A Brief Example of Why Voting Doesn't Work

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For some reason Blogspot shifted this to drafts. Sorry if it adversely affected anyone. Shifted back and re-added the images. Weird stuffs. Apologies to the folks who left comments and didn't have them appear. Apparently Blogspot was dun busted. Feel free to try and add them again. Thanks for all of your support.
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Voting doesn't work.

Voting and art, design, presence, and aesthetics particularly do not mix. They never will.

The reason is simple. If you have followed this blog for any given time, you will have seen the question of audience come up again and again. Without a point of perspective, everything is completely paradoxical and irrelevant. Without an audience, we wander down an aimless path filled with worthless vacuous words such as 'usability', 'beautiful', 'ugly', 'good', 'better', 'bad', etc.

Thus, in the end, voting without having an audience merely samples a cross section of audiences and ends up in a nightmarish soup of opinion. Where does this leave us? If you ever needed concrete proof that voting does not work, look no further than the highly frequented sites such as http://gnome-look.org or http://kde-look.org. Your honor, I offer you exhibit A and B from Gnome-Look. These are, as of this printing, the two most highly rated wallpapers available:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Now your honor, please consider exhibit C and D from KDE-Look.

Exhibit C

Exhibit D

The net sum of the above four images should be proof alone that voting doesn't work, especially in diverse systems with countless members. If the samples fail to convince you, I would ask you the following questions:

1. Where do the above images take an overarching design?
2. Are any of these images inherently beautiful, ugly, perfect, or otherwise?
3. Can you identify an audience that the images might be appealing to when examined on an image by image basis?
4. Would any one of the images alone be a sure-fire solution to an existing design problem as it exists within Ubuntu or another FLOSS project?
   

If one can loosely accept the reality that voting will not lead us to success, we must then question the idea of the premise behind the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. One could easily argue that again, when faced with a disparate and diverse audience, the results of voting will yield useless information or statistics.

What's worse is that we find samples of compelling ideas such as:

1. "Idea #290: Make Ubuntu look nice"
2. "Idea #1231: Drop the brown"[1]

In parting, I'd like to summarily dismiss the idea that we can achieve any degree of solid design with a backbone of democratic voting. Design-by-amoeba, where the design moves along toward food / pleasure and away from pain doesn't work either, of course. If this were a journey along a path toward a location, we can quickly see how both approaches are going to fail us. We have neither a location to travel to nor know who we are going to take along.

If we seek to really push Ubuntu and FLOSS into the new era, we are going to need to accept some of the fundamental realities of design. Our culture has created a fresh new approach to development and community driven collaboration, but it has a long way to go and learn regarding the next evolutionary step of designing lauded interfaces and presence.


[1] What I find amusing is a quote such as "Estesark wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 02:06 - Brown isn't a particularly fashionable colour." How could you be more ill-informed in today's day and age? Is it possible? I challenge anyone who reads this blog to type the words "Prada Brown", "Gucci Brown", "Adidas Brown", "Nike Brown", "Vans Brown Shirt", or like phrase into Google. The result should systematically dismantle the idea that there are innate 'avoid-at-all-costs' colour schemes in our world. Again, this discussion is about Context, Audience, and Communication. Heaven help us if someone actually votes such an ignorant statement up and we, as a culture, suddenly believe it.