Interfaces : New and old

With the introduction and success of the new Windows metro UI, a lot of debate has been spurred on between the different approaches to designing digital Interfaces. Apple's designs are skeumorphic, they try to imitate and reflect the apparent 3Dness of the real world with textures, shadows and such devices.
Windows has come up with a design based on pure typography, information design and ease of use, inspired from the stark functionality of airport signage. It's almost Bauhaus-esque. Personally, I think it's a winner.
What is the need of imitating real life in the interface, when it's clearly digital? That time is long gone when we were unfamiliar with digital tools and needed a sort of bridge to get us to feel more comfortable with a device and its UI. However, as with everything in design, context is of utmost importance. Skeumorphism maybe be getting old now, but it still has its pros.

What really grabs my eye when I roam the internet these days is the rising interest in the analog interfaces of  yore. I remember my mom mentioning that she wanted a DSLR like mine because she loves the sound that the shutter makes when a photo is clicked. It seemed more authentic, old school and has a certain  characteristic to it. The tiny click of a digital camera is simply not that much fun.
On one hand I see that newer laptops are striving to make their interactions more silent and unobtrusive, and on the other I see an app designed just for the purpose of making your laptop keys sound like a typewriter's.
http://fffff.at/noisy-typer-a-typewriter-for-your-laptop/


The feeling of getting a hand written letter from someone you care, can never be replaced by the structured emails of today. It is perhaps this emotion that drives us to look into the past, reminiscing about our old devices and trying to integrate those interactions in the objects we own now..

All these highs and lows,

And you're never really sure

What you do it for

Well do you even want to know?

You put on quite a show...

~ Smoke and mirrors, Gotye

Amorphous and organic,
Like a giant evolving cloud of cotton
So wonderfully grey, 
So painfully close,
Tainting the things it touches,
Making them whole.
It's something to revel in,
Something to celebrate.
Wait, watch, try, suspend
It will always catch the bait.

Design and the Internet

I'm an internet junkie, I admit it. Sometimes, I don't realize where the day has gone, just because I have been too busy reading blogs,news,tweets,RSS feeds or watching videos.I should have a tool to regulate my time spent on the www. There has to be a point where it gets counter-productive.

It's the sheer glossiness and design of media content, all packed up in pretty little boxes that makes me sit in some kind of a stupor, ogling at the screen for hours on end. I become a sponge, soaking in everything the curators/bloggers out there want me to,sometimes making them writhe in pleasure if I happen to like,share or tweet a link a  my social media network.( It shows up on the stats, you see). 

Reflecting on it, it makes me wonder if most content on the internet today is like that well made 3 minute ad video; amazingly edited and presented, slick and communicating so much in the blink of an eye. These product/service/idea explanation videos are in a league of their own, meant to dazzle and mesmerize.But consider this,  do youtube views and facebook likes truly reflect the quality and importance of a project? I do believe that design is meant for the people, so their opinion should matter.What annoys me sometimes is the ridiculously low percentage of actual intelligent critical debate and discourse on a topic in comparison to the flash news sort of approach.

The internet and social media are great, I love them.When it starts to dictate terms about what is good and what is not, is when I feel slightly uneasy. It's like trusting an organic, unknown collective consciousness and not my own.

Digital Hoarders

Clutter. There’s a lot that has been said and discussed about how having too many things and  too much stuff can negatively affect your life. It crams up your abode, leaving no scope for ‘white space’. It also gives valuable insights about the person and their way of life. Why do we like collecting stuff,  sometimes even the things that we don’t need or want? Maybe it is that our possessions give us a chance to exist outside of ourselves, or maybe a chance to attach myriad meanings to things that make sense only to us.

Considering that our identities are constantly being shifted from the ‘real’ to the digital realm; observing  a person’s computer, their various external HD’s and other storage devices can give us an idea of their hoarding habits. If I take my own example, I realise that I have tons of movies on my computer that I haven’t seen, books that aren’t read and music that hasn’t been on my player even once. Still, this doesn’t stop me from downloading even more of these digital artefacts, to lovingly store till the day comes when I would be motivated enough to go through them.

Somehow, having them seems more important than experiencing them. I do watch a movie once in a while or click through an e-book at express speed on a few occasions , but the ratio of the time spent in doing that is much less in comparison to the time I spend in looking for even more stuff to download and keep.

What does this say about me and countless others? Has our practice of acquiring things seeped into our digital habits too?

Just a few thoughts that mulled around in my head when I heard a few friends talking about 1 TB hard disks running out of space and my own laptop HD graph lurking in the overfull red region.

If stones could speak, what would they say?

Ahmedabad is a strangely attractive city. I say strange because its attractions (a lot of them) aren’t what one would call beautiful in the conventional sense of the word. So, yes, I visited the darwazas of the old city and the jama masjid today. Architecturally, these sites are a delight. But more than appreciating the motifs and carvings on the walls or pillars, more than marvelling about the structural strength and the workmanship of these sites; I loved the fact that they were a part of a long and colourful history, and the contrasts that were so enthralling to observe.

The roads were teeming with people, bursting at its seams with the variety of shops, goods that ranged from handkerchiefs to antique bells, from Christmas decorations to rat traps. 

Teen darwaza and the surrounding market and its gullis are a delight for any kind of shopper, the compulsive as well as the practical one. The air is filled with smoke and intermittent honking of the horn from a consistent stream of traffic that plies through these lanes. At short, sharp intervals though, one can hear a particularly loud Gujrati lady haggling with a seller or smell soap, or ittar or maybe even fresh biscuits being baked at a corner bakery place.

The darwazas stand like proud royal guards of an era gone by, watching over a city that had slowly and steadily changed its appearance and priorities over the decades. The spirit though, seems something that has undergone very minimal change at all. The people don’t seem to run, they still seem to have time to talk to each other, or maybe even smile at an unknown stranger. The darwazas- Dilli, Prem, Daryapur, Lal and Kalupar; are places of bustling activity. 

If one was to say that a sanctuary of peace and quiet existed right in the middle of Teen darwaza, I wouldn’t really believe them.But jama masjid manages to surprise me immensely. I feel gratitude for the fact that despite being a woman, I am still allowed inside the sacred premises of this wonderful mosque. The huge empty space inside, the countless pillars, the water construct in the center, the flapping of the pigeons’ wings, the atmosphere of reverence and tranquillity, the intricate and beautifully done carvings; all contribute to making jama masjid a place that is not just a building with great architecture, but an experience that needs to be sensed.

Picture: Front facade, Dilli darwaza

Those faces

Nothing much remains anymore,

Except stray snapshots of a blur;

A silhouette of a girl at the door

A fragment of the people who were..

The miniature vessels, an endless game,

Those myriad faces with no name;

Woven into young innocent memories,

Courtyard capers and fingernails with grease.

The countless wrinkles and glassy eyes,

A cloud of dust and a gleaming road

Dissolved into The Sand that flies,

Those hands that built that abode.

A story so common yet untold,

A frame bent around a sari's fold,

It takes me back to a time so tame;

To the varied faces with no name... 

~Inspired by the short story 'The Real Durwan' -Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri.

Made me think of all those people who worked around the house when I was a kid.I wonder where they are now...