Making Love on the Web

How do you make love on the web?

I know how to make love with books. Books are conspicuously sensual. Pages have texture, smell. There is a delightful satisfaction that comes from the feel of turning pages, the way the pages whisper and rustle when moved. Intimacy is easily established with a book, for I can easily take my book to private settings like my bathtub or under a tree and be enveloped in the sensory experience that is reading a book. I touch it. I smell it. I move deliberately from one page to another, forward and backward with ease, skipping chapters, searching for endnotes. I fill the areas the author has left untouched with my own thoughts and questions, finding within the text a space for myself. Reading is transformative and deeply intimate. This is a whole person experience: all of me is engaged. Not just my mind, but my heart and character. This is perhaps the essence of interactive experience.

But my experience with the web is necessarily different. All of my senses are not stimulated. As my friend Chris points out, the internet is inherently cold and distant. I am not holding a collection of yellowed papers that have been handled by countless other people through time. There is little connection between me and whatever it is I’m reading, which is why interaction design online is so important. The re-creation of a feeling of intimacy and involvement, however superficial, is an important aspect of bringing the human element into the online experience.

Creating Intimacy Online

But interaction design alone isn’t enough. In order to bring intimacy to the web, those of us in charge of designing web experiences have to think very carefully about the emotions people feel when engaged with things they love. We have to choose our words carefully, crafting sentences and paragraphs that read well, that fill the reader with some kind of emotion rather than merely feeding him information. We have to take him on a journey, to show him something of ourselves. Our job is even more difficult than that of the book author, because we have to create the feeling of intimacy that automatically comes from the interaction with a physical book. It is no small task, but it lies at the heart of immersive design.

Our task as visual designers is no different: visual design has to aid the user’s immersion in his experience. We do this by understanding and properly using cultural symbols, mythologies, metaphors and histories. We choose colors and shapes that mean something, not merely random combinations that look good. We choose artistic styles that align with the tone of the narrative we’re crafting. The design elements that go into a page’s construction have connotations and histories of their own, and they convey messages to our viewers whether we mean for them to or not. Part of our job as designers is to be familiar enough with the culture we’re speaking to and of to make thoughtful, intelligent, meaningful decisions about the images we portray, lest we run the risk of sending confused, contradictory messages to the user.

Case Study: Journalism

When the UT Journalism site went live, I received a little bit of flak from someone who didn’t think my use of the OJ Simpson image was appropriate. He was concerned that the image might be offensive to the black community. Neverminding the fact that I, as a black designer, chose the image deliberately without any compunction whatsoever, I was sort of taken aback that anyone would take ethical issue with this particular design decision. The art direction for this site was the great news stories of our time. Whatever we might think of the OJ Simpson murder trial fiasco, it was all over the news; it was inescapable. Anyone with a television set living in America during that trial has incorporated the images and narrative of that story into their lives. Images of OJ are meaningful on a fundamental, emotional level. We remember that story. We have opinions about it. What kind of designer would I be if I intentionally left that image out when it so poignantly fits the narrative and speaks to us on such a visceral level?

On the other hand, there is an image that I did intentionally, and conspicuously, leave out. There isn’t an image of World War II or Hitler anywhere. I debated this decision for a long while, but I finally determined that the associations of Hitler were too strong and too negative to serve on a college department website. As a designer, I also have obligations to create and protect the brand of the college and its departments, and in instances where those obligations conflict with my obligations as storyteller, I have to determine which is more important. In this case, I decided that rather than show Hitler, I could imply Hitler. I chose an image of Jesse Owens on the stage bearing his medal at the 1936 Olympics. Viewers who are familiar with history will see the image and incorporate its associations; I don’t have to spoon-feed it to them. Subtle design is often a wonderful way to provide intimacy: whispering a message and allowing the viewer to interpret it is sometimes the best way to continue a narrative.

Deliberate, careful construction of text and imagery is the first step towards making love on the web. We begin by building mythologies with the symbols and histories we already have, and invite the user to fill in the holes with his own experiences and comments. This is one reason that Web 2.0 is so fundamentally important: it allows users and creators to communicate and share, contributing to a reformation of the lost intimacy caused by the new medium. It’s a start but it isn’t enough. The medium itself will never be as intimate as physical media and perhaps we can’t change that; what we can change, however, is our approach to digital media creation. We have to allow ourselves to be artistically engaged in our work.

More on that will have to wait for another post.