Web Design Worldview (Archive)

Page 2 of 3 (28 total articles)
  • January 14, 2009 in Web Design Worldview

    The Fallen Designer: What Good Can Come from a Shipwrecked Soul?

    The question of the current state of humanity is one which penetrates to the heart of a person's worldview. Understand, when I say "current state of humanity" I'm not referring to of the current state of human affairs in time (who's fighting who, the world economy, etc.); rather I'm speaking of the natural condition into which all humans are born. Our understanding of this state is inextricably tied to the second of three foundational worldview questions: how did we get here? what went wrong? and how do we fix it? In this article I'm going to deal primarily with the question "what went wrong?" and explain how the fallen state of humanity affects designers today. Of course, I'll be focusing primarily on the the classic Christian perspective on this topic, but along the way I'll briefly discuss some other views from pop culture for the purpose of contrast.

  • December 17, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    WARNING! Pragmatic Designers Keep to the Shallow End

    Our culture is obsessed with practical advice. We have seven habits of this and ten rules for that. Everywhere we look, we're being given steps for how to accomplish something. I don't think I can argue that all practical advice is bad. After all, practical advice is simply the outworking of principles. But while we wallow in the shallow end of practical advice, we would do well to remember that it's the principle shapers in the deep end who are telling us what the rules of the game are. They choose generic words like "effective" and "best" to describe the goals they throw at us. Who wouldn't want to be an effective person or live their best life? But without an object, words like effective and best have no meaning. These words are beach balls intended to focus our effort; to steer us to an end; to bring us to passively accept an someone's idea of what effectiveness and best life are.

  • October 8, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    I Design Websites, Therefore, God Is

    The majority of the most exceptional men and women in the historical landscape of philosophy have acknowledged the absolute necessity of a supreme being. Those who did not and were honest with the implications of their conclusions were forced into absurdism. But today, in a culture that is increasingly shallow and intellectually lazy, you'd be hard pressed to find an individual (educated or not) who knows anything of Thomas Aquinas' five rational proofs for the existence of God or has any concept of Aristotle's "unmoved mover". The words of these great thinkers are most often used by quote miners looking for nuggets to rip out of context and paste together into warped shadows of what once was. And fortunately for them we're none the wiser. We gained a little bit of knowledge about how this universe works and became so obsessed with our discoveries that we stopped asking why. We are not unlike Haley's man who, after stumbling upon a pocket watch in the forest, declares himself to be the master watchmaker (or that there must be a blind watchmaker).

  • September 3, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Show and Tell: A Christian Designer's Guide to Faith in the Workplace

    How should a Christian manage his or her Christianity in the workplace? This is a question most Christian designers have considered at one time or another during the course of their career. In our current age (especially in America), the attitude of employers toward public displays of faith varies dramatically from one workplace to another. Some Christian designers work in a laid back work environment where outward displays of faith are seen as generally harmless (annoying at worst). Others work under management that is openly hostile toward Christianity. Still other Christian designers work for religious organizations where it's expected that every employee will let out a "praise God" from time to time.

  • August 19, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Truth by Consensus: The Wiki Worldview and the Future of Knowledge

    Several times in the recent past, I've attempted to workout the Christian worldview of the wiki model. But each time it comes up I find myself quickly overwhelmed by the task. Until now I've abandoned the project in favor more straight-forward design concepts. But a recent conversation made me realize what an important worldview issue the wiki really is. The wiki method of collecting and distributing knowledge has deep implications for the future of social theory and epistemology—implications which haven't even begun to be fully explored by the Christian community. Should Christians give approval to a collection of knowledge that was essentially voted into truth by the masses? Does the Wiki model break the historical Christian principle that truth and reality are objective? These are some of the questions I will discuss in this article. I'll be using Wikipedia, that behemoth of wikiness, as my primary example.

  • August 5, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Design Sub-culture: Christians Would Rather Copy than Create

    Reformed Christian writer Doug Wilson once said, "Whatever the world can do, we can do five years later and not as well." While this may be somewhat of an exaggeration, it's not that far off. For the past 150 years or so, the Christian community has been declining in just about every creative arena. And in the last fifty years you would be hard pressed to find more than kitsch coming from the Christian creative community. There are exceptions for sure. The International Arts Movement, for example, has proven that this rule is not unbreakable; but by and large, the creative sub-culture in evangelical Christianity is about as deep as a West Texas lake (for those of you who've never been to West Texas, we have no lakes). What has caused this fall? Why has the once rich creative wellspring of Christianity seem to have dried up? And what can we do about it?

  • July 16, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Glorious Web Designer: Talkin' 'Bout My Vocation

    What's the most important job in the world? This question sounds like something a curious young child would ask his parents. Fireman... Policeman... Doctor... I don't know little Johnny; what do you want to be when you grow up? It seems silly to those of us who have grown up and chosen a vocational route—something we rarely think about. But it is typically the simplest and most basic questions whose answers carry the weightiest consequences. Closer consideration reveals that this question is actually utterly profound, and answering one way or another can dramatically affect the way you live your life. It is one of the most basic teleological inquiries and digs deep into the heart of human purpose. Is web designer the most important job in the world? If not—if it's just an unnecessary peripheral, then why am I not dedicating my life in some way to a vocation of real importance?

  • July 9, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Truth Claims and the Future of Web Design

    "What is truth?" Pontius Pilate asked this question almost 2000 years ago. At the time, he had no inkling of the infamy which was to follow these words through the millennia. He asked the question as a jaded cynic—he had no interest in knowing the truth. In fact, his question is of a rhetorical nature, implying simply that there is no truth. And yet, in asking this question he hit the very crux of the human condition. Our view of truth is the Rosetta Stone for how we interpret life, relationships, ethics, vocation, and even design. It's the foundation of our worldview. Without a firm grasp on the popular views of truth we encounter, we will find ourselves in situations where our speech is lost in translation. Remember, when we talk about truth here, we are talking about the whole ball of wax. We're asking, What is reality? What is right and what is wrong? What really happened in history? What is real? The question extends out to every area of existence and has enormous implications for the future of our work in web design. In order to clear the haze, we'll start by looking at some popular views of truth and then we'll move on to the historical Christian view of truth and why it conforms to reality as no other view does.

  • July 2, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Analyzing Web Design Through the Christian Worldview Lens

    Is there really a Christian way to analyze design? Can non-religious works of creativity still be considered Christian? What makes a design good or bad? If you're a Christian designer and you haven't considered these questions, you probably aren't analyzing design from a Christian worldview. More importantly, you're probably consenting to a broken worldview without realizing it. It's imperative that we understand the answers to these questions and apply historical Christian principles consistently and relentlessly to our design critiques. We do our creator a disservice when we allow ourselves to be ignorant of the unique and realistic view he has provided for us.

  • May 21, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

    Web Design Worldview (Part 6): A Christian Web Design Manifesto

    Just exactly how does a Christian worldview shape a web designer? Should it change the way he or she approaches ethics, style, or even layout? We've journeyed through a maze of worldviews in the last five articles rounding out our discussion with a look at the Christian worldview. But now we've come to the point. In this final article, the focus will be narrowed to the vocation of web design. In part five, I listed and explained basic Christian design principles derived from classic Christian thinking. In this article I'll build a practical model of a Christian web designer with those principles as the foundation. To start out, though, we need to define and discuss web design itself. That is where I'll begin.

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