I saw this boarding pass in a recent episode of Fringe:

Even though the shot only lasted a second, I couldn’t help but notice such a lovely piece of design fiction, which was then doubly emphasised when the next person in line gave their much crappier-looking boarding pass to the homicidal-TSA-staffperson-of-the-week:

Both images: Fringe Files

(Yes, that crappy boarding pass really is there to make a statement about how readable and elegant the previous one is.)

Designers who work in film and television have a great opportunity to create an alternate, redesigned universe in which things work slightly differently, and the fact that Fringe is set in a gaggle of literally alternate universes, each with telltale differences in their everyday environments, makes this all the more delicious. Perhaps it’s design/science fiction squared.

However, it didn’t take me long to remember where I’d seen a boarding pass like this before:

Yep, it’s former Apple designer Louie Mantia’s contribution to Tyler Thompson’s excellent Boarding Pass/Fail exercise, which in turn is part of a recent trend in speculative, non-commissioned redesigns that can be found on the web. I’ll read this charitably as an homage, or a vision of a utopia where Louie Mantia really does design our boarding passes (which I much prefer to the current iTunes icon, which he also designed).

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Fringe has snuck in a boarding pass Easter egg. Back in Season One, Lost’s Oceanic Air made a sneaky appearance.

After Flight 815, I think Oceanic are due for a rebrand.

This entry was posted on 14 February 2012 at 12:04 pm, filed under Design. Any comments are at the permalink.

In his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote that

conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt — through the figuration of advanced technology — to think the impossible totality of the world system. [My emphasis.]

That is, our culture currently lacks the clarity to map the arcane workings of the global economy, but some of our tall stories still feature some wayward, fetishistic glimmers of that impulse. This figure of degradation reappears throughout Jameson’s work, always referring to an echo of a lost or unattainable whole: our critical sense of history, or an image of Utopia, etc.

Image: Wikipedia

Web designers have our own take on degradation. Graceful degradation is a way to deal with a world where different web browsers support web standards and sexy new technologies to uh, varying degrees <cough />. We design for the most complete experience, and build pages in a way that might preserve an echo of that experience in older or less capable browsers. In those dodgy browsers, the page gracefully degrades, and we exerience a still-worthwhile remnant of the lost whole — a bit like the way Jameson likes to see our radical impulses.

Enhancement

Meanwhile, a different design approach has emerged over the last few years, turning graceful degradation on its head: progressive enhancement is a way of designing outwards from the core content of the page. It keeps the design open to possibilities of sexiness in opportune contexts, rather than starting with a “whole” experience that must be compromised. While it might simply seem like another way to achieve graceful degradation’s exact goal from the opposite direction, this newer approach is qualitatively different: because progressive enhancement doesn’t presume a single, ideal state to fall back from, it deals much better with emerging landscapes and multiple contexts. For example, developing an integrated design that provides an equally “full” and contextually appropriate experience for both mobile and desktop browsers is easier with progressive enhancement.

So, if our degraded attempts at Utopia remind me of design’s graceful degradation, design should return the favour: what might progressive enhancement suggest in the world of culture and politics? As a designer who hungers for progressive political change, this question intrigues me. At the very least: rather than groping for a Lost Symbol of freedom, which would leave plenty of us with a “graceful”, less-than-ideal experience as a fallback position from a fetishised Utopia, progressive enhancement suggests instead that a well-designed experience of freedom can be built outwards from a core structure of meaning, in multiple ways, and in uneven terrain.

This entry was posted on 30 January 2012 at 12:47 pm, filed under Design, Politics. Any comments are at the permalink.