How Reductionism Shapes The Future of Design
“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” — E.Y. Harburg, The Wizard of OZ.
Design is a language. Its trends emerge in eras like dialects, each succeeding the other, transforming the world around us. An example is ‘skeuomorphism;’ ascending with the rise of highly color-rich displays, it popularized the emulation of physical objects onto digital interfaces.
App icons looked glossy, calculator apps felt realistic, and eBooks radiated in wood-textured bookshelves. But if we attribute the rise of interface trends to the continual advancements in technology, why was the subsequent ‘flat-design’ trend so textureless and… well, flat?
Skeuomorphism surged with the first, truly personal computers — smartphones. But a ubiquitous problem these devices faced was, in fact, their newness. Most people still saw computers as complexities using cryptic lingo; ‘triggers’ and ‘booleans’ Keanu Reeves would use to hack the aliens, or something like that. To have a real shot at replacing everyday tools regular folks used, digital tools didn’t just have to be better, they had to be familiar.
So triggers became pushable buttons like the ones in elevators. Booleans became slide-able switches like the ones on radios. Even digital audio recording apps went out of their way to add analog sound meters.
In other words, skeuomorphism made digital interfaces analogous to their analog counterparts. Hence, we can argue that interfaces are analogies. They give us familiar mental models to navigate unfamiliar paradigms. Their function is to translate complexities, like machine language, into something we already understand, and vice versa.
Look closer, and the interfaces skeuomorphism replaced had once dethroned denser analogies preceding them.
Before the realistic calculator app, the pushable numbers on physical calculators succeeded more complex mental-models used by the arithmometer, which replaced the slide-rule, and so on; i.e, the pushable numbers allowed us to simply type out the values from our mind, one digit at a time, as opposed to also learning to fiddle with levers and knobs to do the same. Therefore, while technological advancements improve user experience, they only do so by enabling mental-models more natural.
Interface design is the art of making the artificial, natural.
Here, smartphones with color-rich touch-screens were an inflection point because, in addition to being exponentially efficient, they enabled interactive skeuomorphism that preserved a natural degree of familiarity for migrating users. The combination was a success. In less than a decade, smartphones were buzzing in every pocket, taking our interaction with information to an extreme. Notifications, emails, and apps of all sorts unleashed the new era’s ubiquitous problem — information overload.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore” — Dorothy
It was inevitable that the design trend succeeding skeuomorphism stripped it away; it had accomplished its mission. So instead of using shadows to convince us of the press-ability of a button, the button was reduced to its essential form — a shape. Calendar and note-taking apps evolved from having bright paper textures to solid colors, preferably in dark mode. While our familiarity with smartphones allowed for such a minimalist trend, our crowded minds and tired eyes demanded it. Hence…
An era’s ubiquitous interface trend is a reflection of its ubiquitous problem.
While flat design helped declutter information, information overload remains an ever growing problem. Every passing day, we can do more with technology while our busy lives are run out of the mindshare to interact with those screens, find those flights, make those reservations, etc. This is the emerging era’s ubiquitous problem. It paints a reflection of tomorrow’s interfaces.
Line up all the trends of the past and a pattern emerges — reductionism. Just as flat-design reduced skeuomorphic textures, skeuomorphism reduced physical devices, physical devices reduced archaic ones, all in favor of mental-models less analogical and more natural than previous ones, design trends of the future too will reduce and strip away today’s analogies— dropdowns, input fields, date pickers, etc. What’s more natural than a date picker? — natural language.
Just like early-stage skeuomorphism felt artificial (think Windows 95 with emboss border shadings) today’s AI and Natural Language Processing make talking to Alexa and Siri far from natural. But once these technologies evolve into being as familiar as the people we talk to every day, many of today’s interactions will become disposable for certain products and services. One day, finding the right flight or reservation by delegating it to a digital assistant will be far more natural, and faster, than tapping screens and dragging the dreaded date selector.
That day isn’t far. Here’s a demo of Google’s Duplex AI assistant.
This isn’t to say that visual interfaces will die — far from it. Just as people still need physical notepads, calendars, books, all for good reasons, there will always be good reasons for visual interfaces; they’ll always be most natural for data visualizations, detailed information, precision inputs, etc. For everything else, I believe conversational-design will be the new frontier of interface design. It’ll require new design skills, like making AI personalities familiar — think skeuomorphism for AI. Heuristics and languages differ from culture to culture, so anthropology will become a more important design skill.
With a design language indistinguishable from natural language, it’s likely that conversational super-apps will mediate the interaction between us and the wizardry behind the curtain, seamlessly bridging the natural to the artificial; human to the machine. Closing that gap has been mankind’s great pursuit. While designs along the way employed analogies to bridge that gap, future generations will look back at them as fantastical monuments predating their gap-less era. An era where every mechanical interaction is human. Familiar, natural, like home. Interfaces evolve, because there’s no place like home.
