But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

As a developer or frontend designer, I find that I spend a lot of time exploring the new frameworks, or enhaced versions of tools, guidelines, performance utilities to monitor metrics, even tools that allow you to identify the key metrics to monitor… But at some point, things might get a bit intense when it comes to decission making. Since mine is not a technological background —I graduated at the College of Arts in Madrid—, sometimes I experience difficulties when it comes to find a reliable source, to base myself in order to carry on.

I think, that one of the reasons that made me step away from the artistic field, was the kind of ambiguety that surrounded the whole discourse of Arts, at some point it was just impossible to speak about quality standards. I mean, I still have a criteria whose source is not based on personal taste but on years of experience, that allowes me to know if I’m in front of a relevant piece of work or not, which doesn’t deny the existence of some personal preferences either. This is not the case when it comes to value the technical inner details of two different pieces of code. But opposed to the Arts discourse, programmers are more in the craftsmanship mindset, in the sense that knowledge is understood as what is produced by a community, and somehow its access is conditioned to being part of it. In contrast, artists and the creative crew are expected to be unique, to stand out from the rest.

Now that interface design is being relieved from the printed graphic design industry, and designers are also meant to deal with interaction design, user experience —and UX concerned with web performance— I think this is the place to be.

Anyway there is something, which I am very greatful of having developed during the years I spent in College. That is the exercise on image analysis that we were expected to perform when faced in front of any type of graphical device. During my last years in Arts College I became quite interested in the field of Anthropology of the Senses, and Phenomenology of Perception. Before these I had gone over, less enthusiastically I must say, Arnheim’s Psychology of Perception which is more focused on the tradition of Painting as developed in Occident, still this was an usefull reading that helped me understand how the visual order derived from the perspective system of representation, as it was implemented during the Renaissance, was just one among others.

Merleau-Ponty is probably the most known philosopher in the field of Phenomenology of Perception. His thinking supposed an early response to the dominant idea that conceptualized the notion of man as constituted of a body split of its higher cognitive entity. Instead Merleau-Ponty proposed a way in which the self is built in the world as a result of the stimuli perceived by interacting with the world throughout the whole spectrum of senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa in his book The Eyes of the Skin has more recently applied the same approach to propose an architechture that away from the predominance of the visual system could provide to the embodied ego a reconciliatory experience capable for integrating all the senses. The work of Pallasmaa specifically highlights the connections between vision and touch. The quality that enables human cognition to perceive tactile qualities through the visual channel is also refered as the hapticity of vision. This fact is of enormous relevance for the design of technological interfaces. As David Parisi, actively involved in the research of Emerging Media states, our visual and auditory channels are being highly saturated.

Marcel Proust in one of the seven volumes that compose In Search of Lost Time describes at some point his own room as being that only place in the whole world where he only needs to step inside, to see the lights turn on. I’m sorry to ruin those lines, but I cannot find the exact quote for evident reasons. The act that Proust is describing by removing any explanation which is not the strictly experienced as that being perceived, is the kind of gesture a person could develop, where the movement of the hand that is performed to reach the switch, that turns lights on, is so deeply interiorized in the subject, that it is not only perceived as an act of vision, but also an act that is launched and processed by the visual cortex. Maybe this helps us achieving an idea of how strong and powerfully subjects can adapt its own structural cognition to respond to changing environments.

When everything that called itself art was stricken with palsy, the photographer switched on his thousand-candle-power lamp and gradually the light-sensitive paper absorbed the darkness of a few everyday objects. He had discovered what could be done by a pure and sensitive flash of light – a light that was more important than all the constellations arranged for the eye’s pleasure.
Tristan Tzara, cited by Walter Benjamin

The point that I want to make involves the new announcement of Google’s Material Design as being notoriously insistent of guidelines that revolve on this aspect of the human perception. However, this isn’t explicitly included in the extense documentation that Google provides. The fact that this is an aspect that concerns new experiments on neuroscience I think that could make it worth of being mentioned.

From my point of view tracing Material Design as the logical evolution of Apple’s skewmorphism can be a bit missleading. Skewmorphism was logical in the context of an archaic period of an emerging visual system. Every emerging technology starts emulating other visual codes as cinema emulated theater in its origins. The difference here is that the proposal in question is coming from a company that gathers great amount of data regarding human machine communication patterns.

The other thing we must be aware of is that the internet has not implemented yet a defined model for marketing. Youtube and Facebook do not seem to have developed into most appropriate platforms to locate advertising campaigns. The only model that appears to be accepted is the new idea of content marketing. In this new context paying per click might not be the best policy. Another word that is starting to come around is neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers' sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

Maybe I’m getting the whole picture wrong, but there is a lack of information on the field of computer ergonomics and access to many papers is restricted. This contrast is quite evident when compared to the excesive material available to specific tools that frontend people can make use of. Hopefully restrictions will not be applied on the tools available, because of the very nature of open source communities, that have proved to be more efficient than other organization models that may come with associated policies or limitations.

As a developer it might be a more appealing chagellenge to get that feature to work, additionally it is undeniable that the Google Material guidelines, the Polymer library and these other new emerging proposals are something to be interested on. But maybe this whole discourse around responsiveness might involve us to respond tomorrow not just on the strictly technological aspects, but also on the social and cognitive models that might derive from the technologies we have contributed to provide support for.