Towards a New Science of Interfaces: Bridging Art and Engineering

Summary

The practice of systems engineering has been said to be both an art and a science. While the scientific part is necessary to produce actual designs, the artistic one seems to drive the value of the underlying system structure. Should certain aspects of art be integrated with engineering? Interestingly, systems engineers and master painters seem to use a similar set of rules to effectively manage complexity, balancing rules that reduce noise with rules that add meaning. Furthermore, there is a strong resemblance between the problem context and the solution processes of large artistic endeavors, such as original film scores and theatre productions and large engineering projects. In this chapter, we explore how the arts can be leveraged to design effective interfaces. There are many cases that the complexity of the interaction between a user and a system mostly occurs at the interface level. We suggest that any interface contains a set of messages for the users as encoded by the designer and that the proper encoding of this information is critical in enabling a satisfying level of interaction. In this sense, an interface design, as creating an art piece, is a communicative act, where both artists and engineers package information to deliver meaning. In this chapter, we show, supported by examples, that such meaning delivery can be more efficient and effective if the aesthetic value is incorporated in the interface’s design.

“I like the rule that corrects the emotion. I like the emotion that corrects the rule.”

Georges Braque