The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Black, White and Read Online
Can Khoi Vinh save The New York Times?
By Derrick Koo
Although wildly different in functionality, the many experiments on nytimes.com share the same concept: to open up possibilities for using the site’s content in ways not previously thought possible.
“We’re not focused on designing the news,” Vinh says. “With a design eye, we’re trying to deliver that news with a maximum of elegance using a minimum of ornamentation. We’re trying to think bigger picture: what’s the whole platform experience?”
Born in Saigon in 1971, Vinh moved to Baltimore with his family at age three. As a teenager, he was interested in drawing and painting, and attended the Otis College of Arts and Design in Orange County, CA for a degree in communication design and illustration. He graduated in 1993. After several years working in traditional print design, he joined Rare Medium, a New York-based technology firm, as a web designer. When Rare folded its design department in 2001, a victim of the first dot-com bust, Vinh and four of his co-workers founded their own design studio.
Behavior Design, the name they chose for the studio, says it all. It is here that Vinh first made his name in the wider world of design. While other design firms struggled to keep up with design trends like the glassy Web 2.0 aesthetic, Behavior gained a reputation for fostering a different sort of design philosophy: one rooted not in visual trends but in human behavior and interaction. They redesigned the platforms behind The Onion’s, the National Geographic Channel’s and Uniliver’s websites. They launched an ad-campaign-within-an-ad-campaign for the HBO series True Blood, touting a fictional beverage for vampires. More recently, they have built several interactive museum installations for the MoMA’s special exhibits, including the acclaimed “Kirchner and the Berlin Street” exhibit of late 2008.
Growing from an apartment-run endeavor to a full-fledged professional studio, Behavior soon won wide industry recognition for its work, including honors from design organizations like the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the International Academy of Visual Arts and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
In 2006, after overseeing an exhaustive overhaul of nytimes.com’s platform, Tom Bodkin approached Vinh with a job offer to direct the new website platform. “It was a little hard to decide,” Vinh remembers now. “I thought, am I going to just leave after spending four years building this business?”
The offices of Behavior Design, located in the heart of the Garment District, resemble a hypermodern factory with rows and rows of flat-panel Macs instead of sewing machines and young wizards of interactive media instead of seamstresses. Christopher Fahey, who resembles a cleaner-cut version of Thom Yorke with a buzz cut and glasses as compact as Vinh’s are large, gives me a two-second tour before we move to a coffee shop around the corner.
Fahey co-founded Behavior Design with Vinh and also worked with him in the design department at Rare Medium. His ideas about interaction design go far beyond designing for journalism.
Build a spaceship out of Legos. Record an oral history in the StoryCorps booth at Grand Central Terminal. Edit the personal data on your Facebook profile. Click a button to converse with that digital character in the latest Grand Theft Auto video game. “Practically,” says Fahey, “you can design an object that can cause people to have experiences.”
Consider the Lego set, he continues: you, the user, buy a box of Legos, which contains a certain variety of pieces. You can follow the instructions to build the model depicted on the box, or disregard them and create your monstrosity. How you use the pieces is up to you; the Lego designers just provide the tools and make suggestions based on how they think you may want to use them.
“Empathy as a design skill is the critical talent that differentiates interaction design,” states Fahey, whose background, like Vinh’s, also lies in a peculiar combination of fine and technical arts (in his case, sculpture and video game design). “How do you put yourself into users’ shoes?” The greatest challenge on this front is that behind every design decision lies the ultimate question of interaction: “What if? At any point the user can change their mind. The designer just decides the number of possibilities.”
Fahey has grand ideas. He worked in the past, for example, on designing chat bots, the type that react to users’ conversational text input with realistically human responses. He says it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence technology like this progresses to the point where it’s indistinguishable from live human intelligence.
“The best designers are people who can imagine the future,” he says. To Fahey, studying the interactions between user and product goes beyond just commercial viability. Pinpointing the way we interact teaches us something about how we tick.
“The more we interact,” says Fahey, “the more we learn about the human condition.”
Huge cranes lie dormant in a haze of light drizzle, visible from across the street at Liz Danzico’s temporary office. This tiny room, eleven floors above the student gallery at the School of Visual Arts, is the genesis of a new MFA program in Interaction Design, one of the first interaction design MFA programs in the world.
The program was co-founded by Danzico and Steven Heller, chair of SVA’s graduate program in design and former art director at The New York Times for 33 years. A former writer, English teacher and magazine editor, Danzico has taught courses in information architecture and design at the New School University, Fashion Institute of Technology and Columbia University.