A few weeks back, I posted a link to a list of novels that inspired graphic designers. In a somewhat similar vein, Kottke.org linked to this list of Recommended Reads for students in the MFA program for Interaction Design at the School for the Visual Arts. Some of the titles listed make obvious sense — books like Don’t Make Me Think, by Steven Krug and How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff & Irving Geiss – but a few of the titles jumped out at me as being interesting choices.
In a sub-category called Storytelling and Visual Narratives, the faculty recommends Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner and Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. These titles make a certain sense, as a comic or graphic novel is an interaction, of sorts, and creating a smooth interface is a kind of storytelling, but the one that jumped out at me as being ingenius (and the book I was most excited to see on the list) was Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.
Few books challenge the accepted orthodoxy of their subjects as much as Cradle to Cradle. For those who haven’t read the book, the basic premise is that the way we design and manufacture things is wrong. We think of waste as a natural byproduct of production, and consequently, we continue to replicate wasteful production models. The authors advocate changing the way we make things so that the “waste” created in production is useful, as it so often is in nature. Among the more radical ideas in the book is the notion that recycling isn’t good, but merely “less bad.”
But how to take this idea and apply it to something as – forgive me – ephemeral as web design? What is the “waste” in designing a website or a virtual space? Extraneous links? Crowded space? I’d love to hear from any web designers who have read the book. How did it influence your work or change the way you thought about design?
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