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It's not so much the hubris of designers as the economics. Designers bring the print culture with them, where everything published gets visually polished by a h

by Detrus 12y ago

It's not so much the hubris of designers as the economics. Designers bring the print culture with them, where everything published gets visually polished by a human. You don't just dump tagged text from a typewriter. The web is designed precisely to dump text from a digital typewriter. And the visual design can be universal or customized by a user. This poses a minor problem because if actually implemented as intended, thousands of designers would be out of work. You'd need very few to make universal text display themes and occasionally improve them. And more complex UIs could be handled with something like bootstrap. But there are far more people with the print designer mindset, recreating the old world in digital form, then there are visionary designers like Doug Engelbart who wanted to use computers to do new things. And you can't just retrain those people to not spend their lives changing line lengths and text colors to shove ads and make display cases, that's all they know. It's an economics problem.

x1798DE 12y ago
I understand why designers would want to protect the jobs they currently have, but I personally think that it would actually be better if talented coders and designers were freed up from the [unnecessary] work of creating themes for every website in existence. There's plenty to do in this world that we don't need some of our smartest and best people doing unnecessary work.
- Detrus 12y ago
  Sure but you can't re-allocate workers in a capitalist economy with a paper idea and a signature. You have to convince thousands of people. You have to convince investors to start new companies where new types of workers are doing something new on the web. You probably can't re-educate millions of the current designers, code monkeys, content farmers and clients to do new types of work that has nothing to do with their old work. There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit and HN. HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell. For reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q

by Detrus 12y ago

x1798DE 12y ago

I understand why designers would want to protect the jobs they currently have, but I personally think that it would actually be better if talented coders and designers were freed up from the [unnecessary] work of creating themes for every website in existence. There's plenty to do in this world that we don't need some of our smartest and best people doing unnecessary work.

Detrus 12y ago
Sure but you can't re-allocate workers in a capitalist economy with a paper idea and a signature. You have to convince thousands of people. You have to convince investors to start new companies where new types of workers are doing something new on the web. You probably can't re-educate millions of the current designers, code monkeys, content farmers and clients to do new types of work that has nothing to do with their old work. There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit and HN. HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell. For reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q