THE AESTHETICS OF CONVERGENCE: WE’RE ALL A LITTLE BIT MESSY, AREN’T WE?

When we think of the word ‘aesthetics’, most people immediately pair it up with the words ‘neat and clean’. It’s like how we want our Instagram page to be following the same theme, because the beauty of it, is just so satisfying. However, when we talk about the aesthetics of convergence, it literally means, as Travis would say, “taking stuff and smashing it together.”

Yep, pretty much.

Over the years, we’ve witnessed things changing and evolving for the better or for worse. But what slips our mind is the fact that the process of these things changing doesn’t happen over night. It’s a result of trial and error. For example, snapchat is constantly updating their system. The most recent update received a ton of backlash due to users not liking the changed format. As a result, hopefully, snapchat will take this feedback on board and improve it during the next update.

Digital aesthetics is all about rapid prototyping, experimenting, discovering what went wrong and modifying. However, the outcomes after modifying is unexpected as the target audience may still not like the combination of stuff you’ve smashed together – and as a result, the cycle repeats. It’s quite a mess, isn’t it? But mess is good because as David Pye had said, “the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process” and this is non-industrial culture, so nothing is supposed to go to plan.

Come to think of it, we’re all a little bit messy, aren’t we? We go through life, not knowing what to expect, and when something doesn’t go as planned, we change it in order to try to make it better. And if that doesn’t work, we try again, and someday, we’ll get there.

So in saying that, I decided to smash a few things together to try and attempt to make something aesthetically pleasing. Not sure if that worked out but hey – trial and error, right?

– G