The art of enterprise software
Inspirations from the Golden Age of Digital Art.
Disclaimer: I think about things and I write about them. All opinions and commentary are entirely my own and I welcome other viewpoints.
With the latest developments in the creative application of technology, I feel like a golden age of digital art has arrived. This is in part related to the proliferation of digital canvases in the real world, but more so in the democratised availability of advanced technology to digital artists and the convergence of several technology branches such as Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Cloud. This convergence manifests in cutting edge omni-channel experiences such as ‘play-to-earn’, but also in futurists thinking around the pervasive meta-verse, as promoted by technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Niantic, Magic Leap and many others [1].
Noticing all this ground-breaking activity at the nexus of art and technology I thought it might be fun to explore some of the cross-over learnings into the enterprise space, which I have spent the last twenty years inhabiting as part of my professional career. The truth is most of the exponential learnings I have had over the years have been found through experimental play. In the early days this involved creating games and experimenting with three-dimensional virtual worlds, progressing to the point today where the abundance of real-world sensors has stoked my interest in the concept of ‘disappearing technology’.
Inspiration is quite often formed from ethereal concepts and part of our jobs as technology practitioners in the field, is to turn these ethereal concepts into an observed reality as part of the translation and creation process. However, in the professional world, this thinking is often constrained within evolutionary practices and rarely gets the chance to break out into truly innovative ideas.
Combining arts and technology allows those barriers to be broken down, learning to be brought into the professional world that allows for thinking unconstrained by traditional boundaries of your industry and allows you to transcend these constraints. These experimentations and through observing some of the pioneers in the world of digital arts have inspired this article to explore some of the crossover benefits from this type of art and technology union.
My background I think like many artists is really non-traditional. Meaning I didn't even go to art school in the formal sense. I did get a graduate degree at an art program that was concerned with creative use of new technology...started out studying philosophy. So in my undergraduate career many many years ago, I made an independent major at my university that was about how computer technology would change traditional philosophical arguments….I could combine creative pursuits with professional pursuits and although I loved the academic world and writing about technology and theory, I thought it was really important, to really understand the tangible craft behind what I was theorising about. — Eric Forman
This is of course not a new concept, certainly to visionary innovators such as Steve Jobs, while also being the subject of many articles on the benefits that liberal arts can bring to an increasingly technology-driven world. This fusion of the liberal arts can provide unique insights into what machines can and cannot do, while exploring the changing dynamics of the human and technology interactive universe. Pushing the boundaries at the edge of technology for what these developments may mean for our future.
There are also considerable overlaps to design thinking, which places humans at the centre of the innovation process. Mixing in social, economic and ecosystem trends into the design process, taking the time to observe and experiment with innovative technology, and researching innovative designers, can help to identify future trends in user behaviour and should be somewhere in any software practitioners handbook of innovation.
The Evolving Thesis
Perfection is an over-rated concept. The key element in both enterprise as well as artistic endeavours is just to get started, as one of the key learnings also in the artistic world is that the output rarely matches your expectations of what you sought to achieve in the first place.
This may seem somewhat counter-intuitive in the enterprise world of tightly constrained budgets, balance sheets and profit-and-loss however is the essence of rapid development methodologies such as Agile. The most important part of break-through innovation is indeed just to deliver the first step on that path.
This was also explored famously by David Sylvester in the book “Interviews with Francis Bacon” [2], which describes creation as an evolving organic process. Not all paintings are going to make it, as the idea changes with the paint strokes, new forms are made possible and occasionally tipping over an edge to be irretrievable and destroyed. As it is in software development, rapid iteration around a hypothesis and opening up innovation to be an everyday practice, is where you will likely find parallel ideas and learnings. Rather than focusing on an ‘end-state’ as such, what’s more important is to start somewhere.
“You know that in my case all painting — and the older I get, the more it becomes so — is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it” — Francis Bacon [2]
Originating back in 2017 I sought to create a series of interactive design pieces that combined elements of machine learning and presence sensing technologies into an interactive space. The original prototypes used a combination of infra-red and microwaves to determine presence, then stepping up to location sensitivity and awareness through facial recognition.
The original hypothesis was that a meta-space can be created where the virtual and physical worlds begin to overlap and become seamless. The advanced technology disappearing into the background to form a contextual experience for the observer, who remains unaware of how the illusion is created.
The important lesson I learned were that there were many deviations along the way and learnings of what is more or less difficult when attempting to put these pieces together. However the process of getting started provided rapid feedback from others and eventually landed a private works commission in 2018.
However the thesis was always evolving and the essential ingredient was to create and evolve rather than trying to achieve the desirable ‘end-state’.
Tracking Error
As an industry we make assumptions about the real-world in almost everything we do. In investment management the entire forward projection of economic realities is based on assumptions such as asset returns, which themselves are based on other assumptions where historical data may or may not be present or reliable.
As in investment management, gaps in reliable or available data are also present in fields such as self-driving cars and robots, which themselves have to be trained on simulated data in order to be able to navigate a wide variety of real-world scenarios. What is interesting about this is that this simulated data is often imperfect and the result is ‘tracking error’ within the system where real-world inputs do not match the range of expected simulations. In the real world the results can lead to catastrophic consequences, such as when a virtual object does not align with the real-world and leads to a failure in the system.
As described in Alan Warbuton’s video essay [3], design problems in software can affect the real world in dangerous and unpredictable ways. Essentially the use of synthetic data to model the real world, an increasingly common practice, is creating a layered deception that has real-world implications.
Synthetic data is increasingly sought after as a ’clean’ alternative to real world data sets, which are often biased, unethically sourced or expensive to create. And while CGI data seems to avoid many of these pitfalls, my argument aims from the outset to consider whether the virtual world is as clean and steady as we think. I try to catalogue the ‘hacks’ used to construct the foundations of simulated worlds and suggest that the solutions of early computer graphics create a technical debt that might be less than ideal material on which to build the foundations of yet another generation of technology. — Alan Warbuton [3]
Design and simulation emulates the real-world, however must be constantly fine tuned in practice and revisited from time to time. The tracking error associated with an imperfectly trained model translated into an evolving and shifting real-world is something that cannot be ignored and is ultimately required for real-world dependability.
In essence the models that you design into your software and technology have at best a real-world shelf-life and can never be considered to be ‘complete’. Recognising that shelf life, revisiting the inputs frequently and placing edge case error handing may help to avoid that catastrophic problem when observed reality deviates from your expectations.
Seamless Transitions and Cross Functionality
It is certainly not a unique idea that as technology becomes pervasive it is in the process of ‘disappearing’. Disappearing technology is so well deployed into the everyday lives of those that interact with it, it essentially becomes invisible and considered to be perfectly normal in our everyday lives.
Some of this thinking is what makes up initiatives such as the ‘meta-verse’ which is frequently mentioned in technology circles and intuitively understood by companies such as Carl Pei’s ‘Nothing’. As we seamlessly blend commerce, augmented reality and physical reality, there is a point at which it becomes one universe through which inhabits are able to move freely between different domains.
“Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future,” says Pei, Nothing’s founder and CEO, in a press release. “We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. When sufficiently advanced, it should fade into the background and feel like nothing.” — Carl Pei (Nothing)
In the world of digital art there are cutting edge pioneers in these fields which are paving the way. One of the most remarkable examples I had the opportunity of experiencing was the work of TeamLab in Shanghai as part of their ‘Borderless’ exhibition. The concept of a lack of borders in the interactive works and the seemingly free flow of one work into another, all interacting in real-time was the first time I observed in the real-world this concept of ‘disappearing technology’. Behind the scenes were hundreds of hours of programming effort and pieces of technical equipment to make this illusion possible however the end result was pure magic, leaving even an experienced and technology curious practitioner such as myself scratching my head on how it all worked.
Tog was one of the first interface designers for Apple and he wrote a paper called ‘Magic and Software Design’ and he said that he thought that no art was as similar to graphic interface design than magic. And he pointed out that when those first interfaces (visual interfaces) were designed they were referred to as the ‘user illusion’. And because we’ve forgotten that it’s a trick we keep breaking it in different ways, whereas if you remember what you are doing is a metaphor and you remember that it’s a trick you can pay much more careful attention to some of the aspects that make an illusion powerful — Stuart Nolan (on Apple’s Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini)
When building products are you placing boundaries on yourself or are you in the process of disappearing? Breaking down the boundaries of one world and another and creating a natural flow through your product is the essential part of a seamless and pervasive user experience. This can be materialised as such simple items as reducing the number of mouse ‘clicks’, or not requiring users to exit one function and enter another, seamlessly sharing contextual data across applications in the workflow and getting out of the way of the desired outcome.
As counter-intuitive as it may be to some in the business world, not getting in the way of the eventual outcome and making yourself invisible in the overall process while adding value at every step, is essentially where you need to focus your efforts. Always be in the process of making cross functional, omni-channel [4] and seamless experiences within the platform, ‘thinking-big’ about your user journey and being consistent.
Interactivity and Responsiveness
In recent years there has been an explosion in the world of interactivity in the digital art world, which has also been gradually making its’ way into the business world through contextually aware advertising and interactive retail placements. This idea has yet to truly arrive in enterprise software as we continue to use applications that are relatively static in their presentation and demand that an end user extract utility of their own from the platform.
In the art world, tactile and responsive installations are becoming commonplace as artists seek to find new ways to exploit available technologies and break ground on innovative new fields, where traditional medias which have become saturated, with readily available tools and distribution mediums. This gradual reduction of the creative value of traditional media has provided the push into new realms, while the more ready availability of the tools for advanced technology are providing the pull and democratising access.
This results in an innovation ecosystem where paintings, photos and even film can be viewed as one-dimensional static views, where finding new engagement means reaching out to the observer and interacting with them. In order to stand out in an increasingly crowded field, interactivity and enablement of the omni-channel experience is becoming essential.
I think it is more difficult because painters had a double role before. I think they thought they were recording…..I think that now, with the mechanical methods of recording there, such as the film and the camera and the tape recorder, you have to come down in painting to something more basic and fundamental. Because it can be done better by other means on what I think is a more superficial level. — Francis Bacon, Interview 2 [2].
Also in the enterprise software environment, applications which are interactive and responsive to other models and user behaviours provide the ability to give insights into real-world events and provide significant utility to their ultimate end consumer. This is needed to retain engagement in a crowded environment of static applications, which force the obligation for extraction of value onto the consumer.
Such interactivity and responsiveness in applications can provide insights into events that are not themselves expected or even discoverable, then provide the user with contextual information on how to deal with the insight at hand. It is too often that software applications are too ‘passive’ and demand that a user take action to get utility. This is a flaw of design. We need to move to a world of interaction and response through active agents informing us about the world and interacting with each other.
Blending Inspiration and Execution
There is no ultimate destination upon which we arrive but rather a continuously evolving evolution as technology advances to solve problems in domains that are only really emerging. There is an acceleration in the adoption of these technology innovations as tools are developed which democratise access.
Blending inspiration from these technology innovations, through creative play and the digital arts, then feeding them into your design practices is something that is available to everyone and there is no better place to look for this inspiration than in the world of digital art.
References and Further Inspirations
[1] The Metaverse is coming and it’s a very big deal — Cathy Hack (Forbes) — https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2020/07/05/the-metaverse-is-coming--its-a-very-big-deal/?sh=3db65aed440f
[2] Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, Francis Bacon — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180748.Interviews_with_Francis_Bacon
[3] The Exploded Image — Video Essay — Alan Warburton https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/rgbfaq-bell-labs-to-synthetic-datasets/
[4] McKinsey and Co Design Led Thinking — A design-led approach to embracing business ecosystems | McKinsey
[5] Technique Podcast — Sam Fry and Richard Adams https://shows.acast.com/Technique
[6] Eric Forman Studio — https://www.ericforman.com/
[7] IOIO Creative — Wind Catching Forest https://www.ioiocreative.com/projects/tapping-sonar-2018?lang=en
[8] Teamlab Borderless — https://borderless.teamlab.art/
[9] [Tognazzini, Bruce “Tog.” (1993), “Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design,” Proceedings of INTERCHI, 1993 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 24–29, 1993). ACM, New York, pp 355–362.] — https://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html
