digitaldust

On Monday night I gave a rambling talk about how phenomenology, complexity theory and real human emotions need to be taken into account when designing web sites.

Here are the slides ~20Mb (sorry it’s big, but it is colourful!)

Ed Mitchell asked me a few moons ago to give a talk on designing the web, not web site design and that has been sitting at the back of my mind since then. Then in my typical fashion I realized a couple of days before I was meant to talk that I had nothing prepared. So I had to quickly distill everything that was floating around into this. It’s a bit rough around the edges but it does get the key concepts across. I’m working on a version 2 now which might be a bit more understandable.

So what was I on about? I’m going to put up a fuller discussion of this at some point. But the basic gist is this.

Human experience is an emotional, experiential and multi-varied thing (Hence complex). Current Web Design (and by this I don’t mean the graphic design of the web) and that thing that gets called Web 2.0 is trying to build the web to support these people. However in many cases they are trying to produce the complexity within the system and reduce the human experience of the system. Also a lot of the sites being built are clean and mechanical. I believe that the experience of the system should be human, and that the complexity should be left up to the humans. Simply put, simple tools, humans are the glue and build emotion into the system so that it can be engaged with on many levels.