The past two years were a wild chase for answers. I read books, looked at art, listened to my heroes, and sketched out scratchy thoughts of my own to search for any sensible response to a question that had been lodged in my head for months: What does it mean to natively design for screens? I couldn’t get the question out of my head. I tried to find its contours, and just as I thought I had made some progress on a response, a new part of the picture appeared and showed I only had a shadow of an answer. After many failures, I began to see which approaches worked better. The way toward an answer is never what you expect, so I was surprised that mine began with a routine trip to the pharmacy.

These are aspirin pills. I’m not big on medicating, so my aspirin purchase was the first in a long time. When I rattled a few of the pills out of the bottle, I noticed they seemed to be a lot smaller than I remembered. I went online to see what was going on. It seems pharmaceutical companies have been able to make the active drug in aspirin more effective in the past few decades. The tiny aspirin pills are hardly aspirin at all, and the drug’s current version is so potent and physically minuscule that it must be padded with a filler substance to make the pill large enough to pick up and put in your mouth. Literally, you couldn’t grasp it without the padding.

When I read that, it occurred to me that we’ve been living through a similar situation with computers. I mean, have you looked at technology recently and taken stock? Things have changed under us. We take it for granted, because the transition was so fast and thorough. I remember my first cellular phone. It came in a bag and we called it a car phone. Now the phone fits in your pocket and you can use the damn thing to start a car. It’s remarkable. And I think about my first computer. The monitor sat on top the computer like an ugly, stupid hat: one big, dull box on top of another. But now they’re all the same thing. Your computer is a big, shiny pane of glass that spans the length of your desk.

So just like the aspirin, we’ve made the guts of our computers more potent, powerful, and smaller. Chances are your computer’s footprint is entirely comprised of its screen. Even an iMac is just a screen with a kickstand. And now, because of touch screens, we’re using the screens for input as well as output. The whole feedback cycle of using a computer is entirely screen-based. It’s no wonder that the average person’s conception of a computer is the screen.

Flux is the capacity for change. Yes, this could be animation, because that’s what I’ve been talking about up until now, but I think it’s a lot more, too. Flux is a generous definition. It encompasses many of the things we take for granted in the digital realm: structural changes, like customization, responsiveness, and variability.

I break flux into three levels:

LOW

These are really small mutations we take for granted when it comes to computing, like the ability to sort a table row on your spreadsheet. One of the major reasons the spreadsheet software has the capacity to change is because the screen can show the change produced. You can’t do that on paper. You need processing and a malleable display surface.

HIGH

These are the immersive interactive pieces you think of when I say “Flash website.” I think this sort of stuff is rarely a good idea on the web, but we’re talking about screens in general. I’ve seen a lot of really cool stuff done with high flux in museums, public installations, and in film. High flux is great in physical spaces.

MEDIUM

This area is most interesting to me, because it overlaps with what I do: websites and interfaces. Medium level flux is assistive and descriptive animation, and restructuring content based on sensors. It clarifies interactivity by allowing elements to respond to that interaction and other, measured conditions.

Probably the most well-known example of medium flux is OS X’s genie effect on window minimization. The animation clarifies the interaction by treating the window as a physical object, and sucks down the window to show its eventual position in the dock when minimized. I’ll show you a few more examples. This one shows animated scrolling after clicking on a navigation item. The animation describes the position of the content on the page, and helps you understand the path you took to get there. It preserves context. We’ve been more aware of this interstitial work in the past few years because of responsive design’s popularity and its resistance to fixed states. It’s a step in the right direction, but it has made work crazy frustrating.

At Build 2012, Ethan Marcotte gave a lecture called “The Map is not the Territory.” It was a talk about abstractions, looked at through the lens of maps and physical terrain. The longer I’ve considered Ethan’s thoughts, the more I believe cartography is an apt metaphor for our industry’s current situation. The builders of interfaces in a technology-laden, abstracted, and mediated world hold sway, much like mapmakers do. The longer I’ve considered Ethan’s thoughts, the more I believe cartography is an apt metaphor for our industry’s current situation. The builders of interfaces in a technology-laden, abstracted, and mediated world hold sway, much like mapmakers do.

Let me leave you with this: the point of my writing was to ask what screens want. I think that’s a great question, but it is a secondary concern. What screens want needs to match up with what we want. One of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by screens is because their story is our story. First there was darkness, and then there was light. And then we figured out how to make that light dance. Both stories are about transformations, about change. Screens have flux, and so do we. So the pep talk is that things are starting to suck, but there’s a capacity for change in what we’ve made, who we are, and what we believe. Everything was made, and if we want, we can remake it how we see fit. We only need to want it. And then we have to build it.