It was just the other day when we looked at coming up with a new set of Icons for our in-room entertainment Graphic User Interface that it occurred to us that while the various technology devices that anchor our lives these days allow us to communicate ever more visually, our collective reference points are more and more fragmented. From the old Egyptians and their hieroglyphs to today’s Apps, mankind has always sought to use pictorial descriptions to communicate. When you study for your drivers licence, you have to memorise the look and meaning of as many road signs as possible in order to pass the test. In order to make it easier, the road authorities around the world came up with pictorial representations of the various signs which over the years were adopted more or less universally in the developed world. But while learning the meaning of these signs came with a clear incentive – i.e. learn them or don’t drive – the visual identifiers and pictorials that guide so many other things in life evolved much more haphazardly.
The windows approach to computing was probably a major milestone for making icons a centre piece of way finding in our daily lives. In the early days of the desktop computing age, these icons were necessarily simple, but not only because of the graphic restrictions, but because of the need for a simple conduit into a complex world that would be understood by the most technically inept person. The artist who created the icons for the original Mac desktop and applications believed that icons should work like traffic signs and convey information without distracting the user. So born was the ‘folder’ icon with the little stub poking out that looked exactly like the ones stacked in everyone’s office desk, alongside the ‘recycle bin’ that looked like Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, the pair of scissors that signaled that you were about to ‘cut’ something and a paperclip that meant you were ‘attaching’ a document. Then, when the internet came of age, the depiction of a neat little house with a chimney wasn’t an advertisement for a furniture shop anymore, but the icon that signified the homepage of an internet site. All of this is of course common sense and has largely managed to align most of us along one common path of iconography that enables us to recognise that a shopping cart icon means “check out” a pad lock means “security” and an umbrella has something to do with the weather.
However, what happens when the corresponding physical object has no longer any distinguishing features that are so important for being both instantly identifiable and minimally distracting? Or what if the activity it is meant to represent becomes too complex for a clear pictorial representation? A house is a house is a house is a home – ok. But take out your mobile phone and look at the symbols on the buttons for making a call and ending a call. It’s the old fashioned banana-shaped head set that was part of the home phone before it was replaced with a very different looking hands free set or a mobile phone. Or try saving something on your computer and you’ll see that this action to this date is symbolized by a floppy disc, something that joined the technology scrap heap more than 15 years ago as other portable storage options such as CD-ROM took over.
But it was when I was sitting with my graphics team to ponder a new set of icons for the User Interface of our in-room entertainment system that it really hit me how little the pictorial representation of our world has changed in the face of the relentless evolution of our communications world. How better to represent TV channels than a box with the old rabbit ears on top? And nothing says “movie” better and clearer than the old 35mm movie reel, even though today’s box offices smashes are more likely a combination of digital video and CGI. Music channels are much better represented by a full blown stereo headset rather than the now more prevalent micro earpieces. And what says better “you’ve got mail” than a good old fashioned letter envelope? It will be interesting to see if these ‘old’ pictorials finally disappear simply because a new generation of users has no longer any memory of them ever being in existence. But what will replace them? The problem is that as the physical part of human interaction and communication gets more complex, so by necessity does the iconography. What was once a clearly defined activity, such as “I watch TV”, has morphed into “I Skype my friend on my connected TV”. “I read the news in the paper” is now more likely to be “I read the news on my smart phone”. The question is at what point finding a universal visual vocabulary for ever complex activities becomes futile. Some icons will move into the abstract space where the meaning is instilled through what is commonly known as branding. We can already see this with Facebook, Skype and Twitter, whose logos have effectively turned into icons describing an activity.
But what about the so-called ‘way finding’ icons? At the risk of sounding a little nostalgic, my bet is that while newspapers may go completely digital and TV’s become multifunctional communication devices, their original form and purpose will live on in the world of icons for generations to come. And as for our User interface? In the end we decided to do a combo of words and icons. Nothing beats a good compromise.
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