This blog posting is the fifth in a series. The full series as it currently stands is:
Surpassing Apple: Step One - Animate Everything
Surpassing Apple: Step Two - Get an Audience
Surpassing Apple: Step Three - Set a Tone
Surpassing Apple: Step Four - Vision and Desirability
Surpassing Apple: Step Five - Think Cinematic
Surpassing Apple: Step Six - Cultivate a Culture
It Starts With Immersion
Immersion is a nebulous creature. It is a well known term, but only loose descriptions are ever employed to describe it. Take this example:
A state of mental focus so intense that awareness of the "real" world is lost, generally resulting in a feeling of joy and satisfaction.
- Universal Principles of Design, pg 112
Obviously this is no small feat. To touch on this with our audience, we would be wise to examine fields around us that are already working toward such a goal, and in some cases, creating a state of immersion extremely effectively.
While book reading is certainly an act of immersion, assuming of course the novel is attractive to the audience member reading it, it is rarely a collaborative act of creation. Video games and cinema on the other hand, are entirely collaborative in creation and execution and as such, form the basis of this comparison.
What Do They Do?
There is so much complexity involved in the creation of a video game or cinematic work that no singular blog post from a dribbling fool would suffice to expose the details. That said, there are a few key areas of relevance that we might want to focus on in our Free Software culture.
Thematic
Obviously motion pictures and video games are heavily focused on thematics. Thematic is, as discussed in previous postings in this series, one of the cornerstones of an effective design delivery. The goal of a concept / thematic should ultimately be to select a thematic that 'clicks' for your audience given the communication / goal chosen.
Is this relevant to a desktop computing environment? One could make a strong case that Apple has been exploring this domain with the release of Leopard. Note the spacey feel of the desktop wallpaper and note how it isn't strictly tied to drab space connotations? Note the audio cues in their online Quicktime presentations and the use of backmasking? Note the tightly wound integration with the Time Machine software they delivered with Leopard's release? All in all, Leopard's design is stitched carefully up with a strong thematic. This manifests itself as a holistic approach to their entire Leopard campaign design strategy.
Transitions
Five years ago transitions weren't even on our map. Then came Compiz. Then came the iPhone and many now in our culture are quickly jumping on the transitioning bandwagon. Are transitions an end-all unto themselves however?
Anyone that has studied the history of cinema knows that every single transition has been a learned cue developed over time. In the early ages of cinema, it was all about spectacle - a
single sequence where a train drove past, for example. Images of people drinking tea in a field. That was it.
Gradually, experimental avant-garde filmmakers tested new waters with the notion of the cross cut. Then the dissolve and fades were experimented with. The sixties saw the advent of the jump cut. Morphing frame transitions were experimented with in the early 1990 music videos. Why?
A critical thing to understand is that every single transition between cinematic sequences was delivered for a
reason. The
original implementation of a hard cross cut gradually was learned to communicate sequential action. With
Goddard's revolutionary jump cutting came the desire to dislodge the viewer from their immersed viewing state. With the morph transitions
a feeling akin to LSD drug use was induced.
Every transition throughout the development of cinema had a
reason. Without a thematic and a goal, can we have hope for anything other than 'transitions-for-transition's-sake'?
Arches and Progress
Mainstream motion pictures would call this a plot arch. Avant-garde pieces might even tickle around the edges of a progress / arch to maintain a directionality for the work. Video games have had to push new limits within the technology to accommodate the shifting directions of audience driven progressions.
It might seem initially odd to be suggesting the notion of plotting a transitive arch in a desktop operating system, but we have already clearly laid more than a few key points out. We go through a standard progression as we use a system - we logon, we launch applications (each potentially with their own progressive arches), we are subject to external events such as messaging / blog updates / etc., and then - when we are finished - we will often suspend or shut down the system.
How can we elevate a notion of immersion by more greatly intertwining the progress arch with thematic? How can we evaluate the proper progress through a system in conjunction with the thematic? How can we elevate a sense of audience experience by weaving proper and effective transitions for a given thematic / audience? What should we be communicating as we walk along the progress path and how should we be doing so with effective transitioning?
Sound
It is quite often that one of the greatest and most powerful elements of motion picure immersion is overlooked by a typical audience member - that of the audio domain.
In the earliest incarnations of cinema, it was silent. Over time, a live musician was often added to play live accompaniment in sync to the images. A similar evolutionary progression happened with the video game industry as well - where in the early forays sound was often an afterthought. Gradually, as video games realized there was much to be learned from the motion picture industry and the technology was developed to wrap audio into the mixture, they began to actively seek qualified and highly trained sound designers, music composers, and sound effect artists to fully flesh out the experience of their products.
By no small coincidence, we too suffer from the art of audio taking a back seat role in the evolution of immersion. Our early developers had little worry about audio much like the early video game developers. Perhaps it didn't even cross their minds - as with the early cinematic presentations at small social gatherings.
Whatever the reasoning, we should seek to push audio forward in fresh and creative ways. How can we push the technology in our current Free Software world further? How can we more greatly empower audio to aid in immersion?
Composition
Every single frame in cinema is composed. By and large our westernized presentations of cinema are governed by westernized theory in classical composition. While this might seem obvious for cinema, it took many years for the video game realm to comprehend the full impact of composition on gaming. Everything from HUDs to progress bars suddenly started to abide by art and design theory. With the trained and educated designers came a comprehensive approach to composition with design implications in tow.
Is there anything here to be learned for a computing platform?
Should we consider the desktop as a mise-en-scene? Should we consider how the components appear, disappear, and
where they choose to do so? Should we consider classical composition when defining these placements? How should applications look within themselves? Is there value to experiment with classical layout grids based on Phi? Should we concern ourselves with the dynamic positioning of frames and their relationship to classical composition? Should buttons be considered as part of the compositional whole? Menus and progress bars?
How Do We Negotiate this With Free Software?
First, it should be at least a reasonable hypothesis that the computing platform world shares much in common with several other adjacent industries. There are obvious differences of course, but this should not undermine our ability to cite critical areas of overlap.
What can we learn from those adjacent industries? There is a wealth of information on process and technique already in place to harness should we so choose.
Once again, all of this is predicated on the selection of an audience and the willingness to communicate something to them. This is not trivial nor an easy endpoint to arrive at. While we can readily accept that people argue and bicker about GNOME or KDE being 'better' than the other, we cannot easily comprehend that perhaps, at their core, they are fundamentally aimed at different audiences.
Ask yourself how many video games there are out there? How many movies?
Now ask yourself how many mainstream computing platforms we have? How many culture-centric distributions do we have within the Linux movement? What are the interesting and fascinating opportunities for further pushing these in distinct, specialized, and diverse directions?
Focus on a thematic. Focus on communicating with our particular audiences. Focus on delivering seamless and fully immersive experiences using some of the cornerstones of the periphery specialist industries around us such as cinema, video games, and like presentations.
In Summary
Free Software is about choice, freedom, and a plethora of other details that the mainstream proprietary operating systems
cannot,
will not, and will
never have the ability to execute in full the way only
we can.
The world of computing is bound up with legacy views on how all of this should unfold.
In reality, Free Software provides the much needed diversity to address every single audience member in a distinct and unique fashion. One cannot expect that companies such as Microsoft and Apple would ever be able to accommodate the particular needs and diverse cultural / individual / contextual desires of all people. What they leave us with is the FastFood(TM) of computing - a bland and palatable wash of mediocre flavours.
Our presentations should be the boutique restaurant to Apple and Microsoft's quickie-food.
In fact, the common backbone of community driven group sourcing is one of the greatest strengths of Free Software to
surpass the aforementioned companies in delivery. This is predicated on elevating the game and thinking
unlike the way computing is presented
by them,
for them, and
within their abilities.
What if we pushed immersion full force the way video games and cinema do? What if we forged ahead with cultural and contextual motifs in a manner that Apple and Microsoft would find frightening and / or alienating? What if we created a vast landscape of amazingly immersive distributions in the same way the video game empire creates countless diverse products?
We should embrace diversity. We should embrace thematics for different audiences. We should revel in the fact that there is no way that even the formidable power of Apple and Microsoft cannot, under any circumstance, compete in this arena.
Many would criticize the Free Software / Linux movement for having too much choice and eclectic diversity.
I'd counter that by saying that our very hope lies
within that potential for diversity and choice. Couple the diversity and choice with unsurpassable immersion and innovation and maybe, just maybe, we have one more weapon in our struggle for a truly fresh and inspiring series of operating systems.
Thanks again for all of your time...
Spending too much time examining and studying amazing designers such as Zapf and Slimbach, you get an itch. This is the byproduct of such an itch. This is a first for me. It has been completely rewarding.
