The Bigger Picture

The collective consciousness of Typophile is attempting to create the letter “P”. Should the orange pixel be [Black] or [White]?

A few years ago, Kevan Davis created “The Smaller Picture,” a web page where visitors are shown a white grid with randomly scattered black cells, and a text that says that “the collective consciousness” is attempting to create a picture of something. One of the cells is highlighted pink, and the visitor is asked whether that cell should be white or black, in order to make the picture resemble a star, a flower, a house, or whatever the picture is intended to portray.

I first found Davis’s variation of the idea, where the collective consciousness instead sets out to create a typeface. I don’t know why, but as of this time, neither of the Smaller Pictures even remotely resemble what they should. But the typeface is clearly a typeface.

Davis read about the concept of a hive mind in Kevin Kelly’s very interesting book Out of Control (also available online), where Kelly tells of an event where an entire audience collectively controls an aeroplane in a flight simulator. While Kelly’s example was very inspiring, it is Davis’s application of the idea to the typeface that has stuck in my mind.

And I think it is a brilliant illustration of what software architecture is – or rather, what it should be – about.

The above picture shows the result of about 12,000 people trying to create the letter P. Or at least, 12,000 pixels flipped by probably thousands of people. Each of whom with a mental picture of a P, which he or she bases the decision of whether the orange pixel should be black or white. Collectively, they shape the letter according to their shared understanding of what the letter P should look like.

The challenge in software development is to unite developers in a shared mental picture of the piece of software being created.