More on aesthetic and functional beauty.
A little while ago, I wrote about the changing aesthetics of marketing. My thought then was that a shift to thinking about marketing as a service required a shift away from simply considering the aesthetics of the work we create towards also thinking about the functionality of the work we create. To find beauty in a beautiful solution, as well as finding beauty in a beautiful thing.
From the marketing (as a service) perspective, this shift is important because we are discussing the convergence of marketing and software services. However this shift also has implications from the point of view of software development.
The rise of experience and interaction design on the services side is essentially the mirror image of the marketing as a service movement. There, instead of rethinking marketing as a service, many are concerned with rethinking services as “marketing.” It is the application of insight around what people want, like and feel towards the development of interfaces that are functional and aesthetically pleasing.
While the terminology differs, I think there is a wide body of agreement between these two sides. Importantly, there is a requirement for both sides to adopt new skills and new frameworks for thinking that have not typically been required.
I have written a lot about some of the new skills required for marketers, but the same is equally true for software developers. Today’s developers need to adopt people-centric thinking, to develop an aesthetic sense and to learn to appreciate the beauty of elegant things as well as the beauty of elegant solutions and tightly-written code.
I was reminded of this symmetry this morning when talking about the rise of software development centers in India, Israel and Ireland. While there is an advantage to cheaper development costs overseas, the business of creating software is no longer a business of brute force and scale. It is a business, much closer to the one marketers would recognise, of creating beautiful (and functional) interactions with people that enable and inspire them to do amazing things.
I think we are already seeing that this is the future of the software industry in the US. Unable to compete in terms of scale and efficiency, US firms have begun to migrate, more and more, towards occupying a higher aesthetic territory.
While Web 2.0 has taken glee in being purposefully un-designed – in following a modernist form-follows-function ethos, many of the the coming applications and the coming are (just as purposefully) taking an opposing point-of-view. People talk about this as the development of the semantic web, however it’s also the rise of a growing awareness that people want to use and surround themselves with beautiful and functional things.