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
“Steve approached me in 2006 to design this program,” says Danzico, whose tightly wound curls and thick, dark-rimmed glasses accentuate the thoughtful precision of her speech. Since that initial meeting, she has spent two years designing the curriculum and recruiting the faculty for a program which has little precedent, but which has attracted more applicants than any new program in SVA’s history.
Danzico knows how important her field is to the world of journalism. “We have to think of new ways to deliver news,” she says, and this particular issue is a prominent one in her program. Her 28-member faculty includes Vinh and Fahey, who will teach first-semester courses in the fundamental theory of interaction design; Paul Ford, an editor at Harper’s Magazine; Steve Duenes, graphics director of The New York Times; Alex Wright, the Times’ director of user experience research; and Jeffrey Zeldman, founding editor-in-chief of A List Apart, one of the first and most influential web design publications.
Interaction design represents a new way of thinking about communications. Danzico cites Vinh’s “conversation” theory, or the idea that new media are becoming increasingly dialectical in nature. She takes a broad view of the history behind this evolution, starting not in the 1980s—the advent of the consumer internet—but in the age of antiquity.
“In the age of pre-literacy,” she says, “we communicated through performance—epic poems like the Iliad, songs, theatre—these were a low-fidelity way of communicating.” These performances were interactive: the teller was able to alter the story according to the audience’s reactions. Re-tellings would alter the story bit by bit, like a generations-long game of telephone. Only in this game, the end result could be a Homeric masterpiece.
Twentieth Century media like print, film and audio, on the other hand, are higher fidelity forms of communication. But they’re less fluid; once published or recorded, they become immutable. An oral epic poem might change drastically over time; the text of a book does not.
“The higher the fidelity, the less interaction,” explains Danzico, “and the more removed the content gets from the user.” But, she says, new media has brought back the element of interaction. Reporters on nytimes.com, for example, can foster discussion and debate through their blogs. These blogs often feature serialized stories that undergo several rounds of reader-inspired reporting—Errol Morris’ historical investigations, for example, or the City Room’s coverage of local news, for which reader discussion fills in the range of perspectives.
“Now, we’re not designing an artifact,” Danzico says, “but designing to shape conversations.”
She concludes: “The challenges in understanding the landscape of what we’re designing for are only going to get broader.” As interactive media become more complex, designers must figure out better ways to facilitate interactions.
The irony of interaction design is that despite its huge ideas, its ultimate goal is to be undetectable. The best design feels so natural that it seems second-nature. And this, says Danzico, is a fundamental principle of interaction design: to achieve a sublime state of “statuesque transparency.”
The Eighth Avenue headquarters of The New York Times are a fitting place to be pondering such heady concepts. The elevators, with their buttonless interfaces, operate with automated efficiency. Their doors open with a chime, and sunlight pours in. The slats covering the floor-to-ceiling windows rotate with the sun to ensure maximum exposure to outdoor sunlight. Cubical divisions are artfully placed, flowing in curves rather than terminating in right angles. The offices of managers like Khoi Vinh are walled in glass. Everything in this environment is designed to emphasize transparency, minimalist aesthetics and ease of use. The building itself is a triumph of interaction design.
Will the institution housed in this futuristic building become a savior of its craft? The revenue reported this April indicate that intense challenges lie ahead. And not all the experiments the paper is carrying out have been successful: a new software program called the Times Reader, which digitally replicates the newspaper as designed for print, has backfired in the design community. Outspoken critics such as Jeff Jarvis (the tech-oriented Guardian columnist and director of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism) have decried the Times Reader as “wrongheaded” and “backwards” for clinging to the newspaper’s dying past.
But if the Times fails in its efforts to keep up with technology, it won’t be for lack of trying. Indeed, the titans of the print era—people like Tom Bodkin and Steven Heller—have a distinct awareness that the future of the Times depends on successfully harnessing interactive media.
“Interaction is probably the most significant new communications medium and tool that we have,” says Heller, the former Times art director, now a design consultant for the newspaper. Interactive media differ from print, he says, because “you’re dealing in a virtual space. You’re dealing in something that you can see one minute and not the other, whereas print is there forever.”
This doesn’t mean interaction designers must forget decades of graphic design theory. “The fundamental lingua franca isn’t going to change,” he says. But with new kinds of media, the approach to design “may change insofar as we consciously embrace different kinds of content, what we do with that, and how we process it in our heads.” Our websites already integrate words, pictures, audio, video and discussion. What other kinds of content will be possible in the future?
“I don’t know whether I can even answer that question,” Heller states. “I’m totally a novice at this. I would not even be able to touch the material here—but I appreciate the need for the material.” Heller’s job concerns the “here and now,” he says. It’s Vinh’s job to design for the future.
The future is in the user, Vinh tells me as we sit in his small, aquarium-like office on the Times building’s seventh floor. Sure, content is king in journalism, but content alone won’t retain users. They must have reasons to use it.
Sounding equal parts confident and hopeful, Vinh declares: “We have the knowledge to figure out how to cater to the user.” ♦