There are a number of barriers preventing us from achieving this degree of presentation. In no particular order:

1) Vision. Without a clearly defined purpose and dedication to art, design, aesthetics, presence, and like matters, we aren’t going to get there soon. We need to tackle the fundamental question of audience and goal. While this might seem simple, more than a few multi-million dollar efforts from companies such as Microsoft fall well short. This takes dedication and thinking — something our culture has at least demonstrated an abundance of in other areas. We need to start applying it to design, marketing, and aesthetics now.

2) Quality. In our world, the blight of art and design theory / practice reveals itself in a shoddy contest driven society. Aesthetics, marketing presence, design, and like matters are entirely about process. Getting to that point takes more than a fickle contest driven approach. Even assuming proper execution, (1) above could very well hold us back. This problem is compounded with the very real fact that the bulk of all art direction is carried out by people who simply shouldn’t be making those kinds of decisions. Our culture needs to understand that aesthetic design and marketing presence takes an iterative approach, much like code.

3) Education. Without it we are doomed. Every time someone in our culture pushes blind words such as “ugly” “beautiful” “good” “bad” around, we take a step further backwards. Again, this is about audience. Learning the theory, reasoning, concepts, and related concepts behind the complex relationships is critical. We must evolve from the egocentric ‘Scratching one’s own itch’ to the more open minded ‘Scratching someone else’s itch.’ Can we achieve this in a culture that has seen a large percentage of work created out of a more individually minded philosophy?

This isn’t about money — Microsoft and countless other companies have proven that even with effectively unlimited resources they can still blunder over and over again. If there is one redeeming thing about Apple’s process, it is the fact that they constantly return to their audience to drive all aspects of their products — the design, the web presence, the marketing presence, etc. This is no easy feat.

Without a vision and the willingness to follow true on a potentially risky course, we are destined to repeat the poorly executed recycled effort we see time and time again. As Havoc Pennington once said, if we fail to clearly define our audience we end up with a ‘by developers for developers’ accidental audience[1].

His words could not be any truer when it comes to the aesthetic presence and design notions behind FLOSS.

Wonderful to see blog posts like this ever more frequently on the RSS feeds.

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00174.html