Joy Mountford: interface design, with a small diversion to Bali
Joy Mountford: interface design, with a small diversion to Bali by: David Tiley
From Screen Hub Wednesday 2 June, 2010
Joy Mountford is an eclectic communicator, a witness and creator in the evolution of personal computing. I have no idea what she will offer X|Media|Lab when she comes to Sydney, but the phone interview fizzed with interesting fragments.
S. Joy Mountford is an interface designer, and hugely respected – once a friend of Douglas Adams, and supported by Doug Engelbart (who co-invented the computer mouse), and encouraged by pioneering computer scientist Ivan Sutherland. Working at Disney, she was a friend of Frank Thomas, one of the original Nine Old Men who worked on films like Snow White and Bambi. “He thought the only thing to do is observe,” she said. “All he ever did was sit and watch. He watched the nuances and the tiny things, and let the big things take care of themselves.”
“In the old days, they could only handle about ten characters, so they concentrated on characters with depth. Now they can handle about a hundred characters, but empathy travels with characters, and there are too many to be subtle. The emotional connections have to be more dramatic. Do I care about that guy? No, I’ve only just met him.”
She does not sing the praises of Avatar, which was clumsy and alienating. “Avatar is overkill”, she said, although it is an extraordinary technical advance. “It’s incredible that Avatar did not win the Oscar – it’s the turning point. Instead, it was won by a small movie about death, based on real life”.
I am fascinated by interface design, partly because so much of the world which is irritating and unproductive and gets in the way of our working souls is simply a bad interface. But I am also aware that the basic interface in film was worked out right at the beginning. Sit together in a room, face in the same direction, don’t panic when the lights go out, and remember the speeding train is not really happening.
We inherited most of that from the theatre, and a meditation on the subtleties of the social interface between an audience and a performer is both complex and humbling.
Said Joy, “I find it very hard when people say, describe an interface. Everything is designed. In order to design it, you have to have an interface – even a grocery cart and a bag. I get frustrated with my life because I can’t reduce the number of things I am interested in. Everything is interesting really – it’s all a design. I’m spending my life getting exhausted because the options are endless.”
She told me her parents were academics, and she wanted to be a musician. But her parents reminded her that musos are poor and steered her towards a productive degree – psychology. From there, enchanted already by American and its Starsky and Hutch zest and sense of the future, she went to work in the military avionics industry in the Mid-west, designing interfaces for pilots.. Completely surrounded by men, engulfed in the military, she ploughed on – negotiating each situation at a time. Because she didn’t have high level security clearance, she worked on interesting peripheral problems like stereoscopic displays and speech synthesis.
“It was great doing aviation”, she said, “because you knew you had succeeded when a man didn’t die. Then you come to PCs, and nobody is really dying. You get angry, but you will get over it.”
“You understand design when it doesn’t work. When you design things that are good, people think you haven’t done anything. They say, why would you do it any other way? If you show them the story of the evolution, of what I threw away, to find what did work, and why I made the choices I made, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing. What a fantastic design!’
“Everything is a product of someone else, and someone is doing it, sometimes well and sometimes badly. If you want that product badly, you put up with a bunch of shit. If you don’t really need it, you wait for another one. Or it’s a status symbol. You buy a lemon squeezer which corrodes when you put lemon juice on it, and turns out to be a work of art.”
“Industrial designers design a shape and object that does a task. It keeps on being the same. An interface changes every millisecond as people use it. My objects are not fixed. They can put effort into tiny, tiny elements. There needs to be a thousand times more interface designers than product designers.”
“You cannot design with no failures – as we have noticed with BP, where the engineers are going through nightmares and can’t fix the problem. Mostly things work really well, but there is a failure node in the loop. We are humans and we do unfortunately make errors. The stakes are very high, and we take all of these things very seriously. The idea that we can just move on and change it later, I find very depressing.”
She has often worked, with companies like Mattel and Lego, on projects for children. “Children are the most difficult group to design for because they have no patience,’ she said. “They put it down or do something bizarre, which is funny, and creative. You find yourself saying, no, no – don’t be creative.”
These days she is an Osher Fellow at The San Francisco Exploratorium, which she describes as ‘dirty, loud and big.” In her work with museums, she notices that computers now carry signs which say “Please Touch”, as well as the traditional hands-off warnings. As she observes, “All children now touch screens, all the time. Up until two years ago, nobody did that.
” While interfaces are surely about intelligibility first – you have to know what to do, even if it is just to sit quietly – it leads straight to interaction. Please touch, as the sign says.
The examples quickly take us far from traditional media. She gleefully described a project based on a lollipop containing a sensor, connected to a rubber baby. The faster you lick, the more the toy moves. Get a group, and you can race them – all part of a University Design Expo conceived and carried forth by Mountford for nearly twenty years.
She is fascinated by the projects around crowdsourcing, which depend on intelligible, enticing interfaces. The Sheepmarket uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Project, to pay nominal cash to online workers to create a display of ten thousand sheep. The Johnny Cash Project, from Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, is crowd-creating the animated video for Cash’s “Aint No Grave”.
She is entranced by play, enchanted by change, but not addled by the opportunities. She believes the most important tool in life is a critical mind. But she is not interested in abandoning the power and shape of traditional media.
As she said, “Boundaries blur and interesting things happen that should not be equated with masterful films. We’ve always talked about interactive television or interactive films – we haven’t got any yet, but maybe someone will do something interesting.”
“What would you do with Schindler’s List? You go through the emotional experience because you can’t get out of seeing it. You could have different endings, but it would be some other movie. But the emotional power of time and space in linear media is very compelling and it won’t go away. We have more movies than ever – but we don’t have a lot of new stories, right?”
“Do we want to make light of stories? There are a certain number of stories that we do over and over again. Indeed, we will watch them over and over again, although we know the end. We love the beauty of that.”
She was born in Canterbury, a Roman town, and still finds Silicon Valley shallow. “It’s not their fault, because they have no history,” she said. There is a sense she has not adapted to the Americans – she campaigns against the lack of girls in engineering, insists on being stylish, drives an MGB, collects old cars, is an unmarried mother, records daft signs, and has a different sense of humour.
But she had a wonderful story about Britain and America. As a young graduate, she was interviewed for a position in a prestigious English university. “I said you don’t have any computers. They said, you can watch the deer outside. I said, you don’t have any computers. They said we have two tea breaks a day. I wasn’t going to be able to have a computer on my desk – I would have to book time on a computer somewhere else. It was very odd."
Within a few years, she would set up and manage the Human Interface Group at Apple between 1986 and 1994. That team invented a minor curiosity called Quicktime.
These days, she is on the move frequently. “I travel the world talking – that’s all I do really,” she said. She is enormously fascinated by cultures beyond what she calls the “western vision of a rectilinear world.” She watches the students in different countries, with other senses of shape like China and Japan, or colour palettes like Brazil.
“When I got to Bali or indonesia,” she said, “I love the attention to detail. They will put one small flower in the middle of a beautiful plate. It just makes me feel feel special and happy – and, Goddamit, life is full of misery, right? We need more flowers.
” It makes sense that a gifted person moves from a visual art form into something like interface design. It is about seeing and doing, with a rigorous ability to reconceptualise approaches. She was constantly using language about the physical world, is keyed into her visual cortex. But her background is actually musical.
I went back to the questions about her family – academics, as she had described them. It turns out that her mother had been a physicist, who had become a fashion designer. Her father was a geographer, who moved into psychology and then horticulture, and wrote about geography in a wider, integrated context. Her son, who is eleven years old, plays five instruments, learnt without her urging. One brother is a Professor of Immunology, another is the principal of a high school. “There are five generations of teachers in my family,” she said. “I believe it is genetic.”
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Here is an interview on the net. And her own bio, here.
David Tiley David Tiley is the editor of Screenhub, and can be contacted at editor@screenhub.com.au. or +61 3 9690 6893. editor@screenhub.com.au http://www.screenhub.com.au
(Thank You to Screenhub)
