Frank Chimero has been branding for over 20 years in New York. Recently, he was creative director at FictiveKin.

These notes summarize his article "What Screens Want" and "The Web's grain". In these articles, he explored how screens as a medium shape its message. Alternatively, this summary could also be seen as interpreting his ideas from the perspective of "the medium is the message".

Why mediums?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.

-– Marshall McLuhan

To see the effects of technologies, or any artificial concepts or objects, it is important to see them as ‘paradigms of logics’ instead of looking at instances of the same class.

To use one of McLuhan’s illuminating examples, pun intended, consider the electric light. When we use electric light, we use it to eliminate time and space for perception, just as we use computers, apps, and emails.

Or, compared to papyrus writing Egypt, Babylon used stone tablets to eliminate time dependency in their communication. However, since the stone tablets were restricted by space, it limited Babylon’s expansion. What is illuminating here is that the medium of writing that an empire chose ended up circumscribing the “substance” of the empire itself.

In sum, what we can know about how we live isn’t apparent in the things that we say, but the logic of the tools that we use.

In this regard, when we analyze what makes software unique, it is not the differences in how they are made that matter, it is the user experience (the medium) that is the “message” of software.

Screens as the way we understand computation

  • Because computation is abstract, we need graphic UI to make metaphors "solid".
  • Because our minds are abstract, solid metaphors break down to allow for more attuned experiences once we are adapted to a new level of complexity.
  • The map is not the territory; the abstraction can only serve one purpose.
  • Purposes are normative.
  • What we want is what screens need, not the other way around.

Screens as a medium

If something can be anything, it usually becomes everything.

-- Frank Chimero

  • Screens are containers of aesthetics.
  • Screens are tangible yet atemporal and ahistorical.
  • Screens do not have boundaries. We are the boundaries of screens.

The prototypal screen is the extension of life

  • The grain of screens is the capacity for change.
  • We don't buy the things we need; we buy the medium in which we prefer to use it; we experience more than we use.
  • Change is recursive and infinite so we need control.
  • Control is an act of will. We cannot control everything that we use so we must trust others.
  • Abstraction simplifies logics of control. The shape of our lives becomes dependent on feedback loops of abstract control.

References

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