by Goran Batic, INC researcher for A Decade of Webdesign

Max Bruinsma is an independent designwriter, editor, critic, curator and editorial designer, and former editor of Eye, the international review of graphic design in London. He studied art-, architecture- and design history in Groningen and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 1985, his critical writings have featured regularly in major Dutch art- and design journals and in a range of international design publications (a.o. Graphis, Idea, Blueprint, The AIGA Journal, Eye). Before he took over from founding editor Rick Poynor at Eye, Max was editor of the Dutch design magazine Items, published several books on (graphic and new media) design in the Netherlands, and taught at the Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. His latest book is ‘Deep Sites, intelligent innovation in contemporary webdesign’, published by Thames & Hudson, in English and French editions, april 2003.

Max’s shortest definition of the profession is: “Designers are cultural agents”.

A guest lecturer on contemporary art and graphic design, Max has presented at numerous art academies and congresses throughout the world, including on-line courses for several design academies. Besides his work as an art- and design critic and educator, he was a music editor and program maker for VPRO, a Dutch radio and television broadcasting organisation. Max resides alternately in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Basel, Switzerland.

Interview with Max Bruinsma
by Goran Batic, Institute of Network Cultures

GB: The never ending battle between ‘content vs. form’ still represents a major problem for designers. What would you suggest to young designers and design students as the alternative approach to this dilemma? Is there a way to escape it?

MB: When designing anything, there is no way of escaping either content or form. If there’s a ‘battle’ between the two, then something has gone seriously wrong (as is the case with most wars ;-). Actually, I don’t see the problem. Content needs form to be communicated meaningfully, form needs content to become meaningful. Within the province of design, they both represent different, but necessary and connected, levels. In my view, content should direct form (which by the way is not necessarily the same as ‘form follows function’), and form should reflect content. Ideally, they are functions of each other, meaning that one ‘informs’ the other…

GB: The Web is often considered to be too flashy. How would you describe the condition of the web design before and after the introduction of technical innovations such as Flash, WAP and Shockwave? Is less more?

MB: Quoting myself:
“First, technology seems to have caught up with the demands designers make on the degree of manipulation and the quality of detail in their tools and presentation media. For designers, few things are as annoying as seeing a carefully orchestrated arrangement of texts and images fall apart on every other computer screen than their own.
Conversely, there is a greater awareness among designers that they are unable – and should not want – to control every aspect of design for this medium with its ever-increasing array of output devices and technologies. Rather than meticulously laying out a wealth of details, as they are used to doing, web designers increasingly concentrate on making the basic structure of a site work on any conceivable platform and compensate proactively for differences in display and bandwidth. In short, a new design strategy is developing that focuses less on formal aesthetics and more on designing the behavior of information and users.”
[Deep Sites, Introduction]

In this context, less can be more in sofar the designer restrains from detailing every aspect of the way a website appears on a screen, and instead concentrates on the structural consistency behind it. Making allowance for the information to find its own form on the screen, so to speak. This focus on the structural instead of the formal aspect of design is known from editorial design in f.i.
newspapers and magazines, where large quantities of information need to be channeled into fixed formats flexibly and without much time for detailing.
To me, a simple website that performs well is much more preferable than a flashy one that crashes or takes minutes to load 😉

GB: Internet users are known to scan web pages (instead of reading them thoroughly). Therefore, the form remains the most important feature of the design. The inexperienced user can be easily misled through manipulative design. Do you foresee a situation in which designers will manipulate users’ behaviour on a large scale?

MB: Yes, but not exactly as you describe it. First of all, I think the ‘scanning behavior’ is triggered by the medium:

“This is an aspect of screens that distances them from writing: we are used to watch them, not read them. This is almost a cultural dictate: screens are for watching, paper is for reading. Although I admit to a slight exaggeration here, I do think I can safely state that the directly visual aspect of things on screens is generally stronger than that of things on paper. We watch TV, we read the paper. So, when I use the screen as the medium in which I write, in some respects I change from a reader into a viewer, and I become, almost by necessity, a graphic designer of my own texts.”
[http://maxbruinsma.nl/atypI.html]

In print, the interface is seamlessly integrated with the content and in terms of interaction, it is much simpler than on screen. This means that when one wants to integrate content and interface in a website, one has to attribute behavior to content. Preferably the kind of behavior that anticipates the visitors’ behavior through the site, which means anticipate ‘browsing’, ‘scanning’, or ‘zapping’.

Recognizing the importance of this, is becoming the touchstone of design for the web:

“It has been remarked repeatedly that the ‘new media’ promise (or threaten, depending on your viewpoint) to thoroughly mix up the established hierarchies between authors (or content providers) and recipients (or users); the two become, as hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson said, ‘deeply intertwingled’. The web prompts a way of browsing that is quite different from old media, magazines included. ‘Scanning’ is probably the most accurate word for the average browser’s behavior. The web encourages a predator’s glance, processing a vast amount of fleeting information fast, before focusing on a target. Designers – and editors – who fail to recognize this pattern will most likely make confusing choices in content structure, and ultimately leave their consumers hungry for guidance and substance. Designers, in short, must deepen their knowledge of and expertise in orchestrating human response.”
[Deep Sites, Introduction]

Does all of this amount to ‘manipulation’? Well, yes, in the sense that the interaction designer will try and influence the visitor’s scanning behavior in the direction the content wants to take. There are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of doing this: helping the visitor digest the gist of the content fast (facilitating the visitor) or luring the visitor in the direction of simple sales traps (catching the visitor). As with most things good and bad, the dividing line cannot be so neatly drawn in practice as defined in theory…

GB: In your works, you often point out that the Internet is a combination of aspects and characteristics of other (older) media.
Considering the theory that technological developments are always followed by communicational change, the Internet should be considered as the ultimate source of information. But people still regard television as the best and the most reliable information source. Could you explain this paradox? And do you think the Internet is bound to take over the role of television?

MB: In so far it can mimic television, yes. I am staying with a friend at the moment who lives on the Azores islands. She watches the Dutch news, which obviously she cannot receive as TV, through web-streams. The moment such streams are compatible with or equal to TV in terms of resolution and frame rate, television is dead as technology. What remains then is TV as ‘format’, as a specific way to communicate and mediate information.
As for the internet as “ultimate source of information” and TV being “the most reliable information source”, this is only superficially a paradox. The main difference between the two media is _not_ the amount of information (although the internet ‘wins’ convincingly there), but the way this information is structured. TV represents edited information to a much deeper and more controllable extent than the internet. ‘Reliable’ means from official and controllable sources. We know the bias of big news organizations such as CNN or FOX (internationally), or EO and VPRO (nationally). We don’t know who is the ‘authority’ behind www.blogspot.com/allthenewsintheworld. So the matter of reliability is not directly connected to the medium, but to the way we can check the editorial point of view behind the information communicated. Hence my statement: the more information is available, the more important are reliable filters, i.e. the more crucial the editorial selection and validating processes become. As I have said on many occasions, this condition also stresses the editorial responsibility of communication designers:

“On the web, where content and the technologies used to communicate it are so intricately ensnared, the editorial core of design acquires even more significance. The structure design brings to a site’s content largely determines the visitors’ experience.”
[Deep Sites, Introduction]

“Obviously, the design of the interface is crucial: it delimits the gamut of visitors’ actions and it represents the editorial structure of the site. In other words, it maps its meaningful uses. Reading (and writing) have, as literary scientists argue, become ‘topographical’, a term indicating that information resides as much in the way discrete collections of data are connected among each other as in the information contained within the data. When content is visually presented as a landscape of ‘topoi’ or ‘sites’ of information, the way an interface facilitates or determines the routes through that information and between the sites touches on more than its accessibility, or usability – the interface becomes part of its contents. Thus, the design of the interface is essential in quite literally mapping out the information’s topology.”
[Deep Sites, Interface]

GB: If an interface design is regarded as the designer’s view on reality, how can a user ever experience it fully, since the only ‘real’ version of the interface design is on the designer’s screen? Is this yet another reason why designers should turn to creating original concepts and not forms?

MB: Yes. BTW, interface is the designer’s way of signposting paths through information (which is not entirely the same as ‘reality’ 😉
It is good to realize that ‘structure’ is always biased, always at least in part the result of a specific point of view (f.i. am I a Nielsonist or not? Do I hold that all information is equal or not? etceteras).

GB: Since the Internet is virtually accessible to anyone, and thus the number of amateur sites is probably greater than the number of professionally designed sites, what buzz characteristics/differences should an inexperienced user watch out for?

Learn to read URLs 😉
If you’re looking for information on, say, Islam, then there is a huge difference between the following (imaginary) sources, which is immediately readable from the URLs:

www.cnn.com/islam
www.beirutuniversity.edu/graduate/faculty/~alahmed/islam.html
hum.uva.nl/cultuurstudies/cs_int/reader/islam.html
www.blogspot.com/community/wasp/islam.htm
www.alsharif.sa/english/islam
www.yediotachronot.is/background/islam

Another indication of ‘bias’ and reliability is where a specific site or page links to or is linked from. Richard Rogers has done some interesting research into that: “Preferred Placement”
[http://www.govcom.org/symposium.html]

GB: One of your key statements throughout your publications is that the aim of design is to cast a message in such a form that it enters into a meaningful and critical relationship with its cultural, social and informative context. However, in the wide variety of websites, how is the user supposed to decide which one to rely on? And what should the designer do in this respect?

MB: As for the user, see above. Idem for designers: their responsibility here is in principle editorial. When content and form are in concert, the information represented will show its context and bias at a glance. Making the presentation of information readable in its own right, i.e. ‘coding’ the presentation in a way that shows its embedded cultural context, is a design task of the first order.

GB: In this age of visual information overload, people are steadily developing a visual literacy. The language of imagery seems to be the only universal language left, and therefore the designers now direct the development of our visual culture. Considering this universal quality of the image, does it mean the less original the design is, the better?

MB: No. The less it succeeds in making its cultural references readable, the less it communicates. You can be completely original by merely reassembling existing images and codes, as DJs and VJs have convincingly demonstrated. There is an important difference between material, references, forms, and the design that binds them together.
On the web, the best way to be original is in my view to find new ways of linking existing content (adding some of your own in the meantime, of course 😉

“Perhaps in recent years there has been too much emphasis on forms and not enough on ideas.
More important than the precise form of the end product, in that case, is the way it comes about, the mentality with which it is devised and the analysis that underlies it. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to the extent that it is legitimate to speak of originality at all, it has to be sought in the world of concepts, the world of the not yet and not first and foremost in the world of products.
It is here, in the personal interpretation of the designer, that there lies, potentially, more individuality than in any kind of ‘original’ formal design.”
“The content and effectiveness of communication have become strongly context-dependent, not least because the audience with whom the message communicates has itself matured. In contrast to the impression created by many communication products – from advertising to news bulletins – the recipient is usually not stupid.”
“In an age when contexts, references and interpretations are often more important than the raw data themselves, it may be the path leading through those data that contains the most valuable information. The true message is then: how to enter. The designer can inject his own attitude into this ‘navigation’ between pieces of information.
Of course, in an applied art – which is what design still is – traditional notions such as structuring and reinforcing a client’s message still apply. But there are more ways of reinforcing a message than simply getting it to look different from other messages. You can also try to show the connection between messages.”
[http://maxbruinsma.nl/ideal-e.html]