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Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

There is a fundamental lack of understanding what user want. Just like those crappy catalogue viewers with flipping animations - just let me fucking download the pdf file.

This is not good design no matter how you put it. Imagine if this page was built using simple HTML without JavaScript. Just a list of albums as you said, that load in less than 100ms and you scroll through using your mouse wheel.

The world is full of superfluous display of design in the form of decoration and a middle finger to the user. It’s sad and I don’t know what these designers are taught in their colleges. It is infuriating. Of course there are exceptions in good design but boy it makes me sad that the world is filled with vaneers on shitboxes.

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These are Art Experiments -- it's a playground for design -- it's what artists do. Playing with design and ideas is how you think new thoughts and jump the curve -- discover subtle aspects -- elements that work that you can combine and overtime as it comes together the bigger picture emerges into something new.

It’s about the content and if the designer wants to add flair - that takes away from the content by slowing down my browser to a crawl.

I can understand if this is a UX/UI art experiment. But it’s not. It’s about NASA images that are collected and grouped together using machine learning.

Edit: I’m not against the experiment. I’m against how it’s presented in the browser window.

So you understand the essence of art, and you're saying experimenting with machine learning as an artistic tool should play no part -- it's out of scope?

Have you read the book Hackers & Painters [1]? http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Do any of these other Arts & Culture Experiments speak to you? https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/arts-culture

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624

I’m being misunderstood. I do think that machine learning can be an artistic tool. I do think that experimental art is important.

The crux of my argument isn’t about the experiment itself. It is how Google chooses to present it that gets in the way of contemplating, understanding and enjoying the experiment.

About the books: I shall check them out, appreciate the insight.

> I can understand if this is a UX/UI art experiment. But it’s not.

https:// ____ARTSEXPERIMENTS____ .withgoogle.com/nasasvisualuniverse

I understand but I think I wasn’t clear. Let me make an analogy to be clear.

We are here to see the painting. Not the frame design and not the museum. If the frame has a cloudy glass with fancy ways to open it, with flower patterns stained on it, it takes considerable strength to unveil it, and it makes you mad when opening it - it gets in the way of enjoying the painting.

UX/UI presents the content. In this case : Google’s art experiment is about using ML to discover new insights about NASA’s programs. That’s the content part. That’s the painting.

Your separation of content/form is reductive. In art, the framing (here the UX/UI) can most definitely be a part of the content.

There's nothing sexual at all about this

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