With fatter data pipes, large high resolution displays, and web content that is increasingly imagery and video, the cracks have been forming in Web interfaces for some time now. Here are some thoughts I’ve put together on the subject in a video narrated slide set:

Original Slide Deck Here >>

I am an Apple Computer alumnus and Silicon Valley veteran. I consider myself at the vanguard of a new wave of talented professionals from places like Apple, Pixar, and other elite, visionary companies whose skillset spans design and technology.

I recently returned to the United States after eight years in Scandinavia where I lectured, and was involved in Internet, open source, and mobile wireless projects. I am currently looking for a strategic design position in the design industry.

As I research the design industry landscape I notice something odd: someone forgot to tell design firms how to fully leverage the Internet platform.

For example, try and find an RSS feed at IDEO, Davos 2006 attendee, and Business Week poster child for all things innovative. No luck? How about a weblog? Nuthin? Well surely they at least have a web page listing podcasts of David Kelley’s most inspirational talks. Nope? Well that can’t be good…

For context, When Thomas Friedman says The World is Flat, the Internet is the infrastructure supporting that flattening. The protocols of the supply chain of this flattened world are Internet protocols. The bricks, mortar, and plumbing currently being used to rearchitect Fortune 500 internal processes are Internet protocols.

So what? So, that means previously opaque processes and workflows are now transparent. This enables entirely new conceptualizations of product experience from ideation to recycling dump. Our first glimpse of the possibilities comes from the work of high tech of course. For example take a look at the DIY (do it yourself) capabilities for PC and notebook configuration at dell.com.

I don’t see how a design firm can properly advise clients on innovation strategy without understanding how to leverage this sea change and roll it into a comprehensive strategic solution. Sorry, branded Flash-powered websites don’t count.

Geoffrey Moore’s weblog entry on the surprisingly limited scope of innovation at IDEO is instructive.

Here’s an illustrative story that should help show how products, services, marketing, and media are all deeply affected by the Internet. Note, it is important here to understand the difference between the Internet platform (Google API, Web Services, SOA, RSS, HTTP, SMTP, WSDL, etc) and the suite of applications running atop that platform (Website, Blog, Skype, IM, Email).

Most design firms (and the public as well) only understand the Internet’s usefulness through the more limited lens of Internet applications. I believe this is the root of the design industry’s problems.

Let’s go back five years into the past. Karen in San Francisco goes out to Target and buys a toaster designed by a hot designer. One morning she cuts a thick slice of bread and plunks it in hre snazzy new toaster. Because of the toast’s thickness it fails to pop-up and begins to burn. Karen tries frantically to press the eject button but it does nothing. She tries lifting the lever to raise the bread but the handle falls off. Finally, she unplugs the toaster, fishes the shard of carbon out of the toaster with a fork, and throws it in the garbage. Sitting alone, surrounded by a rising pall of blue smoke and muttering to the kitchen wall about shoddy construction and poor design she vows to never buy that toaster model again.

Let’s return to the present. After chucking the toast in the garbage, Karen visits one of a dozen product review weblogs and vents her anger. The issue mushrooms, and circulates the blogosphere. David Pogue of the New York Times notices and writes an article on bad product design. Suddenly Target has a serious PR problem on its hands. The designer in question has her reputation damaged. Sales plummet. Heads roll.

Let’s go forward five years into the future. A hot young Malaysian company sets up a website, weblog, wiki, IM channel, and podcast repository. This collection of technologies represents a “clean well light” space for the public to enter, congregate, and engage with the toaster product and brand. The company has its act together. They use a variant of the Dell model of tight supply chain control combined with customer-facing DIY (do it yourself) capabilities. They make use of the logistics services of UPS to out-source non-core parts of the supply-chain infrastructure. The companies marcom folks do limited selective messaging in traditional media. The buzz builds. In key coolhunting and trendspotting markets such as New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and London short lived “popup” stores appear for one month displaying dozens of model variants which are sold on a limited basis. Gizmodo and Engadget do their thing. Key weblogs are sent product samples for feedback. Anytime anyone anywhere has a problem for whatever reason a video IM session is setup to address the matter. The resultant data is harvested and poured over like it is gold. It is gold. Gold 2.0.

This company understands that in the modern era, product experience blurs the boundary between the physical space and digital space. They understand the public has an insatiable hunger to “lift the hood” and get to know a product/brand on a far deeper, less mediated level then every before. Example: the popularity of behind the scenes special effects shows that accompany every blockbuster movie launch. Example: DVD extras for Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Example: Pimp my ride. Example: Google Maps mashups.

Designers need to be all over this stuff and I just don’t see it.

Some artists and architects speak to us so directly, immediately, and intensely that an encounter with their work feels more like the realization of a unarticulated feeling. Isamu Noguchi. Louis Kahn. Carlo Scarpa. Joseph Cornell. Andy Goldsworthy.

Alvar Aalto.

My first encounter with an Alvar Aalto space occurred at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The mansion’s interior walls are made of intricatily carved teak. I walked up the grand staircase to the second floor landing where large black and white poster’s of Aalto’s work hung on the walls. One poster in particular grabbed my attention. It was a photograph of the Finnish pavillion for the Universal Exposition held in 1939 in New York. The poster showed a space bound on one side by a series horizontally undulating wooden surfaces composed of vertical wooden slats. The surfaces cascaded one atop the other upward at a canted angle towards the ceiling as well as outwards into the space they bounded. These surfaces served as backdrops for juxtaposed photographs of Finnish merchandise, industrial products, and groceries.

The effect was simultaneously riveting, disorienting, and puzzling. While Aalto was a late twentieth century modernist, he divirged from his peers in some profound ways. Prevailing International Style dogma demanded a pallete of stainless steel, terrazzo, glass, corten steel, granite. The grid dictated all spatial manipulation. The idea is to create a context-free sense of cerebral, rarified, detached purity. Think Lever House. Think Seagrams Builiding. Alvar Aalto’s palate includes wood, ceramic tile, plaster. His spaces mix curved and undulating sections with obliquely angled elements. The feeling is intimite, harmonious, inclusive, and highly contextual.

For the last seven years I have been living and working in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. There is a marvelous Aalto jewel here called Nordic House. In 1998 I built a small personal Alvar Aalto shrine based on Nordic House in honor of the centenury year of his birth. Be sure and check out the interactive panoramas (Java support required). It was a sublime pleasure clamboring over every inch of the building shooting pictures. I had the perverse pleasure of actually hugging an Aalto building. Cool.

My undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering. One summer I got hired as an HVAC engineer for a prestigious New York architect called Swankee, Hayden & Connell. Swanky indeed, located on Park Avenue and a few floors down from the offices of SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill for you hopelessly uncouth types). HVAC. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. Could you imagine anything more boring? Anyway the pay was just fine.

I soon started poking around the office and chatting with some of the young architects who it turns out are paid next to nothing for some bizzare reason I still don’t understand. Anyway, I found what they were doing vastly more interesting then the mind numbing details of duct work specification and started spending more and more time with them. One architect I became friends with had attended the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been a student of Louis Kahn and described to me how Kahn packed Penn lecture halls with rapt, adoring students and held them spellbound for hours. I’ll have more to say about Louis Kahn in a future post.

The School of Fine Arts publishs a quarterly called VIA. My architect friend showed me one volume entitled Structures Implicit and Explicit and a doorway opened in my brain. For the first time I saw words on a page that began to answer the nagging questions I had about how to reconsile and better understand the profound impact design and engineering has on me.

One piece in particular by David P. Billington entitled Meaning in Maillart was particularly illuminating. David P. Billington is Professor of Civil Engineering at Princeton University. He is in a class by himself as a writer on the art of engineering. Meaning in Maillart, on the work of 20th century Swiss master bridge engineer Robert Maillart, is an elegant synthesis of engineering, asthetic, and historical analysis.

So why “The Salgina Crossing”? Well, the jewel in Robert Maillart’s crown is the incomparable Salginatobel bridge. Billington introduces the Salginatobel bridge in the prologue to the wonderful Robert Maillart’s Bridges. The prologue is entitled The Salgina Crossing. Here is a passage:

From Shiers a single-lane road winds up to the mountain village of Fajauna. Few signs of civilization can be seen above the high Alpine meadows as the road curves up the southern slope of the Ratikon range that separates Switzerland from Austria. After one curve, a small white form appears through the trees. After a few more curves, it comes into full view – a bridge, connecting two mountains over a wide ravine. To laymen its form is unclear at first and then distinguishable as a bridge. To knowledgeable engineers, however, it is not only immediately clear, it is also the reason for the pilgramage. Here is one of the most beautiful examples of pure twentieth-century structure. But is also complex and, even to the skilled engineer, an object of mystery and wonder.

This bridge, the Salginatobel, was completed in 1930 to serve the population of Schuders, an Alpine community of less than 50 people; yet it was the focus of the first art museum exhibition ever devoted to pure engineering, held at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1947. Designed by a highly trained engineer whose highest school grade was in differential equations, the bridge calculations employed elementary mathematics with no calculus at all. Expressing in its form one of the simplest of all technical ideas, it nevertheless had practically no precedent. Arising in a setting of almost primitive mountain simplicity, the bridge almost immediately became an important force in the most sophisticated circles of avant-garde intellectuals. Considered now to be a work of art, the design was originally chosen because it was the least expensive proposal.

This work of pure engineering strikes laymen and engineers alike as something radically new and prototypical of the twentieth century. It’s designer, Robert Maillart, created in the wilderness a bridge of such extraordinary beauty that its materiel, reinforced concrete, became the medium for a legitimate style in its own right.