Chapter Five: Poetry, Spirit and Soul

One way of examining and considering substance in design is through a linguistic lens of poetry. An interaction occurs in the conceptual space between a person and an object. It is at once physical, cognitive, and social. A poetic interaction is one that resonates immediately but yet continues to inform later—it is one that causes reflection and that relies heavily on a state of emotional awareness. Additionally, a poetic interaction is one that is nearly always subtle yet mindful.

Consider the poetic and highly refined act of chopping a clove of garlic with a Wüsthof cook's knife, and compare it to the obvious, jarring experience of riding a roller coaster through the most perilous curves. The roller coaster drops and turns and relies on the adrenalin rush associated with near death. It creates an experience so riddled with awe that many will stop “thinking” at all. Each turn and drop is bigger than the last, and as riders feel the wind in their hair and the blood in their ears, the exhilaration is sensory and perceptual first and cognitive second, if ever.

By comparison, preparing a meal can be a rather banal experience. Imagine using the heavy forged steel Wüsthof, the blank of the handle against your hand, the staccato and constant motion of the blade against the cutting board, and the pungent odor of garlic pressing against your eyes and nose. This mundane experience described is a story that creates, much like a compelling novel, a world for the participant to engage in. Unlike a novel, however, the participant is not an idle observer. The active engagement of the senses encourages a highly heightened sense of awareness—the “user” is not simply a “viewer.”

The roller-coaster forces a set of behavior through brute force and reminds the rider over and over that he is, in fact, thrilled. The knife, by comparison, speaks quietly but firmly. The interaction is at once less obvious and more compelling. The entertainment provided by the roller-coaster is passive in the most obvious sense—a rider sits, and his senses are assaulted. The entertainment provided by the knife is highly active, demanding a sense of acute engagement.

A poetic interaction can generally be characterized as having, or encouraging, three main elements: honesty, mindfulness, and a vivid and refined attention to sensory detail. These elements combine to encourage creativity in the end participant (note the shift away from the word user, as the audience no longer simply uses but instead must actively engage).

Honest Interactions

Honesty is a difficult word to discuss as applied to product development, as it brings to mind issues of ethics, morality, and the basic axioms of humanity. While the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness resonate with Americans, these are ideologically Western views—thoughts of simplicity, respect, and nature may make more sense to the Japanese. Thus, while underlying and basic principles of integrity (do not steal, do not kill) may transcend cultures, the details of honesty seem to be culturally independent. Products that attempt to convey a sense of honesty may, in fact, not make any sense when presented in other cultures (and subcultures) and communities. Given that culture changes over time, honest product design, too, may begin to alter depending on the momentum of society.

All cannot be relative, however, if the attempt is to define a framework for poetic Interaction Design. If honesty implies integrity, Interaction Designers can uphold the integrity of several aspects of the design through the development of the product, and these particular aspects of honesty seem to transcend cultural boundaries: integrity to the business vision, integrity to the consumer, and integrity to materials.

Frequently, business decisions are made with a great deal of thought and consideration, yet the dissemination of these goals is thwarted by tiers of middle management that twist and convolute both the decision and the rationale for that decision. To uphold integrity to the business vision requires that Interaction Designers participate in the development of this business vision in some manner. How can one uphold the integrity of something if one isn't aware of what that something is? Internal corporate branding, often represented as a set of strategic imperatives or as a set of goal-outcome statements, is used to disseminate business objectives internally. These statements are often an obvious attempt to force a value system on a set of participants who had little to do with the creation of these values. Jim Clemmer, author of Firing on All Cylinders, claims that these imperatives are “those vital 12 to 18 month goals, priorities, and improvement targets that—when reached—hurl our team or organization towards its vision, value and purpose.”

Yet most involved in the development of products cringe when they hear a goal or priority broken down into a tongue-in-cheek euphemism like “Trim the Fat” (Albertsons) or into single, staccato-like bullets of “Imagine. Build. Solve. Lead.” (General Electric). These miniature rallying cries rely on rote memorization and belittle the audience—they implicitly state that members of a company can't understand the complexity of business decisions and strategy.

Victor Margolin reflects that “Designer/entrepreneurs should be able to create business plans, identify niches for new products within the global marketplace, and seek appropriate venture capital.”

If designers and artists truly understand why they are working on a particular project or direction, they can best embrace the strategic decision and hurl themselves at it.

This understanding of business value and strategy requires equal representation at the heart of business: A designer needs to be present in the boardroom where these decisions are made.

Integrity to the consumer, or participant, requires the passionate advocacy for humanity. This advocacy transcends “making things user friendly” or “foolproof” and instead requires respect for the end consumers and users of the product.

This respect comes from understanding and empathy and results in a level of commitment that often relies on the emotive instead of the rational. While design and manufacturing are engaged in for-profit activities, these activities should be ethical and informed. The entire notion of planned obsolescence rejects this notion of integrity for humanity, in that it attempts to pull the wool over the naïve consumers' eyes. Industrial Designer Brooks Stevens has been recognized as coining the term planned obsolescence. Consider the subtle audacity of his definition for this quality of design: “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” With design comes a great deal of power. Rather than attempting to trick otherwise neutral participants in the dialogue of a product, why not exert this power toward the creation of betterment for the individual, her family, and her society?

Integrity to materials requires a sense of respect for both the natural world and the human-made world,and the philosophical understanding of how various materials want to work. Consider a PT Cruiser with wood paneling (wood laminate, a thin sheet of wood or a wood-like material) on the side. The car is made of metal and plastic,and is artificial in nearly every way (even in its allusions to early Sixties wagons). According to Chrysler, it is the “small car alternative that lives large.” Why, then, would a designer specify a choice of “a simple, flowing wood-grained graphic” on the doors, the graphic being “a linear Medium Oak woodgrain framed with Light Ash surround moldings”? The car isn't wooden, and in this case, the wood isn't even wooden! Trevor Creed, Senior Vice President of Design at the Chrysler Group, attempts to explain that “For the Chrysler PT Cruiser ‘Woodie’ Edition, we wanted a design execution that recreated the carefree fun of the popular 1960s California surf wagons.”

But the popular California surf wagons, specifically the Mercury Station Wagon, were made of solid wood. The 1946 Mercury Woodie was made of a solid wood frame (most probably birch or mahogany), as were many vehicles in the late thirties and early forties. If a car is going to be made of wood, it should deserve to be made of wood. What type of design deserves to be made of a “wood-grained graphic”?

One can't help but think of the idealistic Ayn Rand's Howard Roark as he denounces the Parthenon as poorly architected:

“The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they made for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble… Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood.”

Sustainable Design advocates William McDonough and Michael Braungart illustrate a similar respect for materials and the associated principle of honesty in design in the physical manifestation of their text Cradle to Cradle. The pages of the text are made of plastic rather than paper. The ink from the pages can easily be washed and captured for reuse. The plastic itself can be reused without downcycling. As McDonough wondered aloud during the Industrial Designers Society of America annual conference in Washington, DC, in 2005, “Why make something as simple as a sheet of paper out of something as elegant as a tree? Design something that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, builds soil, provides habitat for hundreds of people, and self replicates… and cut it down to write on it?”

Investigating mindfulness

In addition to the elements of honesty, a poetic interaction should encourage a state of mindfulness. Mindfulness (note the subtle distinction between mindfulness and mindlessness) has often been cited as the primary state of mind necessary to accomplish meditation. Buddhists reference a state of mindfulness of breathing. One can think of mindfulness as an acute awareness of the present moment.

Rather than actively considering other people, or chores that need to be done, or opinions that need to be formed, one simply exists, and understands this moment of that existence. This appreciation for the present moment has been cited as a method used successfully by marathon runners and artists alike and discussed by authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.

A successful poetic Interaction Design will encourage a state of mindfulness. This is, of course, easier said than done. To achieve this state of mental appreciation, one must be willing (and actively choose) to ignore many of the problems and elements present in the hustle of daily life. How can a product encourage a user to let go of his surroundings and attend only to the moment?

When reading a poem, it is interesting to consider where the imagery comes from. The words on the page are rather plain, and save for the authors' potential use of kitschy typography, the print itself is rather nondescript. Words themselves frequently fail to trigger vivid and robust thoughts, as the brain seems to desire to think in two dimensions. That is, even when trying passionately to picture a “tree in the rain,” few readers will get beyond the prototypical form of a tree—the form that, perhaps, a child will scrawl when asked to draw a tree. This lack of ability to visualize an object in full detail in the mind may be what holds many back from claiming artistic capabilities. “I can't draw” usually means “I can't draw accurately,” and it may be more appropriate to claim “I can't think” (or at least “I can't think accurately”).

But compare the imagery conjured by a “tree in the rain” to this short excerpt from “The Wasteland”:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain

T. S. Eliot has managed to use the same basic constructs of words, and simple words at that, to stir deep emotional responses in the reader. A “tree in the rain” is finite, obvious, and non-challenging. The lack of complexity and specificity may, in fact, be why it is difficult to picture the tree with any depth or detail. But the fact that the lilac has dead roots, and it isn't just a rain—it's a spring rain—creates a matter-of-fact situation that readers can begin to feel before they even try to see it. It is difficult to picture April, much less to picture the month as cruel, yet Eliot's four lines have managed to invigorate a deeply honed sense of feeling that allows readers to picture not just a tree, nor a rain, but an entire scene.

In much the same way that readers have difficulty picturing a “tree in the rain” with any level of character, they may have a similarly troubling time imagining opening a car door, or turning on the television, or typing an email. Simply recalling the nature of interactions one has had throughout the day is a particularly difficult task, in a peculiarly striking way. As an example, try to imagine how many doors you must have opened, how many buttons you have pressed in one day. Surely there were a lot, but recreating these actions or recalling particulars is incredibly difficult. It may be difficult to reproduce these ideas because they happened, for lack of a better word, automatically. It is not necessary to consciously attend to the car door when encountering it. Your focus was most likely on the destination of the drive or the other passengers in the car. Most will recall actual behavior only when it fails. It is easy to recall when the door broke, or when a key was lost, or when a door was difficult to open.

Frequently, resonant interactions are creative interactions with a heightened awareness of task. Author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been analyzing the essence of creativity and has identified the state of being known as flow to be one that encourages a vivid awareness of the moment but an almost lack of awareness of the surrounding environment and task. As Csikszentmihalyi describes, during flow, the sense of self and self-consciousness disappears. While experiencing flow, people become too involved in their activities to worry about protecting their self-image or their ego.

Perhaps, then, it is useful to attempt to recall not a particular interaction but the beauty of the associative scene. In the same way that a poem requires a sense of whole in order to understand the parts, so too does a successful interaction require both a holistic attention to the context and a dramatically detailed understanding of nuance.

Attention to Detail

In addition to honesty and mindfulness, a vivid and refined attention to sensory detail can be thought of as the last necessary element to encourage a poetic and resonant Interaction Design. This attention to sensory detail—made up of all elements of design, including material, form, color, texture, placement—is frequently lost during the translation from concept to reality in the actual development of manufactured goods. Two main explanations can be cited for the loss of this important quality: an understanding of importance and cost.

Often, the folks working in product development don't understand, respect, or care about attention to sensory details. Many engineers and business executives have a difficult time embracing the subjective benefits of one material over the other. This is not to say that engineers and executives don't care about all details; indeed, to achieve a level of Six Sigma quality, engineers must be detail driven.

But these details are in logic and in process rather than in the visual or the aesthetic. Many engineers simply have not been trained to perceive these details. Those who have designed computer interfaces can attest to the blinders software developers have toward visual style. To many developers, the user interface is an inconvenience that commonly implies drastic compromises and delays in development. It is not accidental that one can achieve a B.S. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and never take a required user interface development course. The design of visual control interfaces are relegated to an elective.

Additionally, issues of cost frequently disrupt attention to sensory detail. In the development of a physical product, designers may specify very particular trim pieces or premium surface treatments. These details will help differentiate a product in the marketplace and will serve to create a cohesive experience of use, but will also add cost to the development of the product. In a business culture, the value of these particular ephemeral enhancements may simply not be comprehensible to the managers making financial decisions. These details are at the heart of popular industrial design successes like the Apple iPod, the Motorola RAZR, and the Audi TT. Imagine the iPod in a cheaper grade of plastic or the TT without the hallmark—and more expensive—art deco gauges and custom leather interior. Companies like Apple and Audi continually understand and respect attention to detail in visual aesthetics and frequently pass on the cost of this refinement to the consumer, who will happily pay the premium price to enjoy the premium experience.

To resonate poetic, the interaction one has with a product should be engaging, appropriately complicated to the given task in order to encourage a mindful state, and highly sensory. But it is important to note that the moment need not be long. While pouring a cup of coffee out of a French press, one may experience a mindful interaction, if only for several seconds. The combination of acuity necessary to perform the task (the challenge, if you like, of successfully moving the hot coffee from one apparatus to another) and the appropriate materials (stainless steel, glass) and the various sensory elements (the smell of the rich coffee, the heat against the pouring hand, the billows of steam from the bottom of the coffee mug) creates a poetic interaction.

Some practicing designers balk at the idea of designing poetic interactions. One early reviewer of this text was as blunt as to say, “I have other things to worry about—like shipping a working product that isn't awful.” Yet if designers focus only on the low-hanging fruit of functionalism or usability, the human experience with designed objects is destined to a level of banality. As ideological as it may appear, what if that piece of enterprise software offers—for a fleeting moment of use—a poetic or soulful experience? These types of interactions extend the view of design as communication, building on the view of argument, rhetoric, and design languages. Poetry specifically, and language generally, provides a framework in which to view interactions created through design. These interactions, when properly structured, can afford sensory, emotionally charged, and breathtakingly human interactions.

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