malevolent beings trying to overload your optical pathways
That's what happens when your brain becomes a tragedy of the commons.
Some friends and I dreamed up the table of contents of the "Geocities Web Design Handbook," but I think it would apply to Japanese commercial web sites and streets as well.
Part I. Basics
Chapter 1. Rational thought: your enemy.
Chapter 2. Serenity, comprehension, and other bad design smells.
Part II. Basic applications
Chapter 3. Maximizing information density using randomly sourced content.
Chapter 4. Total coverage: cross-browser design techniques to banish white space.
Part III. Advanced techniques
Chapter 5. The BLINK tag: sissy crutch.
Chapter 6. DOSing the visual cortex: advanced techniques to overwhelm and disorient.
I've found that interesting too. And I definitely agree with the website design, though I've seen faaaar worse than those, even in relatively popular websites. They seem to like putting everything in boxes, and loading the page with 100+ boxes of some sort. It has its uses, but definitely overload inducing.
That said, a huge amount of the buildings in Japan are somehow different from others (different shape, color splashes, wall art), and there's a lot of random green spaces (usually with a shrine of some sort) in even the densest / most businessey areas. There are, of course, the standard looks like your map example, and cheap apartment housing that's the same everywhere in the world, but I've yet to see that amount of diversity anywhere else as the rule, rather than the exception.
I actually think that's a great street. It's dense and walkable. It has enough splashes of color that it's not drab. The buildings are a mix of shops, offices, and apartments, so you don't need to get in your car and wait in traffic for 20 minutes to get anywhere. It may seem cluttered, but it's excellent design for a place to live -- and your eye learns to ignore the clutter in about a week or so.
And it's not all megabuildings, either. I'd wager that there's some pretty green space within easy walking distance.
I agree. Places like Tokyo and Seoul are visually assaulting. But you get used to it. And they are super walkable. But they make similarly hustle and bustle places like downtown Manhattan look calm and tame by comparison.
I'm just not sure how to reconcile in my head this type of urban layout with the Japanese aesthetic.
Yes, they can build some really ugly websites, but some very elegant ones as well. It's puzzling.
My theory is that Japanese (and Chinese) readers process a web site differently from readers of word-based languages, such as English. Japanese readers do a lot more 'scanning' than we do.
It would be interesting to see a usability study of one of those Japanese sites that records how the user actually processes the page.
I quite liked the way the street looks. It's intersting. I really don't see where you get "malevolent beings trying to overload your optical pathways."
What makes Japanese design so special? Basically, it’s a matter of simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, different from what simplicity means in the West.
It doesn't.
It talks about a German-made knife vs. a Japanese-made knife, but the Japanese-made knife simply is more simple. They aren't "simple" in different ways.
German design goal: functionality and comfort, user is at the center.
Japanese design goal: aesthetics, the tool is at the center.
It is possible, that a Japanese chef will feel and work better working with an aesthetic and clean looking knife. The chef's skill is praised in as much as it can make use of the beautifully designed knife (i.e. the craftsmanship culture).
A German (Western) chef will work better with any knife that fits his hand better. The chef is at the center of the design. A knife is an extension of a chef's hand.
I think the Japanese knife is at one pole of the fundamental user interface dilemma: to what extent do you cater to common actions at the expense of expert actions? The Japanese knife says that any concession made to one specific use will unacceptably hinder other uses.
The German knife is specialized for one particular hand position. In a way, it is actually prescriptive and restrictive: if you try to use it a different way than expected, you will have an inferior experience. The designers (hopefully) studied usage and decided that they could optimize for the common case without hindering other cases too much, thereby getting a better result. It doesn't matter if uncommon cases are a little awkward.
It's just common sense that the optimum design will reject the do-nothing approach and provide some kind of non-use-agnostic tweak. However, ten years of software development work have given me much more appreciation for the assumption embodied in the Japanese knife. It's pessimistic and will never be the best (except in the eyes of design gurus who never actually use stuff) but by god it will never stop you from doing what you want.
I've seen several people write about Matz's design principles for Ruby, but I can't find what the man himself wrote. I'd love to read that if someone with better google-fu can dig it up.
I'm sure Ruby's design is worth study, and maybe there are things identifiably "japanese" about it. But surely simplicity and symmetry are not among them. It's a very large language, with many non-orthogonal features -- cleaner than perl or C++, but certainly nothing like, say, Lua or Clojure.
Are simplicity and symmetry any more Japanese than they are, say, Greek or Swedish? I think you need to go deeper than that to identify something uniquely Japanese.
I read the two interviews linked by domgblackwell, and it's hard to tell. In the first interview, from 2001, the only design principle he cites is the principle of least surprise. In the 2003 interview, he says he didn't think of that, it was just an observation other people made about Ruby. He talks about the folly of pursuing perfection, "harmonious" rather than orthogonal features, and how the programmer feels when using the language, comfort, joy, etc. That actually sounds pretty Japanese, but the fact that he had a much better articulated design philosophy in 2003 than in 2001 makes me think we will never know what implicit design philosophy guided his creation of Ruby. His purported design philosophy is at least partly a retrospectively constructed just-so story he invented to explain how he was able to come up with Ruby. It makes sense that a Japanese creator, upon discovering that he had created something beautiful, would use familiar concepts to try to explain how he did it.
Yet, Japanese streets are a virtual assault on your senses. Like malevolent beings trying to overload your optical pathways.
http://maps.google.co.jp/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=ja&#...
(maybe not the best example, but I picked someplace pretty random that looked like a commercial district).
And I've noticed this same visual clutter in Japanese website design.
http://car.nifty.com/
http://www.guesthouse-apartment.com/
etc.