Sunday morning run

Ran around 3.7 miles in New Haven this morning.  It was a wet, humid sorta day, but with a nice, cool breeze.  I started out from my brother's place on Canner St., ran downtown on Orange St., and then came back up on Whitney Ave.  It's been a while; the run was more difficult than expected - or rather, I felt like I had run farther than actually had.  I thought it was about 5 miles.

Here's the map:

Thursday evening run/walk

Went for my first run in a while on Thursday.  This post is backdated from Sunday morning.  Made it from Richdale down to JFK Park, approximiately 1.7 miles, booking a bit more than I should have, and ended up moseying my way back home after stopping in the park.  It was a fairly warm day.

Here's the map.  The running bit stopped a smidge before that 2 mile marker, at the corner there in the park:

Interactive and Visual Design is like Music.

Music has a fundamental concept of tension and release.  This is the phenomenon where, as a song progresses, the composer takes you on both macro and micro journeys of increased tension, culminating in some sort of resolution back to the tonic of a key.  On a micro scale, this happens repeatedly every time a bass player returns to C from G, for instance, or every time they fall through the circle of fourths on some sort of 4-7-3-6-2-5-1.  On a macro level, a soloist may refuse to resolve a phrase for some number of bars, repeatedly increasing tension until it's finally released.

Both visual and interactive design have similar concepts, but it usually takes place over the course of months or years.

In interactive design, there is a tendency for products and interfaces to accumulate features over the course of multiple versions as companies compete with each other to win customers.  These features, if not attended to carefully, tend to increase the complexity and decrease the usability of the interface or device in question.  The process of increasing complexity and decreasing usability, in this case, I'll refer to as tension.  Eventually, tension reaches a critical mass where it can't be maintained anymore, and designers go on a crusade (supported by consumer desires) to release the tension and return to a tonic, comfortable, usable design.  This may mean shedding features.  It may also mean reevaluating organically created interfaces that evolved over multiple iterations, but in general, it means releasing multiple years of built up tension in favor of something that feels more centered and solid.

I think a similar phenomenon exists in visual design as it relates to branding, though perhaps to a lesser, and more carefully controlled extent.  An entity with a well established brand will iterate on that brand to keep it fresh.  In the course of these iterations, the brand will evolve more visually interesting, differentiating, or eye catching idiosyncrasies.  These idiosyncrasies and visual tensions will build up until the visual designer feels they're starting to overwhelm the original, tonic, centered concept for the brand, in which case they will simplify the design and resolve it back to something simple and clean.

I say that this phenomenon exists to a lesser or more carefully controlled extent in visual design because I think visual design culture has put a greater emphasis on simplicity and clarity of message than interaction design.  Interaction design contends with features which forcibly increase complexity and reduce clarity; visual design has lower barriers to re-evaluation and iteration, and is thus more flexible.

In all of these cases, the composer or designer is utilizing complexity, tension, and/or differentiation in order to engage their audience and maintain attention and interest.  All of these tools have the side effect of increasing the audience's perceived need for relaxation and simplicity (a pleasant phrase I just borrowed from Wikipedia's definition of musical tension), which must be satisfied, eventually, lest the audience become frustrated and turn their attentions elsewhere.  Talent in these disciplines often equates to the ability to extend this tension for protracted periods of time without the audience consciously perceiving the effort, except, perhaps, on reflection or meta-attentiveness.

It seems likely that this argument could be extended to fiction and fine art in one way or another.