Bauhaus Movement in interactive design

The Bauhaus Movement (1918-1933) originated in Germany and is a renaissance of pure and honest design concepts. Its influence has been applied to many fields of architecture, art, fonts, and product design. It highlights features and removes decoration. Bauhaus's aesthetic and belief come from industry and design and manufacturing. It is a design trend influenced by modern industrial civilization. Speaking of Bauhaus's philosophy, the University of Columbia's Walter Gropius Watter Gropius believes that the goal of Bauhaus is to demonstrate group cooperation without losing personality.

It aims to demonstrate how to maintain identity in diversity and achieve this through form concepts related to the times. This behavior method is revolutionary.

The concept of Bauhaus is described in two sentences: the form follows the function to remove interference and decoration. Rahul Sen of johnnyholland believes that a Bauhaus revolution is underway in the field of interactive design.

To understand this concept, let's take a look at a counterexample.

This is a design drawing of a media player. It features imitation of the real world. The idea is that the more similar the design of the virtual world and the real world, the easier it is to get started and the more user-friendly it is. To some extent, this makes sense, but over-emphasizing similarity will lead to poor design, because the way the virtual world works is different from the real world after all. Imitation may bring surprising interfaces, but not necessarily good operations. For example, an application may be like this.

This kind of UI is called the Skeumorphic interface, which Apple currently tends to design (such as iBooks and iCal)

Skeumorphic applications on the user interface, spend a lot of effort to point to or imitate the real world function. Apple is currently the king of this design trend. In its "Man-Machine Interface Guide", it writes: "As long as possible, you can add realistic and physical latitudes to your applications. The more similar your application is to the reality, the more identical the operation is, the more easy it is for users to understand how it works, and the more happy they are to use it ".

Apple's leader in interaction design cannot be questioned, but it does not mean that it is the only design concept, and change cannot happen. Ben Brooks of the BrooksReview website believes that Apple is a little overactive in this regard. iCal is a bad example. He wrote in "The interface should not imitate the real world:

Theoretically, or in a movie, it looks pretty-It looks surprising visually. The problem is that these applications mimic real-world interfaces and have very bad computer interfaces. Windows Phone 7's Metro UI is a disruption to the above concepts. Its basic design concept is just in line with the basic principles of Bauhaus in the field of Interactive Design "form to follow the content ".

Other applications and devices that demonstrate Bauhaus's philosophy include Flipboard, Puma Phone, Flud, and Wired for iPad.

These are all excellent designs, but it should be noted that the Bauhaus philosophy also has its own weaknesses, because the removal of decoration makes the personalized space very small. People will feel that this style of building and furniture lacks personality, vitality, and emotional connection. Jacque Tati criticized the modern life brought about by the Bauhaus Movement in Playtime, a forest of steel and glass.

This is also true in the field of interactive design. Compared with other systems, Windows Phone 7 is more difficult to personalize through themes. Perhaps because of this, the design of Windows Phone 7 emphasizes the interaction of the home page, to offset the pressure on the Bauhaus style.