Xavier Bertels

Google just announced that they will host and sync all of your photos and videos, for free, forever. Let me give that a moment to sink in.

All of the images you have ever captured, backed up to one of the most secure clouds in the world, and automatically synced to all of your devices – iOS, Android and desktop – for free, forever.

I find that fucking scary. Besides the fact that a company with a user base that big – more than 1 billion Android users – is able to pull that off financially, here is why:

One of Google’s employees wrote a blog post, that it is now able to analyse and caption images automatically. You really have to see it to believe it. These images have been automatically processed and captioned without human interference:

As Aral Balkan put it, we have entered an age of digital feudalism, where the poorest – unable to buy similar digital services – will pay with their data and privacy. And the frustrating part is that there is no easy way to stop it. Google is valued at a higher price than the GDP of about 200 countries. So many people are invested in the company, financially, psychologically and even on business level (you use Google Apps, right?). How will anyone stop that?

You do not have to be annoyed by CCTV anymore. Nor by all the camera’s that are in public spaces or stores. People filming you on the streets? Not really an issue anymore. Those were actions that took place in public spaces anyway.

No, you now have to be afraid of those close to you that have Android devices. The seemingly normal action of taking a picture at a private party is now Google’s own private CCTV network in action. Photos are uploaded automatically to Google’s cloud, analysed and categorised. Even if you choose not to use any of their services, they are able to build a profile of you, based on photos and videos your friends take of you. Because they have facial recognition software running on their servers that is better at recognising people than you are.

Welcome to 2015, it is now 1984. Your most private moments are officially non-existent. Google Photos was the final piece of the puzzle, the final move in a chess play designed to index all of the world’s data. All of it. Even your most intimate moments. Big G is always watching.

When a friend whips out an Android phone, I’ll yell “Duck!”—and I’m only half joking. While Google’s intentions might just be selling ads, the risk lies in the sheer volume of intimate data they’ve centralized. It’s not Google abusing this that scares me; it’s the inevitability of someone else eventually finding a way to misuse this unprecedented treasure of personal information. The only safe move now is decentralization.

Client: “This is not entirely what I’m looking for, I’m looking for something a bit more . . .”
Designer: “Modern? Timeless? Playful?”
Client: “Sexy!”
Designer: cringe

This has become somewhat of a running gag among designers. In my experience, a running gag can be a sign of dogmatic thinking. Since part of my job is to question everything, I had to give this some more thought.

First, on the word sexy. Collins dictionary says:

You can describe people and things as sexy if you think they are sexually exciting or sexually attractive.

The key word being things. Unless the editors of Collins are referring to objectophilia, I believe we have been granted permission to call anything sexy. Especially if we find it exciting or attractive on both a physical and an emotional level.

But why do designers cringe when they hear the word sexy in a design context? Maybe it is because a functional, modernist design aesthetic has become the holy grail of good design¹. Much of the design discourse of the past decennia was about removing embellishments. And perhaps our understanding of the word sexy has become too superficial. So superficial that we have forgotten its meaning reaches beyond those embellishments.

Sexy does not mean just physically attractive. Sexy is about attitude and content as much as it is about visual appearance. Even when we were designing this website we had a thorough discussion about whether to include a webfont. Why not pick Helvetica and be done with it? From a functional point of view, it would be an adequate solution. Not very attractive though.

It is okay to try to create an attractive interface that can suck a user into a state of productive, enjoyable flow. Just like dating a person you find sexy is satisfying, so can using an interface you find sexy be satisfying. But sexy is a living definition. To remain sexy, you have to deliver what you promise. An attractive design that is hard to handle will become a pain in the ass before you know it. And you will feel betrayed because it lured you in with deceitful aesthetics.

Sexy design is extremely hard. It is about striking the right balance in the entire design package. Useful and beautiful. From the moment you first see something, to the moment you have been using it for a while. A design can be sexy and we should embrace that.

¹ See The History of Flat Design.

Do What You Love, Love What You Do; a much heard mantra. Maybe especially so among designers. Not too long ago, an opinion piece on Slate magazine¹ poked some holes in that mantra. I agreed with that article somewhat, but eating those words still left a faintly bitter aftertaste.

I think I figured out what has been bothering me about it. It is the Do What You Love part of the mantra that creates the problem. Do What You Love leads you to a maze of questions to which you might never reach a satisfying conclusion. Here is why; it implies that you first have to find what you love, before you can do, well, anything. As long as you are looking for what you love, everything you do is seemingly fruitless. It is a paralyzing statement, because finding what you love, without doing anything, is impossible.

The other part of the mantra is much, much more important. Love What You Do. Although you might not be doing what you love, it is possible to love what you do. It is the only part of the equation we excercise any control over. Loving What You Do, as opposed to Doing What You Love, is a conscious choice. If you choose to love what you do, reaching a state of flow² is much easier.

So from now on, I will make an effort to love what I do. Am I doing what I love? Who knows. It is too much of an existential question to be asking oneself all the time. It is a path that ultimately leads to unhappiness. And if flow is happiness, then I would much rather be living in that place.

¹ Read the article on Slate magazine: Do what you love, love what you do: An omnipresent mantra that’s bad for work and workers.

² In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes how flow illuminates the path to truly satisfying experiences, and ultimately, happiness.

So every profession has a code of ethics. Doctors have a code of ethics—the Hippocratic Oath—lawyers, accountants, journalists . . . In fact, part of a profession, is that there is a code of ethics.

— James Abruzzo via The Big Think

Makes me wonder, is there a code of ethics for designers? Watch the entire clip below if you are interested in some more context:

Warning: designer rant.

The biggest problem is a broken promise. Creative Suite and Creative Cloud would bring a coherent software suite and cloud integration. Just look at the sync settings panel in the latest Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. How on earth is it possible that they came up with, let alone released different solutions to the exact same problem in what is supposed to be a coherent software suite?

“Creative Cloud” is de facto just another app in the Adobe toolkit. What it should be is a way of thinking/streamlining an experience. There is something really, really wrong with the product vision at the top of the food chain. I sometimes wonder if there is any product vision at all. Adobe is a numbers-run company in stead of a product-run company.

Creative Cloud is so transparently a fad thought up by marketers, rather than a real product vision. Somebody with a product vision needs to take reign of this company again, or it will slowly slide into irrelevance. I would hate to see that happen, because I have liked Adobe for so long.