When I was an art major I learned about the concept of negative space. The space around your figure can be as important or more important than the figures themselves. If you’ve never heard of this, consider this simple example.
It’s only recently that I began to consider software and product design in terms of negative space. I’ve always been one to want to know something’s purpose. What’s it for? Tell me about the features? It never occurred to me that a brilliant design might mean leaving questions like these unanswered. By not telling a user a product’s purpose, a designer allows each user to identify its purpose so that unknown potential might be explored. So a product’s purpose need not be limited to its form but can be defined by space in which it exists.
Consider Twitter: what is it? A social network? A marketing tool? A forum for ritual communication? A search engine? A news aggregator? A tool of social justice and democracy? A creative writing medium perfectly suited to metafiction?
Yes, it’s all of these things but not because the creators told us so. They created a simple tool for micro-blogging which people didn’t seem to understand at first. The website was sparse with not a lot of guidance and very limited functionality. The buzz was that users should tell readers what they were doing from moment to moment but this was just what the tech-geeks wrote on their blogs. In practice, it was playground without any rules and it was in this lack of a singular purpose, which may have reduced Twitter to a fad, that so many varied purposes evolved.
I started writing this to introduce why I was recommending Evernote but I’ll leave this to the next post.
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