[ed. See also: UI, UX Who Does What? A Designer's Guide to the Tech Industry.]
“I have a weird question for you,” I stammered, sitting in a hotel room across from Matias Duarte and Jon Wiley, the Google design leads for Android and Search, respectively. As a reporter, you tend to ask a lot of stupid sounding questions, and it’s generally no big deal. But I was about to ask an extremely stupid sounding question--the type of question that, just by breathing it into the air, might out me as actually stupid, tainting every future conversation we’d have to come.
“What is Google?”
Yes, It's A Lot Of Services
The question may have been stupid, yes, but it was apropos. Google had just announced a new initiative called Material Design that promised to unify all Google products (and even third-party Android apps) under a common UX tongue. Google seemed to be morphing into something, but what?
With Material Design, Google has become a second reality inside touch-screen devices--complete with its own rules of logic and physics--and if Google has its way, it will eventually break free of touch screens to quite literally reshape the world around us.
“When you make things, you inherit thousands of years of expertise. But software design is just getting started,” Wiley had explained earlier. “We took a step back. We looked at all of the software and asked, what is this made of?”
A day before, as Google revealed its big plan at its annual I/O conference, it was overwhelming to conceptualize what this blob of digital services had become. Was Google a search bar that lived in a laptop web browser? Was Google a dashboard for your car? Was Google the Android tablet, being used to control an Android TV game? Was Google the system of white note cards, being sent from an Android phone to an Android Wear smartwatch? Was Google a magic blue button that lived on these cards, making anything possible with a tap?
In reality, all of these notions of Google are true. It's a series of services that have become our digital infrastructure. And in the very near future, Google will exist, not as something you need to understand as "Chrome" or "Android," but as a conduit of information that's on just the right screen at just the right time. When you check your watch at the train station, you'll see when your next train is arriving. But when you check that same watch at work, you'll see the most important email from your boss. That watch will unlock your computer--no need to use a password--and your email will be waiting. Walk away mid-response, no problem. Your phone has the email waiting on its screen, cursor blinking mid-sentence, as you walk to your meeting.
Luckily it's not all work. After five, on your ride home, every one of these screens will be dedicated to new tasks: picking up your kids, making your dinner, and showing you Game of Thrones reruns.
And Google is grounding all of these infrastructural services through a new approach called Material Design, which will be introduced inside their upcoming mobile OS, Android L. It's an impressive, underlying logic to Google's interface across all devices that I believe will not just unify their services across the digital world, but bring them into our analog world, too.
“I have a weird question for you,” I stammered, sitting in a hotel room across from Matias Duarte and Jon Wiley, the Google design leads for Android and Search, respectively. As a reporter, you tend to ask a lot of stupid sounding questions, and it’s generally no big deal. But I was about to ask an extremely stupid sounding question--the type of question that, just by breathing it into the air, might out me as actually stupid, tainting every future conversation we’d have to come.
“What is Google?”
Yes, It's A Lot Of Services
The question may have been stupid, yes, but it was apropos. Google had just announced a new initiative called Material Design that promised to unify all Google products (and even third-party Android apps) under a common UX tongue. Google seemed to be morphing into something, but what?
With Material Design, Google has become a second reality inside touch-screen devices--complete with its own rules of logic and physics--and if Google has its way, it will eventually break free of touch screens to quite literally reshape the world around us.
“When you make things, you inherit thousands of years of expertise. But software design is just getting started,” Wiley had explained earlier. “We took a step back. We looked at all of the software and asked, what is this made of?”A day before, as Google revealed its big plan at its annual I/O conference, it was overwhelming to conceptualize what this blob of digital services had become. Was Google a search bar that lived in a laptop web browser? Was Google a dashboard for your car? Was Google the Android tablet, being used to control an Android TV game? Was Google the system of white note cards, being sent from an Android phone to an Android Wear smartwatch? Was Google a magic blue button that lived on these cards, making anything possible with a tap?
In reality, all of these notions of Google are true. It's a series of services that have become our digital infrastructure. And in the very near future, Google will exist, not as something you need to understand as "Chrome" or "Android," but as a conduit of information that's on just the right screen at just the right time. When you check your watch at the train station, you'll see when your next train is arriving. But when you check that same watch at work, you'll see the most important email from your boss. That watch will unlock your computer--no need to use a password--and your email will be waiting. Walk away mid-response, no problem. Your phone has the email waiting on its screen, cursor blinking mid-sentence, as you walk to your meeting.
Luckily it's not all work. After five, on your ride home, every one of these screens will be dedicated to new tasks: picking up your kids, making your dinner, and showing you Game of Thrones reruns.
And Google is grounding all of these infrastructural services through a new approach called Material Design, which will be introduced inside their upcoming mobile OS, Android L. It's an impressive, underlying logic to Google's interface across all devices that I believe will not just unify their services across the digital world, but bring them into our analog world, too.
by Mark Wilson, Co.Design | Read more:
Image: Business Insider
