Writing

Five months ago during a Sunday sermon at The School of Life, design critic Alice Rawsthorn preached to a congregation of designers about the importance of 'good design'. As expected, service designers featured heavily on the list of disciplines that are changing things for the better, but there was also a surprise shout-out to user interface software, which as Icon Magazine's Anna Bates points out, is often "the most ignored form of design".

This statement will ring true to the ears of many digital designers, but as a practising web designer working in a digitally saturated society, it does strike me as odd that user interface design should continue to exist under the radar. Just browsing through the jobs section of Design Week reveals a surge in digital design opportunities, with the 'Digital/Web' category picking up the largest number of job vacancies – a 19% share of all of Design Week's advertised jobs.

So with digital design stronger than ever, why is user interface design not being talked about more? One reason for this lack of critique may lie in the constraints brought about by designing for a digital audience. In the expansive user-generated discussion of the Web, emphasis is on content not style and to engage with this content users must first be able to quickly access and understand its interface. Consequently, interface designers tend to favour purpose over aesthetic presence until as designer Neil Cummings says, "the brand [becomes] present in its function rather than its aesthetic."

By feeding function over style, interface design blends into the background and pushes content to the forefront. But with so little aesthetic impact, it can be difficult for designers to get excited over an interface because crucially, it's hard to be inspired by a form of design that works precisely because it isn’t overtly 'designed'.

Yet whilst user interface design suffers from its own practical limitations, thankfully, there are also artists and designers recognised for exploiting this form of design to great effect. Jonathan Harris is a visual artist and computer scientist whose work hinges on using interactivity to "re-imagine how we relate to our machines and to each other". His online pieces merge design with technology to engage users in meaningful interactions with the screen.

Art installation Listening Post also uses a screen-based dialogue to its advantage. Described by its creators, statistician Mark Hansen and media artist Ben Rubin as "a digital portrait of online communication", Listening Post displays real-time fragments of uncensored text pulled in from Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards. By focusing on creating a sensory experience of online chatter, the artists allow the content to do the talking whilst design acts as facilitator.

At the heart of user interface software is the screen and there’s no getting away from the constraints of this medium. But as Jonathan Harris and Listening Post demonstrate, there is much to be celebrated and discussed in the digitised realm of interface design. We just need to pay it a little more attention.

This piece was intended for Creative Review Blog readers.