With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

A good industrial designer understands the capabilities and limitations of the human body in manipulating physical objects, and of the human mind in comprehending mechanical models. A camera designer, for example, shapes her product to fit the human hand. She places buttons such that they can be manipulated with index fingers while the camera rests on the thumbs, and weights the buttons so they can be easily pressed in this position, but won’t trigger on accident. Just as importantly, she designs an understandable mapping from physical features to functions—pressing a button snaps a picture, pulling a lever advances the film, opening a door reveals the film, opening another door reveals the battery.

When the software designer defines the interactive aspects of her program, when she places these pseudo-mechanical affordances and describes their behavior, she is doing a virtual form of industrial design. Whether she realizes it or not. #The software designer can thus approach her art as a fusion of graphic design and industrial design. Now, let’s consider how a user approaches software, and more importantly, why.

For the layman to build their own Folk Interfaces, jigs to wield the media they care about, we must offer simple primitives. A designer in Blender thinks in terms of lighting, camera movements, and materials. An editor in Premiere, in sequences, transitions, titles, and colors. Critically, this is different from automating existing patterns, e.g. making it easy to create a website, simulate the visuals of film photography, or 3D-scan one's room. Instead, it's about building a playground in which those novel computational artifacts can be tinkered with and composed, via a grammar native to their own domain, to produce the fruits of the users' own vision. The goal of the computational tool-maker then is not to teach the layman about recursion, abstraction, or composition, but to provide meaningful primitives (i.e. a system) with which the user can do real work. End-user programming is a red herring: We need to focus on materiality, what some disparage as mere "side effects." The goal is to enable others to feel the agency and power that comes when the world ceases to be immutable.

I hope this mode can paint the picture of software, not as a teleological instrument careening towards automation and ease, but as a medium for intimacy with the matter of our time (images, audio, video), yielding a sense of agency with what, to most, feels like an indelible substrate.

Games felt like they were about sparkles and tension. Great app UX is about minimalism and simplicity. Fortunately, I found Raph Koster, the author of A Theory of Fun. Raph is known as a “Game Grammarian” and deeply deconstructs how games are made.

Another more modern example is this landing page for PayPal. Notice how the page clearly invites you to choose. Are you a “Personal” user or a “Business” user? As you mouse over each section, the story unfolds, expanding your choices, offering you things you can easily understand and identify with. Each branch has a clear call to action. This is a beautiful story telling sequence that pulls you in and gets you to become an active part of the on-boarding process.

There are clearly 3 distinct versions of jumping going on here: Initial jump. Simple button pressLong jump. Long button pressLanding jump. Timed jump What’s so interesting here is that there is only one ‘thing’ you’re learning: jumping. But by stressing subtle aspects of how to jump, the game builds up variations of it. A basic jump gets you over things, a long jump can “open” and landing a jump can “attack”. A boring app designer like me would assume you’d need 3 different verbs/buttons for this but Super Mario does this with a single “Jump” action.

APPSEach feature is in isolation, how it is done usually has little relation to other features (other that using a style guide).GAMESBuild a game through a single, mechanic that grows in expressive power by adding modifiers like time, special keys, or timing.

APPSJust throw in a bunch of features into a pot.GAMESUnderstand everything is a journey. Work hard to make everything a closely connected arc of events that help the user create a narrative that matches the overall story.

APPSAssume users are at a constant skill level.GAMESUse hints constantly and patiently to move users to the next level.

APPSTend to offer users a large toolbox and let them figure out how to get started.GAMESHave a clear understanding of the journey and say “Start here first”.

The Mac took a very hardware driven concept, turning on your computer, and turned it into theater. Yes it had the boot sound, but it then showed a promise, a compromise of the final desktop and as it booted, ‘inflated’ that promise with the final working model. Why people loved the Mac is often misunderstood. I’d claim that it’s this dedication to taking people on a carefully crafted story, one which allowed users to craft a compatible narrative, that is at the heart of this devotion.

To win the level you must first cross the street. To cross the street requires that you move the frog. To move the frog requires that you understand joystick timing. Each of these sub levels have their own feedback considerations: Street: the cars movementFrog: How it moves, how far it jumps each timeJoystick: Direction and speed of movement (it’s quite slow actually) Games understand that each of these levels has their own set of feedback, motivation and learning that must take place. This level of deconstruction, in a 30 year old game no less, blew my mind. Games were complex! They really paid attention to detail. There was a lot here to understand.

The computer example here is desktop menus. “Selecting a menu item” is actually a fractal cascade of skills where you first start horizontally browsing the menu bar, with a click, you shift into a vertical mode but keep the same basic highlight approach. For hierarchical menus, you need to understand the graphic hint that there is something deeper and then navigate over to reveal and then select that menu. Anyone who has taught beginning computer users the menu system knows how hard it is to master hierarchical menus. It’s takes practice to find, reveal and track over to that menu. There is a fractal cascade of skills required.

Raph has a great quote in his book for this: “Fun is just another word for learning”. In order to have fun, you must learn. I find this inspiring as app design wants your users to learn but we’ve rarely appreciated this could be fun. Games understand that in order to learn you must start thinking in layers. Begin with a basic skill and slowly add more, getting better one layer at a time.