Cargo Cults of Professional Web Design
One thing I truely love about the World Wide Web is how it remains a mystery to most people despite its popularity and rising ubiquity. The Web permeates our lives like few technologies – it’s up there with language, writing, knives and forks. That is to say that the Web is a current existence staple for the developed world.
Cargo Cults come out of Black Boxes
Cargo cults are a crazy cultural mish-mash that come out of situations where the environment isn’t fully understood or explained. These are situations where the environment throws people a black box solution without explaining the rationale.
During World War 2 in the Pacific theatre of operations the United States put strategic bases on the Vanuatu island group… coincidentally the islanders had, under French and English colonisation, developed a belief that an age of abundance would come to pass… and they believed in the words of a man called “John Frum”.
The Americans were generous, affluent and life vastly improved for local people. Imagine their rationale when confronted with a societal change where men wearing headphones tapped morse code that apparently caused giant planes to parachute crates of cargo – food, clothing, shelter and weapons.
The war ended and the Americans left Vanuatu… and the cargo cult followed the path of emulation in the hope the Gods would send more cargo from the sky. They might have looked funny in their mock rituals but that’s not so far from how a lot of web design is being done at the moment (circa 2010).
Black Boxes need to be Constantly Probed
Perhaps it’s because I have a science degree… I just feel that whenever a black box encroaches far enough into my world I have to pull out whatever tools are handy and start probing at the edges. As a rational person it’s difficult for me to accept, like the majority of Web users, that the Internet lives inside my computer.
Google’s What is a Browser? street quiz showed how little the average person understands the concepts behind the Web.
The flip side of that issue is that I hang out with like-minded geeks online and we get easily seduced into believing everybody out there is amazingly computer literate. We can fallibly design with expectations of what we consider basic level knowledge.
Web Design’s Black Boxes for Designers and Developers
Andy Clarke’s book Hardboiled Web Design questions progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. That’s a good thing… we need to constantly go back over the sacred cows, the entrenched dogmas of 2003 and the black boxes that we’ve taken for granted.
We need to ask why… and we need to ask why as often as it takes to understand our changing environment.
Because if you’re in the business of designing or building websites it’s imperative you don’t just do things because it’s what you were told was correct five long years ago – for example, before the iPhone changed our screen size expectations.
And we need to look at what cargo cults we’ve created and do our best as an industry to move that perception along. It’s so easy to be lazy and just keep making the same old websites we’ve always made… but is it the right way now? How many web professionals sit in their office wearing coconut headphones? Too many.
