Excerpts from Jessica Helfand, "The Pleasure of the Text(ure): Why Most Multimedia is Boring." Print, 48:5 (September/October 1994) 93-101.


Texture--and here I am referring not to surface texture but to texture as multiple levels of experience--is complexity made physically manifest. Multimedia, overflowing with complexity (and driven by the user's own unpredictable experience) mostly appears to be anything but. Organized along linear pathways and Cartesian coordinates, many multimedia titles take us on journeys through dense forests of information as though navigating a city with chronologically numbered streets. Form, which in this case is still being formed, is increasingly at odds with the content from which it stems.

In an overwhelming effort to clarify, texture itself is often greatly diminished, if not altogether destroyed. Pictographic wayfinding systems become organizational straitjackets, driven by buttons and menus and arrows, but why? Such approaches breed sterile interfaces, environments that undermine multimedia by compromising the very complexity that is its richest asset. Why not probe the conceptual dimensions of this new design space? Why not invent other new worlds to explore?

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