Making Art with Simple and Portable Interfaces
This is the first of a multi-part series on interfaces. Here is part 2.
Portability generates opportunities.
Portability in Music. I used to play bass guitar in a band. I loved the feeling of the heavy thud that the large bass cabinet would push through the air and how it would rattle all of the coins and pencils off of my desk. However, despite how much I loved playing bass, there were many pitfalls to owning a large instrument. Chief among these was portability. The speaker was heavy and large, and I could barely squeeze everything into the backseat of my car. The difficulty of moving everything from gig to gig eventually wore on me. I remember being relieved to sell my bass equipment and reclaim a large swath of my room.
Fortunately, I live in an era where musical instruments have become extremely portable. Instead of bass, I now play the Teenage Engineering OP-Z, a minimalist synth and sequencer that fits in my pocket. I love Teenage Engineerings’s design choices, especially their "bring-your-own-screen" concept, which makes screens optional —if the user wants to extend the interface, they can do so by syncing with an app over Bluetooth. By stripping away unnecessary interface features, they create instruments that are fun to play while also reducing costs.
The OP-Z. The four colored knobs in the upper right adjust the parameters of each instrument. The goal is to populate a series of musical pattern matrices, where each note is a column (16 columns representing 4 bars), each instrument is a row (8 instruments), and moving along each row, you choose the musical note and instrument parameters for each note entry. (Shot on my kitchen counter with an iPhone.)
Portability in Photography. I'm also fortunate to live in an era of digital cameras with virtually unlimited and free "film." However, digital cameras also have a spectrum of portability. On one end, I have a Sony DSLR, which takes amazing photos but is complicated and has many bulky moving parts prone to breaking. On the other end, I have an iPhone—simple to use, physically compact, solid-state, and drop-resistant. Since I already carry my iPhone everywhere, its camera naturally gets used more often.
The Power of Portability. There's a two-way relationship between the instrument at hand and the creative process: being readily available means the OP-Z gets played more often than any other instrument I own, and in turn, the OP-Z shapes how I think about and make music. In the same way, the convenience of my iPhone has led to shoot more photos while shaping my process around the capabilities and workflow of the iPhone.
Simplicity accelerates creation.
Simplicity in Music. Decision paralysis remains a challenge in music production. Digital audio workstations (DAWs), like Ableton Live, offer too many choices and risk users spending their creative energy lost in a sea of possibilities. In contrast, traditional instruments and effects pedals typically have just a few controls: usually a volume and intensity knob, and an on-off switch. In response to the complexity of DAWs, some musicians have adopted a "DAW-less" approach, essentially returning to the old-fashioned method of connecting multiple small instruments and effects without a computer. The fundamental idea is that a simple interface creates a clearer path from idea to result.
Teenage Engineering’s OP-Z and OP-1 are great examples of simple interfaces that clearly map musical ideas to results. There are only a handful of digital instruments on each device, and each one has at most four knobs per instrument. Unlike the sea of parameters in a classic DAW, learning four parameters is tractable problem that can be solved quickly. Once artists learn how each of the four parameter affect the final sound, they can focus on their high-level creative idea of what they are playing instead of how they are playing it.
This is the famed OP-1 from Teenage Engineering. The four colored knobs in the upper right adjust the parameters of each instrument. (Shot on my kitchen counter with an iPhone.)
Simplicity in Photography. Simplicity is equally important in photography. Photo editing software, such as Adobe Lightroom, also risks users becoming lost in parameter space. From fine-tuning light curves to color grading, hours can be spent on a single photograph instead of shaping the high-level artistic idea. While I'm not aware of a "DAW-less" equivalent in photography, retro cameras have remained popular far beyond a casual fad. They remind me of old-fashioned effects pedals—most have very few parameters: aperture size, shutter speed, and an on-off switch. Once again, the goal of a simple interface is to more efficiently map an idea to a result, and it doesn't get more straightforward than point-and-click.
The iPhone Photos app and Instagram are excellent examples of simple photo editing interfaces. Each clearly displays the available parameters and immediately renders their effects, allowing users to quickly learn the parameter-to-result mapping. Because I've internalized these mappings, I spend far more time focusing on high-level photographic ideas than getting lost in parameter space. I also feel more confident in my editorial choices and the final result. This has made photography incredibly enjoyable. As a bonus, expertise brings speed. Since I can capture a moment in seconds and fully edit it within minutes, I create much more art.
Portability and simplicity boost productivity.
Portability leads to more opportunities to create and simplicity leads to faster creation. The net effect is a greater volume of completed works. In other words, simple and portable interfaces make artists more productive. However, achieving simplicity is challenging. To better understand this problem, in the next post. l’ll borrow a few ideas from mathematics.
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