Functionalism, aesthetics Was:(RE: I come to praise .join, not

[Alex Martelli]

"Carlos Ribeiro" <carribeiro at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.985052844.17993.python-list at python.org...
>
> I'm lost for words... This summarizes a lot of concerns that sometimes I
> find so hard to explain. Anyone who has actually *read* Christopher
> Alexander's books on design should know that the best solutions are the
> ones that take into account the inner sense of satisfaction of their end
> users. As Alexander puts it itself, it is a rewarding experience born out
> of the "completeness" of the solution. The best solutions also share
> another common trait: they look *and feel* good to the untrained eye.
> Beware of works that can only be appreciated by experts - they are way too
> trained to see the obvious.

Unfortunately, this does not generalize to fields in which the non-experts
lack a few thousand years of collective cultural adaptation.  In that case,
the superficial apperception of 'beauty' does need understanding of the
underlying technology to be grounded -- shared cultural background and
biology don't suffice.

Back when "Concorde" and "Jumbo" first appeared on the scene, for
example, non-experts found the former quite beautiful, the latter quite
plain.  Sure the sleek, fast-looking lines of Concorde were superior to
the goofy-looking fatness of Jumbo?

Unfortunately, this superficial perception had zero relevance for the
actual technical soundness of the designs.  A few decades later, we
can see with hindsight that Concorde was one of the costliest big
failures in airliner design, Jumbo the unqualified greatest success
ever in the same field.  The actual need was to carry huge masses
of humanity from A to B cheaply, NOT to wiz around a few upper
class poshies in half the time.

So why did the elitist design look better?  Perhaps because it's a
common subconscious mechanism to prefer the luxury good, even
when in actual fact one won't be able to take advantage of it, as
a wishful-thinking byproduct.  Remember that human beings are
quite prone to a few well-known systematic perception errors --
and it takes LOTS of training to teach one of us to stop making
them.  Thus, a design which happens to hit squarely on the button
one of those common perception errors may well be quite pleasing,
superficially, to the untrained masses -- only highly experienced
professionals really stand a chance to smell something fishy with
it.  Computers and peripherals without an on/off button ('software
will do it all' -- yeah, right, but what happens when due to a bug
you need to recycle power...?  unplug/replug the mains...?!) are
another example, closer to our field.

Buildings as such (and more generally dwelling-places) are old
enough that it's quite possible that we all share some basic
biological basis for sound judgment -- I'm not pronouncing
on that, but that's what Alexander is mostly writing about.

Other technologies don't share that characteristics, or may
even display nothing actually relevant to the end-user; I am
reminded of a huge brouhaha about a drug that happened
a few years ago here.  The color of the pills was changed from
vivid red to pale red (actually to reduce the amount of
artificial coloring after doubts were raised about it being
intrinsically harmful).  People were furious that the medicine
had been 'weakened' -- even though the actually active
chemicals in each pill were exactly the same as before!

We can endlessly discuss where computers and software
fit on this scale, but surely the example of pharmaceutics
does suffice to show conclusively that, with far too many
modern technologies, it's quite likely that what appears to
the untrained eye has *zero* relevance -- that, no matter
how ideologically unpleasant this may feel, we DO have to
rely on _expertise and training_ to be able to judge certain
issues.  Vox populi is NOT necessarily vox Dei -- not when
the underlying technology is too new (a few centuries) and/or
not reflected in immediately apperceivable traits.


> To summarize it: a  *technically* optimal solution for a problem is not
> always the *best* solution. If it does not look intuitively good for most
> users, its probably a bad solution.

So, you're arguing that the amount of artificial coloring should
have been kept high (who cares about giving users cancer, right?),
since that bright color was definitely what "looked intuitively
good for most users" as proved by the endless carping...?


> Its unfortunate that in many cases the non-expert user keeps quiet,
> assuming that whatever opinion the "master" haves, its going to be better
> than theirs - after all they are the so-called experts.

Ask the experts in any field whether untrained users keep too quiet,
or not enough, in their field, and you'll get a different opinion (of
course, self-serving conscious or unconscious biases are at work
as well!).


Alex