about.” In the meantime he will carry on playing and creating.

This article first appeared in the June 2005 issue of Desktop magazine. It is expressly not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons licence and is ©2005 Andy Polaine.