It’s interesting how trends in world of creativity and design (and innovation for that matter) can appear at similar times, sometimes without the people involved knowing anything about what else is going on. Alongside Swann and Edison, 20 other people are acknowledged as being “inventors” of the lightbulb. The 1920s saw many people working on the development of television, and the TV of John Logie Baird is a very different (mechanical) beast to that that became popular (and a million miles from the digital devices of the 21st Century).
My late teenage years working in a video rental store also gave me the opportunity to witness it in the output in Hollywood movies: Turner & Hooch and K9 (anthropomorphic dog flicks); Vice Versa and Big (boy/adult body swap movies) released at similar times in the late 1980s, apparently independently of any knowledge of the other project.
I’m sure that this phenomenon has been written about in some Gladwell-esque book, and if not then it’s one for my back burner list (which quite frankly with the combination of work and looking after two toddlers isn’t getting any shorter any time soon). However, the reason I raise it now is that a similar thing seems to be happening with the look and feel of Metro, the user interface design principals that Microsoft has developed from Windows Media Center, through Zune, onto Windows Phone and beyond.
This isn’t an accusation of conscious plagarism – it could well be that designers are not aware of any of our products at all. But there seems to be a growing trend, particularly of websites, looking a bit, erm, Metro-y. The new BBC Homepage definitely has certain design cues that are reminiscent; the CBI launched a new website earlier this week that looks even more like Metro. I am sure that there will be many others as Nokia take cues from Metro to advertise its new Lumia Windows Phone range.
There are a couple of things that this makes me wonder: first, will this be a design fad like, say, isometric, pixellated 3D cartoons were a few years back, or will it be something more sustained? And secondly, will elements of this type of Web design evolve in such a way that they go beyond the capabilities of Metro itself? On that latter point, one of the key “points” of Metro is that it is “chromeless” – not a reference to the Google Browser, but to extra bells and whistles on user interface design that don’t of themselves add anything other than extra processing requirements (I presume from the chrome fittings on cars and so on). It’s a very minimalist design ethic, but my own experience tells me that not all web designers are minimalists…
mmitII 
