Dimensions of experience
Last week I helped with an activity in my fourth-grader’s classroom. While sitting in a tiny chair at the back of the room, my eyes scanned the rich environment around me. Drawings, sculptures, bookshelves, markers, desks and tables; every color and shape imaginable; kids excitedly talking and working.
There was so much diversity, my eyes had trouble resolving it all. I realized then that due to my work and information sources, I spend a large majority of my time looking at flat screens 18-24 inches from my face. My eyes simply are not used to changing focus or direction in order to do work anymore. This isn’t made any easier by their increasing age, of course.
I spoke with a friend later in the week who described their high school-aged son’s schoolwork as entirely screen-based now. “He lies down sideways on the couch with his laptop and doesn’t move for hours,” he said. “All of his assignments and learning materials are delivered via the screen, and he stays in one place until he’s done.”
I’m sure that’s efficient, though hearing it I felt fortunate to have gone to high school before computers became the dominant medium. I’m also lucky to have hobbies and kid activities that do give me dimensionality in the rest of my days. But when such a big part of life is spent in flat experience, it has an impact on how we think, feel, and act.
Julie Beck wrote last year in the Atlantic about “the great friendship flattening“. She noticed that when friend updates were mixed with work, entertainment, and news content, it made those friendships feel flatter and hard to distinguish:
When my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together.
Tom Vanderlinden analyzed recent trends in cinematography and noted that modern movies tend to have a flatter, less realistic look to them. He identified perceptual realism, indexicality, haptic visuality, and cinematic qualia as choices that make the viewer feel a movie is more or less “real”.
One aspect in particular is the depth of focus used–do viewers see everything in detail across the screen, or only the central actor or item with the background blurred. This kind of hyperfocus mimics our own behavior when looking at personal devices; the world behind them is blurred, and only the interface is in focus.
Vanderlinden also quotes Laura Marks from The Skin of the Film, where she says:
Film is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole. This view of perception implies an attitude toward [a film], not as something that must be analyzed and deciphered in order to deliver forth its meaning but as something that means in itself.
Marks describes “haptic visuality” as a way of seeing that “tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.”
I can’t remember the last time I “grazed” an interface on a screen; interfaces overall have been so hyper-optimized for efficiency that the very idea of it seems an anathema. And yet I feel a craving for that sort of richness of experience; that our screen lives today are poorer without it. Our minds know that an experience is more than just the optics, that real things should be engaged with all of our senses.
So what might this mean for digital designers, who focus on screen-based experiences? Are screens inherently limiting to human experience? Should we return to skeuomorphism in an attempt to engage the “haptics” of the eyes? Might we need virtual reality goggles to take our interfaces to a higher level? Should we all just go touch grass?
I believe flat, rectangular screens will continue to dominate our informational and creative lives. After all, flat books have sufficed for storytelling since Gutenberg, and my own thoughts on the challenges of face computers are well documented.
But it seems worth thinking about visual richness, realism, and dimensionality as important aspects of the human experience that we aren’t currently getting from our screens. And if screens can’t bring them to us, then we will need to more often raise our eyes from them to refocus.
