Chronicles of Digital Evolution

Thanks to Andy McMillan and to everyone Build for having me here. I also want to start my talk today by saying thank you to Ethan Marcotte, who’s speaking today, for leading the charge on Responsive Web Design. There aren’t a lot of things that come along that really change the game for how you think about what you do, but, for me, Responsive Web Design was one of those things.Before I started working on the web, I worked as a print designer. If you’re designing a book, there’s only one page size and everything comes from that. You spec the type, define the baseline grid, and shape the page. The format, in many ways, forms the design.

A responsive design for the web, however, is shaped by its context. It adapts to how you’re viewing it. Rather than assuming a fixed form, it embraces fluidity. It uses one code base to serve many different situations. It does this elegantly, even beautifully. The practice of Responsive Web Design is shaped by its context as well. While it exists as an invention, it also exists as a critique. It critiques fixed-grid layouts, for example, since they cannot scale responsively — in fact, it critiques fixed presentation methods of all sorts.

Instead of seeking a lowest common denominator for a site’s presentation, or fragmenting it across several subdomains, Responsive Web Design says you can have it all: presentation needn’t be singular, and fragmentation needn’t be necessary. A site’s design can be both variable and total. This is a really big deal. It seems simple when Ethan describes it, but it’s a fundamental shift in thinking about how things for the web are made.

Ethan’s piece on A List Apart started with a quote from John Allsopp’s “A Dao of Web Design” about ebb and flow. In that article, Allsopp adapts a number of Taoist teachings into guiding principles for the web. Emptiness is not on Allsopp’s list, but he might have included it. Here’s what the Dao teaches about emptiness:

We pierce doors and windows to make a house; and it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11)

A house is the space it contains and the space it releases. Its windows frame space through absence. A house interacts with its environment through the portions that are either removed or never built. As much as a house is defined by its building, the Dao says, it is also defined by its unbuilding.A house is the space it contains and the space it releases. Its windows frame space through absence. A house interacts with its environment through the portions that are either removed or never built. As much as a house is defined by its building, the Dao says, it is also defined by its unbuilding.

This is a talk about unbuilding

When we think about building, we think about a lot of things. For example, we think about what we can build, and that takes knowledge. So building is about learning, building skills, building with those skills. But in order to learn, we must also take the world apart a bit, unravel it, examine it up close. In other words, we have to unbuild it.
To build anything revolutionary, we’ve got to be innovative. We’ve got to invent new strategies, new approaches, new tools. So building is about inventing, making new, even surprising our competition. But in order to invent, we must also shake things up, disrupt our normal process, reorganize. Again: unbuilding.

And building is undoubtedly about growth — making something bigger. Maybe scaling by a little or a lot, but bringing things to the next level. And doing that involves — you guessed it — unbuilding: disseminating your point of view, dispensing your product, diversifying your capital, all that.

Learning and unraveling, inventing and disrupting, scaling and disseminating — you can’t have one without the other. If building is the call, unbuilding is the response. They are two sides of the same coin, each constituting the other. Far from opposite of building, unbuilding offers an opportunity to see what it means to build from a fresh perspective.
Let’s start by giving a little more depth to these concepts — here’s building on the left and unbuilding on the right.

While building is planned, following a step-by-step path, unbuilding is reflexive. At last year’s Build, Wilson Miner reminded us of the Marshall McLuhan quote “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” — that’s a reflexive thought, it works in a circular way. Building looks forward toward progress while unbuilding evaluates and learns by looking back. Building involves skills and know-how; unbuilding requires inquiry and investigation. When we build we follow patterns; when we unbuild, we often find them. Building involves setting expectations, while the objective of unbuilding is often discovery. In building we place things where they’re supposed to go; in unbuilding we often try to misplace or creatively recombine them. When we build we build with intention; when we unbuild, we embrace chance. Building is a logical process; because of the element of surprise and wonder, unbuilding can often be an emotional process.

Earlier I said that while Responsive Web Design functioned as a practice, it also functioned as a critique of the practices that came before it and the culture that surrounded it. Art often functions this way too, and I want to take a look at some artworks today and see how we might learn from how they work.

This is Marcel Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” from 1913. Like Ethan’s idea of Responsive Web Design, Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” hugely influenced the art that came after it — it is widely regarded as Duchamp’s first readymade, kicking off almost a century of appropriation in the art world. But, like Responsive Web Design, the Bicycle Wheel is also a critique of the culture that surrounded it — specifically the culture of cycling and mass production, which by 1913 was about a century old.
So it’s reasonable to stop and ask at this point: How did Duchamp create this totally new approach to art? What strategies is he using here? If we were seeking this kind of insightfulness in our work, how might we systematically approach it?

We’ve already talked about appropriation — he’s clearly doing that — unbuilding our concept of what is original. Duchamp also said reflexively that “instead of choosing his objects, his objects chose him” and this injects a bit of chance into the imperative of artistic choice. I’ve talked a bit about how “Bicycle Wheel” negates the conditions that surround it — about bicycles and about art-making — and it does so through a kind of removal of the artist himself. We have an expectation about the role of the artist, so the work seems incomplete — even its author can’t explain what it means. This failure — to be meaningful in a comfortable way, to even to qualify as something we understand as art — this is built in to the Bicycle Wheel’s efforts at unbuilding its context.

So, I’ve named a few strategies:

and to these we could add even more:

Strategies like speculation: What will things look like in the future? Repetition: What do 100 of them mean? What about 1 million? Comedy: What does it mean if I laugh at this?
As we look at all these strategies that come out of unbuilding, I want to zoom in on four of them today — negation, removal, reversal, and incompleteness — and see how they function with examples in art, on the web, and elsewhere. A disclaimer: some of these strategies are complementary — a particular reversal might also be a negation of some kind, for example. My goal here isn’t to create rigid categories; I want to spark new ideas about how we work.