Stanley Kubrick's Calm

A meandering essay on craft, weaving together film, design, industries, work and the finding of an ethos.

During my formative years as a self-taught designer, I crafted a WordPress template named Kubrick in honor of the legendary director, Stanley Kubrick.

In the early 90s my parents gifted me an Amstrad, with the help of my grandfather. a former radio operator in the Danish navy and later a teacher at a technical college. Every week, he'd accompany me to the computer club with our computers in the tow.

On that machine I learned how to design and program a simple menu system for floppy disks in Basic (and later cockamamie configuration menus for DOS squeezing every byte possible out of the base memory). I later discovered information architecture and user experience for the BBS I ran out of my parent's basement. That turned into websites, first for personal use, then as an HTML monkey for the small multimedia Agency, Omedia in Aalborg.

But Kubrick—the template which became the standard WordPress template for six or seven years—was the first time I felt I had an actual point of view on the why of a design. In the cacophony of blogging and open source content management systems—believe it or not, it was quite the hot ticket for a few years in the early 2000s—it was a miracle that things previously unavailable to most people existed, to also think they should come with any capital D Design thinking was a bridge too far for the time.

The young Stanley Kubrick famously felt most films were terrible and that he would be able to do better if given the chance, which is how he became a director. I somewhat arrogantly, and not a little naively, felt the same.

With the design of *Kubrick*, I found my distinct perspective. In the early 2000s it was astonishing to witness tools once out of reach become accessible to many. But in that primordial soup of creativity, the ability to do something, anything, often outpaced the how of it.

I named the template Kubrick not because I was trying to ape (apologies) his films stylistically, but because I was inspired by the man and his work in my own nascent work. I was in search of ideals; articulations of what I felt about the work I longed to do, and I found it in his ethos. His work was precise, careful, and unrelenting in its dedication to a strong, central vision and the trust he held in that vision.

I’ve attempted to follow the same ethos in my own work, even if buffeted by reality.

A few years ago I came across a quote from Christoper Nolan* which got at what was so attractive about Kubrick’s work:

From a storytelling point of view, from a directing point of view, there is one thing I associate with what he does, which is calm. There is such an inherent calm and inherent trust of the one powerful image, that he makes me embarrassed with my own work, in terms of how many different shots, how many different sound effects, how many different things we’ll throw at an audience to make an impression. But with Kubrick, there is such a great trust of the one correct image to calmly explain something to audience. There can be some slowness to the editing. There’s nothing frenetic about it. It’s very simple. There’s a trust in simple storytelling and simple image making that actually takes massive confidence to try and emulate.

An interviewer once disagreed with my opinion that my prior work as a creative and designer in the computer games industry was informative to my design work in the tech industry. "I don't think so," he stated flatly and carried on another line of questioning.

That really stuck with me.

I don't think they were addressing interactive design specifically when the Vignelli's talked about their notion that 'Design is One'. The idea that if you can design one thing you can design anything because proportion, harmony, clarity and other fundamental design principles always apply.

I might agree with the aforementioned interviewer on specifics required by different types of design. The Vignelli's were addressing more traditional graphic and product design and less interactive and gameplay design. And it is arguably a different matter to design a vase from something like a website editor. But the notion has staying power because it also carries an inherent, undeniable truth, even if it is incomplete.

In reality the two worlds are not that different. They're both about storytelling. What are we trying to do, who is it for, what do they do and how do they do it? How do we bring clarity, teach, and set expectations, and how do we meet those expectations in unexpected ways (which is one way to frame innovation).

How do we do all these things while understanding the full journey and the specific experience in its own place as well as its place in and contribution to, the overall. Too convoluted to express simply, too important to ignore.

Film exists predominantly to entertain, software can service many needs, but when either is great the interplay between orchestration and expectation setting is what creates interface design's spiritual equivalent to Kubrick's 'one powerful image'. A singular, intentional moment wherein everything before and around it elevates it. At once separate and at one with it. Resting calmly in its deeply considered intentionality.

When I think about interaction design it's that 'one powerful image' Nolan describes where everything but the essential is eschewed with confidence, trusting in exactly what remains and the ability of the 'image' to deliver a superior experience because it is laden with that deep intentionality.

I often think about another idea which Brian Aldiss talks about in the documentary *Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures*. He said Kubrick thought about a film's structure as 'six non-submersible units', an unexplained and curious turn of phrase. Each unit was independent of one another with its own start, middle and end. When you had six of them it would be easy to connect them, and you had a movie.

In more traditional film making vernacular those might be called 'sequences', but Kubrick's thinking about them pushed the boundaries, most obviously at play in 2001: A Space Odyssey where each sequence carries the thinnest of threads from ones prior, and the whole bears little resemblance to traditional dramaturgical structures.

Pulling back to the world of technology, we can think of larger digital products, applications, platforms or games similarly. iOS for instance consists of many 'non submersible units' (apps like Camera, Notes, Maps, or deep areas of functionality like the accessibility or focus settings, springboard and so on) held together by shared heuristics, sometimes more so, sometimes less so. They feel of a piece, while also clearly distinct. Each iOS unit often has several 'powerful images' (some have none).

Springboard, the home screen of iOS, is one of the most iconic such powerful images in modern software. A masterpiece of design, deceptively simple, deeply meaningful in its place.

A view, or screen, is maybe akin to an 'image' in this vernacular. But by necessity it's also more nuanced. The powerful image in relation to software design has more to do with the feeling invoked by that view and its interactions, its lifecycle, and the emotion it elicits as it facilitates its purpose.

The thin thread holding the units together can be the shared purpose of being under the umbrella of a platform. In addition to iOS think for instance of the many tools under Creative Cloud, or in Google Workspace.

Most of us are not Stanley Kubrick, and our work must inherent to its nature be less cryptic than the Clockwork Orange's and Eyes Wide Shut's of the world.

Aside from providing a framework for thinking about platforms, the nuance of the simile is in how our inner idealists struggle towards mastery of our craft, seeking one powerful image after another, and over years painstakingly building our intuition and confidence in their relationships to the people receiving them.

There is often a need for that unwavering vision when creating non submersible units and laying them out strategically just so, with enough thread to bind them, but not enough to entangle them.

Many want design to be a science. Perfectly predictable and measurable. But like film it isn’t. It can be aided by science—research, trends, metrics and so on—but both are in themselves crafts (one creates art, the other tools). Yet tech, as film I’m sure, is rife with thought leaders so-called proclaiming ways to make product creation deterministic.

Not surprisingly these people are rarely designers by trade, but salesmen selling what every company wants: predictability (a notable exception proving the proverbial rule may be LoveFrom's partnership with a company like AirBnb on how to operate as a design centric company).

I believe in operational models as the bulwark of the design process—how do we work, and why in this way and not any other?—but most companies create at best a conveyor belt of design adequacy. Beyond a certain size clarity and details deteriorate as the drive shifts toward network effects, walled garden content, or whatever other strategic lever the company can bring to bear. The breadth and depth of the company foils best intentions. What got us here won’t get us there, and there are few manuals for how to get there.

Not surprisingly design-centered companies, as with great film makers, are hyper focused on picking the right cast and crew at every step; for pre-production, on set, on location, reshoots; the right partners for effects, marketing and so on. In reality managing the ins and outs of people is something few companies excel at. But at the core of it all, that is ultimately where greatness comes from. The people. With the right people in the right place, anything is possible. Without it, everything is at best adequate. Picking the people and how they work is the design of design.

Of course, dissimilarities also abound—design's raison d'être is solving problems, film's is emotion—but if this piece of turgid writing has a point as it haphazardly weaves this meandering pair of narratives about craft into something, it is the need for deeply earned focus and intentionality in those powerful images, whether in film, interface design or in the design of how we work to achieve those things. The design of design itself.

Or, echoing the man's own directive to Jack Nicholson, just "Do something brilliant."

* The interview was hosted at a the now defunct PopWatch site.