In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp described this more adaptive approach as “a multiple-loop system in which one enters into a conversation a continual and constructive information exchange.” Emphasis mine, as I think that’s a subtle yet powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can-and should-mutually influence each other. Companies have already produced “smart glass technology” that can automatically become opaque when a room’s occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an additional layer of privacy. Motion sensors can be paired with climate control systems to adjust a room’s temperature and ambient lighting as it fills with people. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. Recently, an emergent discipline called “ responsive architecture” has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. In short, our flexible design works well enough in the desktop-centric context for which it was designed, but isn’t optimized to extend far beyond that. And it’s not just the lower end of the resolution spectrum that’s affected: when viewing the design on a widescreen display, the images quickly grow to unwieldy sizes, crowding out the surrounding context. When viewed at viewport smaller than 800×600, the illustration behind the logo quickly becomes cropped, navigation text can wrap in an unseemly manner, and the images along the bottom become too compact to appear legible. The example design scales perfectly well as the browser window resizes, but stress points quickly appear at lower resolutions. Our layout, flexible though it is, doesn’t respond well to changes in resolution or viewport size.īut no design, fixed or fluid, scales seamlessly beyond the context for which it was originally intended. And to a certain extent, that’s true: flexible designs make no assumptions about a browser window’s width, and adapt beautifully to devices that have portrait and landscape modes. As a long-time proponent of non-fixed layouts, I’ve long felt they were more “future proof” simply because they were layout agnostic. I’ve built a simple page for a hypothetical magazine it’s a straightforward two-column layout built on a fluid grid, with not a few flexible images peppered throughout. But how can we-and our designs-adapt? A flexible foundation #section2 We can quarantine the mobile experience on separate subdomains, spaces distinct and separate from “the non-iPhone website.” But what’s next? An iPad website? An N90 website? Can we really continue to commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But as designers, I think we often take comfort in such explicit requirements, as they allow us to compartmentalize the problems before us. It’s an interesting phrase: At face value, of course, it speaks to mobile WebKit’s quality as a browser, as well as a powerful business case for thinking beyond the desktop. In recent years, I’ve been meeting with more companies that request “an iPhone website” as part of their project. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Inconsistent window widths, screen resolutions, user preferences, and our users’ installed fonts are but a few of the intangibles we negotiate when we publish our work, and over the years, we’ve become incredibly adept at doing so.īut the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Our work is defined by its transience, often refined or replaced within a year or two. Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. Creative decisions quite literally shape a physical space, defining the way in which people move through its confines for decades or even centuries. Each phase of the architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the last. 3 days of design, code, and content for web & UX designers & devs.Ī building’s foundation defines its footprint, which defines its frame, which shapes the facade.
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