Some history (I take awhile getting here but I promise it's worth it). A long, long time ago I was in film school. Now most film schools go down one of two tracks. Either a film school values 'narrative' filmmaking or 'experimental' filmmaking. Rarely does one program promote or value them equally and they often go in phases with a focus on one or the other over time. During my sojourn in film school I was in a narrative mode while the school was clearly in an experimental mode. Your knowledge and awareness of things should be different if you're in one camp or the other but then there's also a baseline level of cultural knowledge that you need to possess to be successful.
One of my professors was helping all of us make film titles one day when he noticed a shirt a fellow student was wearing that was black and had 'The Brady Bunch' printed on the front with the little three by three grid of everyone like in the opening credits of the show. He looked at the shirt and goes, "The Brady Bunch? What's that?" While my professor was a talented filmmaker I found this a bit shocking. He was in a field and a role where cultural knowledge like this was critical--if you were teaching narrative film. As one would expect, those of us committed to story telling often felt like second class citizens.
Later in life when I was pondering work in the world of advertising this concept was reintroduced to me when one of creative producers and mentor at an agency was asking me what types of things I wanted to advertise and then asked about my interests. She prefaced her questions by talking about how important understanding the market and culture of products was critical in terms of understanding how to create compelling advertising and stories that would resonate with that audience. Saying for example, "It would be hard for someone to sell beer in this country if they didn't have a love and an appreciation for sports."
Flash forward a yet a few more years and I found myself a motion graphic designer for broadcast. In the mid-90's you were at a crossroads if you did this for a buck. Basically you could worship at the altar of SGI or Quantel or you could throw in your lot with the upstart in the space, Apple. Now both SGI and Quantel survived but Apple entering this market in the mid-90's was truly disruptive, and the professional design market kept Apple alive during the dark years of the mid to late 90s.
Programs like After Effects, Electric Image and Commotion (Developed by Microsoft's Forest Key along with Industrial Light and Magic Special Effects Director Scott Squires) truly democratized and put powerful tools and capabilities in that hands of eager designers for a fraction of the costs that typical rigs cost in those days. Entire segments of the business folded and new ones emerged in their place because of this. As someone that went down the Apple road during this time (not that I would have been interested but viable professional level tools for the Windows platform were just emerging at this time) I was often asked why I used a Mac when PC were so much more economical and eventually much faster.
My opinion was the same as many other designers of the day and I'll paraphrase an influential designer from that time, Tim Sassoon, who basically said. "PCs are just fine, but in a way computers are like cars and the Macintosh is like driving a fine automobile. I know it's not as fast and I know it's perhaps more expensive but I make my living doing this for hours a day and I ENJOY my experience better using this hardware and I find I'm more productive."
However as I pecked away merrily on my Mac creating motion graphics and working with our teams that designed Web pages, elaborate PowerPoint (stop laughing) and interactive applications using Director and Flash I noticed that more and more of my design peers were using PC's. When I asked one of them why he said, "It's simple, it's what my customers use and I need to see what they see and how things will work."
Now in my world of motion graphics this was simply not a big deal. But in the world of Web design and interaction design things slowly and surely transitioned to the PC and Windows platform. In fact a majority of revenues for design tools firms come from the PC platform and I suspect the reason that is because designers realized they often had to design for and with the platform that a majority of their customers would be experience their creations on.
But it's fairly hard to go to a design or a development conference today without seeing a large swath of glowing Apple logos in the room. The reason for this is simple. Pro designers and developer value hardware differently than many consumers do, they value the high performance engine and hardware. While their are a multitude of high-end computing options available in the world of PCs (I'm tapping this blog post on a slab of Sony designed carbon fiber laptop that's faster than most desktops and weighs about 3 pounds and change) we have to acknowledge that for many designers that live in the world of print and the Web that intel-based Apple hardware has no peer right now. We also have to acknowledge that many professional developers, at least in the Web space, are doing the same thing. The promise of the Web as the the 'new' platform fuels this. This is shortsighted. Here's why.
Technology and tools for application design and Web design in general have always been about really making it easier for the designer or the developer. Mantras along the lines of 'you've been doing it this way for years' or 'write once and run everywhere' fuel a fictional pursuit that this is A.) possible and B.) that it actually creates an optimized experience for users. As marketing, or rather advertising, continues to be a part of the equation of how we experience software and services what I suspect we will see is a future pursuit to optimize the experience a consumer, user, customer has across different different digital mediums. This doesn't mean standards based Web sites will go away, rather it means that they will be one channel in a multitude of experiences with a brand, product or consumer service that we create. It also means that wrapping up solution optimized for one channel, the Web, and running it on the desktop or on a mobile device will not deliver the value that's probably required to make advertising supported scenarios viable in the future.
So what does this have to do with designers and virtualization? Namely, it let's designers work in platforms and with hardware they are comfortable with and still target and experience the platforms and channels that their users are going to interact with, often on the same piece of hardware used for content, asset creation or development.
This puts us closer to our target users but gives us the flexibility to experience our work as our users will. In fact, it probably obligates us to do this since it's really never been easier to do. At least on an Apple computer that runs virtualization software like Bootcamp, Parallels or VMWare's fusion.
This will increase the flexibility that designers have with tools they can use and let them collaborate more effectively and productively with developers and other partners that may work on different platforms. I suspect in the future that we'll select our operating systems and platforms much differently than we do today because virtualization will let us seamlessly run just about whatever applications on whatever platforms that we choose to.
Virtualization and it's promise won't just be confined to designers and developers however. It's like to also have a profound effect in how we deploy and support applications and platforms in the data-center and those firms that create services and applications that rely on the client and the network will have a multitude of new opportunities to optimize their businesses.
Based on the success of VM Ware's IPO it's apparent that other folks see this as well. But it does introduce an obligation for us as designers. Much like we use design research and ethnography to get into the mind of a customer we'll use virtualization to accomplish the same in the implementation of these experiences.
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