by Goran Batic, INC researcher for A Decade of Webdesign
Luna Maurer (1972) is a graphic/interaction designer based in the Netherlands. After completing courses at the Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute she’s done many different kinds of projects ranging from interactive narration to performances and fashion. Instead of seeing herself as a graphic designer she approaches her work as a designer of systems. By crystallizing structures and making systems visible she wants to purify information and communication and make them more honest. Information should be structured in such a way that the structure (or the system) creates a meaningful image. View her portfolio at www.poly-luna.com and www.poly-xelor.com
Interview with Luna Maurer, December 20, 2004.
By Goran Batic, Institute of Network Cultures
GB: A few years ago Jeffrey Zeldman, a design theorist and a designer himself, said: “The Web used to look like a phone book. Now much of it looks like a design portfolio. In fact, it looks like the design portfolio of 20 well-known designers, whose style gets copied again and again by young designers who consider themselves disciples.” Do you agree?
LM: I definitely don’t think that I am one of those who copy. I think it is logical it happens, but off course it is horrible. It should be all about people thinking for themselves, and developing their own views and their own approaches to designing information for the Internet.
GB: Do you think that design students nowadays are mainly focused on the latest designing techniques and innovations?
LM: I can’t really tell what students work with these days. But I do know for instance that design students at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam don’t work with new media at all! Actually they turned their back to new media these last few years.
GB: Do you think that design students should know about the (visual) history of webdesign, what did the web look like ten years ago? And what does it look like now?
LM: No, I don’t think it is necessary at all to study how webdesign looked before. What is really important is to be trained to develop something yourself. Not through looking at others people’s work, but by thinking about underlying structures. From my point of view, the visual aspect of the web design is not that interesting, really. The structures are much more important. Therefore, you have to be trained in that almost architectural way of thinking. You have to recognise those structures to be dynamic images, rather than just designing certain graphics.
GB: So you think designers should focus on the originality of structure rather than the originality of form?
LM: Yes, exactly. So, in that sense it is not that related to the new techniques, like Photoshop, all kinds of filters, flash, et cetera. It about using them in a very simple way, instead of making long flash introductions, which I believe we all hate. Unless of course if you want to make movies, which is something else completely.
However, in a different way it is related to the new technology, since now the websites should be, and are going to be, more dynamic with for instance a content management system for. I think that increasingly, websites are turning away from the static HTML pages any more. This is a trend, and I think it is a very good one. Since you have the technology, you should use it, instead of designing static online brochures.
GB: I would like to focus a bit more on this notion of the trends in webdesign. We are all witnessing the quick pace of the technological development, and every year there seems to be new software, faster computers etc. For a designer, this must be ‘a dream come true’. However, most of the users do not have the newest equipment or plug-ins, and have dial-up internet connections. All of these new trends can result in websites that take a very long time to load. So, does this mean that designers should stop following the latest techniques in order to have a broader public?
LM: That naturally depends on what kind of web sites you make. There are different intentions and necessities. For instance, the website for the Nederlandse Spoorwegen mainly needs to be fast. Nevertheless, we have to make innovative things and experiment, go over the boarders of being safe, and also as a designer you have a responsibility to educate the user. Now you are talking about the bandwidth, but what you could also talk about is the way the interface is structured and designed. Just because the horizontal and the vertical menu bars are what the users have grown accustomed to, is not a good reason to keep on designing the same way. I think in that sense concerning design, we should not keep on doing what every user understands right away. Users will understand new things if they are well designed.
GB: what about the fact that a designer with a T1 connection and a huge flat screen experiences his design much different from a common net user at home does.
LM: I have just made a project where you need a bandwidth, it was an interactive narrative. We had the choice between making it much more beautiful and more advanced, that really works much more intuitive, but therefore we needed technology of the latest QuickTime player. At the end we did choose to go for the latest QuickTime player instead of using older versions, and having fewer options.
GB: But don’t you think that is sort of designing for designers?
LM: No, no, no. It is totally not! It is just that fewer people will look at it. I would rather make a beautiful project that is really good and less people will see it, than make a half as good project and have a wider public. But again, it depends on what you do. If it is a website for a bank, it is essential for everyone to see it fast.
GB: Since the introduction of innovations such as Shockwave, Flash, WAP etc. the web design completely changed. Do you think it changed to better or worse in the sense of simplicity and structure?
LM: In that sense I’d have to say it changed to worse. Because of all those possibilities things become much more complicated. But actually I can’t really remember, Flash has been there for so long, what was there before…
GB: A phone book?
LM: Yes, exactly. I definitely think all of those possibilities make you distract. But again you can look through them and use them in a very simple way. That’s what I always say, that we have to use the new systems and make them visible, rather than wrap them in design. Let’s skip that, and show the underlying systems. This is what I always preach in a way… For some people it might be useful to have these colourful flash designs, but I don’t like it that much. I think it could be better.
G. Does this mean that designers have to make some sacrifices? If they need to make sites simpler, they can’t really go wild with their creativity.
L. I think creativity lies in the simplicity! It is much easier to make a fancy crazy thing, than to make a simple, pure and really good design. That’s much harder. It is the same with language. It is much easier to make long and complicated sentences to explain something, rather to express the complexity in a simple way.
G. Is that perhaps what you had in your mind when you made the website for Sandberg Institute? (http://www.sandberg.nl ) For me it has a notion of simplicity of a very good structure, and you can play with it.
L. It is a playful one! On one hand it is very simple and straight with the matrix, on the other hand you’ll be surprised by the tactile feeling. The matrix feels elastic. Most of my works deal with the similar aspects. They play with these two parallel realities: the digital world, and the physical. These two worlds mix and intertwine so much in our daily lives, that we can’t always distinguish them any more, and live half digital half physical. In that sense, this website comments on that. You can also say this is an experiment of the aspect of ‘who controls who’. We always try to make our interfaces much more human, in order to be able to relate to it better. All those new technologies and developments mean that you have to adapt to new systems all the time. You would assume that by making these new systems more human you could control them better, but on the other hand you are always a victim of your computer. You get lost, it doesn’t work the way you want it to… Very often you feel you are a victim of your system. So this is the notion I like to use in my works, the game of control. One time you think you are in control when you use technology in order to satisfy your human being, like an extension of yourself, in order to control the world. And on the other hand, you are a victim of what you designed yourself, because you can’t handle it, you don’t know how to use it, it doesn’t work the way you want it to. This is an interesting game, the man-machine relationship.
So to go back to where we started off, the Sandberg website with the elastic rate where you have the static matrix which is very much the logic of the computer and the digital world, and then the distortion which is very much the physical aspect. The programming of the site is based on the physical principle of spring. So it is exactly calculated in the way it would react in the physical world. The rules are applied.
Another theme which I like is the combination of simple elements with simple rules. So as the matrix has its corner points, you apply certain rules, and by multiplying those rules, you create a whole, where the whole is a more complex system than a single element, with new behaviours and characteristics emerging. I have also included this in other works of mine, and it is all related to the idea of letting go of control in designing process, which I think is interesting. You don’t try to design every end product, but you design the systems. You focus on the system and by using it, every time a slight change makes the design look different.
GB: Let’s get back to the notion of manipulation. Most common online user’s behaviour is scanning. In that sense, the form of the site seems to be the most important aspect. If a user finds the site visually more appealing, he’s likely to spend more time on it. An inexperienced Internet user can easily be misled by those Flash movies, different colours and fonts… Nowadays, the Internet is full of e-commerce sites, in a way like the ‘Themed Shopping Malls’, as Max Bruinsma calls them. If a group of designers gets involved with Cognitive Science and focuses on process of responses to colours, movements, fonts, they could optimize this manipulation. Do you see it happening one day?
LM: I think it is possible that if you would like, you can have a big influence as a designer on the way how users use and perceive the information. That’s how big branding strategies of the ‘shopping malls’ function. A lot of content behind it is psychologically based in order to influence users to buy certain products. But off course I am very much against that. I am very idealistic, otherwise I wouldn’t continue designing. I want to make better websites and systems, I turn my back on this aspect of manipulation. Why not let the user be an independent individual, so he can make his own choice? A lot of new technological developments focus on the user’s choice, i.e. that he can individually design his own environment and customize things the way he wants to.
GB: So it is more like a manipulation of a user, in the sense that the user believes he controls the system, not the other way around.
LM: Yes, this is an illusion because it is all pre-designed. There are two parallel developments in this concern. The one is the shopping mall concept, where everyone tries to make tight branding concepts of what they want to sell. On the other hand, systems are opening up; they become more like Wikipedia, where you can use the Internet in a way that you can really build things yourself. And of course, a lot of people build their own websites.
GB: In order to shift the subject, I would like to read out another quote by Jeffrey Zeldman. In 1999, he said: “Before you can puzzle out the problem of how to design a web project, you must resolve the riddle of who you are designing it for.” How do you define your audience, do you divide them into users, readers and viewers, if you think it is possible to make such a division? While answering this, could you explain the process of designing from the beginning (when you get the project) till the publishing of the final product.
LM: That is very important if you make sites that are supposed to have big audiences (a bank site). I actually don’t really think much of the end user’s profile and how to approach the user, before I start. I think the other way around, how I can express the information in a way that it makes sense, for the design, the structure, and the client you are making the site for. And then, the audience is also based on how this is made, on what kind of information it is. Maybe, you get a whole different audience than the one you were expecting; you can’t really control your audience. I am much more interested in finding the perfect system for a certain organization or for information. For example, the idea for squares on the site for Dinie Besems, a jewellery designer, developed out her systematic way of working. She also made a project where she cut tree leaves in squares. That’s how I started thinking in squares. I very much relate to the work itself.
Also, another example of my work is the house style that I designed for an art space, but then again an art space has a very specific audience. The whole house style represents the art space with an every day changing colours. The colour is generated by the system, and this is generated on the website too. This resulted in a colourful website, which is very nice and attractive. I can imagine that this appeals to certain people. Definitely to art public, but perhaps to others too.
GB: Have you ever tested one of your websites with test users?
LM: No not really. I did it once with a demo version of the interactive story I already mentioned, but it is not a good example since it wasn’t the final version of the product.
GB: Do you get feedback from your websites? Did you use any suggestions?
LM: I get them, but I never got negative feedback. They are usually questions such as: “Oh beautiful, how did you do this?”
GB: I would like to know whether there is anything you would like to do in your design work, but you can not since it is not possible yet? And is it right to say that nowadays something is impossible?
LM: I totally think so much is possible, that it is overwhelming in a way. What concerns me personally is the aspect of programming. It is important to focus on the system and the structure, not on the images and graphics. What I really like is when the system results in the visual structure. This is very often created through programming algorithms. It is important to think analytically in structures. That is what you need to able to design in such a way. Designers need to talk to programmers to completely understand what is possible, and I can imagine a lot of designers lack this quality. Maybe they should experiment a bit more with this.
GB: When you get an assignment, how much influence do clients have on your work? How much freedom do you have?
LM: In the best case, people approach me because they like the way I approach design. Yet, it is very important that you don’t put ‘the same sauce on top of it’. I listen to my clients very carefully and I am open to make compromises.
GB: Has it ever happened that someone had copied your work?
LM: No. I might inspire people, but I also get inspired by other people as well.
GB: Well then, how do you define copying?
LM: It is difficult to say when something is copied. I am happy when people have a similar approach as mine, because it is a good approach, otherwise I wouldn’t do it that way. What is important to note is that a visual idea is not of any use to copy, because it should result from the system you thought of.