Every June, I look forward to ID magazine's Interactive Media awards issue. Two years ago John Maeda won for "Tap Type Write, which led me to his book "Design By Numbers." Martin Wattenberg's "Map of the Market" for Smartmoney.com the same year is a marvel of information design that still impresses me every time I use it. Two of the most memorable speakers at Doors of Perception 5 were last year's gold winners Will Wright (who won for "The Sims") and Toshiro Iwai (for "Composition on the Table"). All of these designers' work is original, startling, witty, and thoughtful. The best of it is inspiring and even instructive. So it's dissapointing open June's ID and find that this year's winners, in contrast, are almost uniformly dull, even lazy. Worse, the content in the work is frequently dumbed-down or incidental, almost totally subsumed in the prettiness of the designs.
A team at Xerox PARC received a Gold for their "Reading Wall." Jurors called it "monumentally gratifying." What's really the innovative interaction here? From what I understand, the reader slides several expensive-looking plasma display panels along tracks that run the length of a wall. At intervals, different pieces of information about the history of reading are displayed on the panels. I suppose it's satisfying to walk along and have the displays change as you move, but that hardly seems profound. In what sense is that the "richer reading experience" the desigers describe? In action, it mimics the linear process of reading a book from left to right, with early stuff at the left and later stuff at the right. However there's no random access to the material as there is with a book. You have to slide past information to get to other information, essentially it's a more physical way of saying "click here for the next page." It looks to me like they just really liked the idea of sliding big custom-made plasma display panels.
Worse, though, is the actual content in the piece. One example: "Hieroglyphs are pictures that stand for sounds or words. The ancient Egyptians believed that writing was a gift from the god Thoth. But not everyone got the gift. Only 1 out of 100 ancient Egyptians could read or write. They were called SCRIBES. Because they could read and write, scribes were very powerful." Come on. That's stupid pap. It's uninsightful and simplistic; there's better content in children's' books about Egyptian writing, and there's certainly better content in academic discussions of the nature of reading in other cultures. This is content that's been dumped in because it fits the space, not because it's good or illuminating. In the context of "innovative" interaction design, uncritically presenting such simple-minded information is inadequate and brings down the overall quality of the idea.
The designers defend the work by retreating into statements like "[t]he Reading Wall is our speculative take on a possible role that walls might play in the digital future." So...it's not just "speculative," but also "possible," and "might" be what the future looks like? That kind of vague language is academic cover-your-ass at its worst. It's disappointing because the designers of the exhibition clearly are aware of the incredibly rich history of "wall-reading" from Roman ekphrasis to subway car graffiti. The most vital aspect of nearly all of that history is the requirement that the viewer bring some knowledge and story-telling ability to the act of reading; reading is an active experience. That doesn't happen with the "Reading Wall," where viewers just, well, slide panels along.
In contrast, genuinely interesting interactive design like Blogger and other weblog-creation services are actively reshaping what it means to read and write on the web. Blogger's not insignificant contribution is an alternate conceptual model of web publishing which frees writers from thinking about files and servers and turns it into a simple service: type stuff in this box and it appears at the top of your web page.
Jurors called "Art as Experiment, Art as Experience" "not revolutionary on a conceptual level" but rewarded it anyway for being "clean" and well-integrated. In fact, they praised it with the same language they used for "Reading Wall": seamless, well-integrated text and visuals. Fine. For the most part, it's the same old drag-and-drop matching games and "click on the picture to hear the sound" interactions seen in dozens of educational multimedia titles. Admittedly, the quality of the content here, both in image quality and in the writing, is quite good. It's certainly impressive that the designers were able to put on the web what a couple of years ago would have been a CD-ROM, but shouldn't Gold winners do more than just get the basics of right?
Silver award winner "Iron Stomach" is just Tetris. That's all it is. It's hard to believe the only video game among the winners is Tetris with different graphics. In 1998, "Parappa the Rappa" won gold. In 1999, "Legend of Zelda" and "Bust-a-Groove" both won Silver awards; in 2000, "The Sims," "Crazy Taxi," and "Homeworld" were recognized. Erik Zimmerman has won three times for his genuinely inventive games "Blix," "Sissyfight," and "Strain." And remember the Nicholson New York "Snowball Fight" game? There's no question that the some of the most innovative interaction design happens in video game design, and 2000 was no exception. "Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2", for example, is as near-perfect a video game as I've ever played, perfectly tuned to reward beginners and expert players. Yet ID saw fit to reward. . . Tetris?
Bronze winners this year are merely boring. One or two things are appealing, like iKlimpt.com and "Subway Skylights." But, design studio Second Story's scrolling image navigation bar is a Flash-site cliche, not to mention awfully similar to Move Design's ID winner from 2000 (and neither are as exciting as yugop.com's three year old original anyway). And the inclusion of seven design agency sites is too many; there's no other single category so deeply represented. Even iKlimt.com looks to be a self-promotional piece for RGA. It's probably a bad sign that the most inventive work designers did this year was for themselves, not for clients.
Most troubling is that there's nothing here that's really good design in the sense of products that solve problems or which make life easier (with the possible exception of Herman Miller's "Scout" application). Even past winners awarded mostly for their creative impact (like "The Sims" or "Composition on the Table") suggested new ways of managing and interacting with dynamic, complex information. None of this year's winners are as plainly valuable or as productive as "Map of the Market" or Google in 2000. Instead we get Flash intro animations (the kind that nearly always offer a "skip intro" button) and cumbersome academic experiments like "Learning Landscape." Where's Blogger? For pete's sake where's Napster? Both are genuinely innovative interactive experiences that had essentially no precedent when they appeared on the scene, and both had enormous effects on the way people use and perceive interactive media. Regrettably, it's probably their no-frills interface designs that keep things like Blogger and Napster from awards, which is a shame.
My 2001 winners: