IN THE MID-1980S, DESIGNER P. SCOTT MAKELA TOOK THE ADVICE OF APRIL GREIMAN AND BOUGHT A MAC. HE NEVER LOOKED BACK. His fervent, chaotic work—so unlike the then-pervasive Swiss style design—gained the respect of older design luminaries, although his style was strikingly not to their taste. Makela did not even spare the sanctity of typographic tradition. To create Dead History, a typeface for Emigre Fonts, he spliced together two existing digital typefaces, Linotype Centennial and Adobe VAG Rounded, with no care for elegance or precision. In his influential projects, such as the video for Michael Jackson’s song “Scream” and film title sequences, particularly that of Fight Club, Makela used technology to flood the senses with a shocking multimedia experience, thereby defining the postmodern aesthetic of the early 1990s. His mantra was, “It must bleed on all four sides.”1 With his wife, Laurie Haycock—a design force in her own right—he codirected the influential Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design program. Together this power couple taught students to look to their own private obsessions as an impetus for design practice.2
P. SCOTT MAKELA | 1993
Father Richard LaCosse is the only priest in his rectory with a computer work wall in his room. There, a large, periscope-projection fabric screen flickers with video patches as the transparent digital pages of books overlap. Several colleagues call him on the videophone; their images can be adjusted in size and by proximity to each other. LaCosse’s research is interrupted by the appearance of a drawn red curtain at the left of his screen. The online confession that then begins shares the electronic screen space with his other daily work but is appropriately darkened and isolated.
This is just one fantasy for a new kind of electronic office, in which signals will be clearer, stronger, and more realistic than ever. With the application of optimal broadband fiber optics and the aggressive programming of television, personal computers, and telephones, systems like Father LaCosse’s may be available late in this decade. As the techno-hip wait for workable, day-to-day access to the three-dimensional computer simulation called virtual reality, they will continue to devise new ways of framing information on the screen. After the complete digital submergence promised by VR has been achieved, our ways of planning and executing work, communications, rituals, and leisure activities will never be the same. Until then, though, how do we choose the programming and delivery of our daily electronic stuff? Surely the current screen icons of file folders, trash cans, and windows are stiff and limiting. New paradigms for these digital presentations are needed to augment the spatial experience and optical excitement that the VR goggles, gloves, and suits have promised to deliver.
If we could dispense with the conventional office as the major metaphor for our computer visuals, we would be better able to represent our minds’ memories, dreams, and visions. We have begun by loosening the formats and softening the presentation of data, but everyone has a different idea of what such departures mean. Some people might use the screen to frame the pleasant confusion of the daily work routine; to many of us the messy desk is a useful structure. Others might arrange their media information and output on the screen with the pragmatism and care used by a biologist preparing a culture specimen. Flexibility in forming personal-data terrains and textures is sure to help make our workstations warmer and more comfortable than they are now.
Awareness of my own working methods has helped me to visualize others’ data-processing needs. Every day I make multiple phone calls while my Macintosh runs up to six software programs at once. I send faxes and email, and I am productively addicted to good electronic bulletin boards. I watch obscure satellite TV stations…, and I enjoy CDs played at high volume. Soon, when new hardware permits, I hope to add to this mix the capacity to make instant, simultaneous, high-resolution image and text transfers between terminals. I want to conduct seamless multiple-videophone conversations…and to acquire a larger on-screen working area. If only I could arrange and mold the electronic information that appears before me in the same way I unconsciously compose my desk. Depictions of the contents of my pockets…would share the screen with my software applications, vacation photos, pages from books, and stills from CNN. These images, though digital, would accurately portray the idiosyncratic elements of my daily life.
The models illustrated (realized with the help of Alex) here [see p. 94] are my subjective forecasts of how individual work walls might appear to a parish priest, an artist, a motorcycle mechanic, and a plumber, whose needs and notions of order define their digital working and communication spaces. For example, the priest conducts a primary conversation with one person whose likeness appears in full scale. Text that relates to a current conversation falls directly over an on-screen face. The artist uses online services that help him select and join various media in his work. A caller’s face is contained in a small soft circle in the upper left corner, an image inspired by signers for the hearing-impaired on Sunday morning TV religious services. The motorcycle mechanic chooses to mass her visuals, business documents, and current projects on one side of the screen, while on the other side she focuses on the precise details of a pipe cutter. The plumber prefers large background images of his upcoming fishing vacation. He files through old invoices, fittings, and valve diagrams. His grandchild links in to say hello, just as an angry client calls. Though the digital office will never completely replace the physical one, the signals we send and receive ought to better mirror the experiences and dramas of each user’s daily existence.
1 Michael Rock, “P. Scott Makela Is Wired,” Eye 12 (spring 1994): 26–35.
2 Makela died at age thirty-nine from a rare infection of the epiglottis.