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Above and below:
The Mac OS logo and an
animated presentation on
the benefits of interactivity
are among Alben+Faris's
computer-oriented projects.
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In the early days of American industrial design, it was a well-known fact that
certain automobile manufacturers introduced models that differed only
cosmetically from the previous year's. Half a century later, as the computer
industry replaces the automotive industry as this country's biggest economic
boon, issues of obsolescence are still relevant - only in a much different
way. "Now we have the opposite problem," says Jim Faris, copartner in the
Santa Cruz-based interaction design firm AlbenFaris. "Your product is no
bloody good after six months no matter what. It's absolutely assured -
guaranteed obsolescence."
Having worked on a number of high-visibility projects for such computer
heavies such as Apple, IBM, Netscape and Sega, Faris and his partner,
Lauralee Alben, should know. Moving their design firm from New York to
the more scenic Monterey Peninsula in 1990, the husband-and-wife team
refashioned their previously traditional graphics practice into an almost
entirely interactive studio. "We were looking for the easy California lifestyle,"
laughs Alben, "and instead we walked headlong into the craziness of Silicon
Valley." Alben, who trained as a designer at RISD and Basel, was more than
thrilled to leave the static world of conventional corporate identity - for years
she worked as senior designer and project director at Siegel & Gale - for the
promise of interaction design's motion graphics. "After all," she says,
"I originally went to Basel to study film animation." The child of a Hollywood
film editor and foley artist, Faris, who studied design at UC-Santa Cruz and
Basel and served as head of graphics at New York's Museum of Modern Art
during the 1980's, finds himself in somewhat familiar territory.
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Since they moved to Santa Cruz, AlbenFaris has had an extensive working
relationship with Apple with whom the firm has produced, among other
things, an award-winning instructional product called Making it Macintosh,
a CD-ROM manual designed to teach software developers how to build the
user-friendly Macintosh aesthetic into their applications. But the team's
best-known creation to date has been the incessantly cheerful Mac OS
smiley face, a distinctly multiperspectival view of the computer screen and
user merged into one instantly recognizable brand identity.
Alben and Faris are doing their best to insure that computers become more
human. Alben speaks of creating "out of the box experiences," or ways in
which that ubiquitous hunk of plastic perched on desks worldwide can be
transformed into something more personal. To this end, the firm has been
working for the past two years on creating customizable appearances for the
Mac OS desktop. The insistently rectilinear Mac environment can be trans-
formed according to whim. If nature is your pleasure, the formerly black-and-
white windows become outlined in nubbly twigs, the topmost menu
resembles bark and icons are superimposed on flat stones. If you're looking
for more visual excitement, the menu becomes a circus of squiggly lines,
bright colors, whoops and whistles. "It's a baby step," admits Alben, but one
she and Faris hopes points to a future of humanized technology.
"My belief is that design with a capital D is dead," concludes Faris. "Design is
moving into the world. It is a fundamental human activity, like cooking or
being in love." By creating software interfaces that can be co-created by the
users themselves, Alben and Faris are banking on the fact that inside every-
one is a designer just waiting to be born.
Reprinted with permission from I.D. Magazine.
Excerpted from the January/February 1997 issue, p.55.
Photo: Paul Schraub
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