1. Essays and rants.
In my work, the difference between a rant and an essay is: an essay offers a solution. This does not make rants any better or worse than essays; it just makes them different in their scope, their goals, and their strategy around research. An excellent rant is Bret Victor’s A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, which meant to discuss the state of the art and why he thinks it’s bad – but the lack of solutions came from the subject matter, because it was discussing theoretical interfaces and notional directions for future research. All fair ground.
Essays take a confident stand that a certain idea is (or isn’t) preferable within a set of prescribed bounds. Rewriting Bret’s essay, it would say something like “touch interfaces are preferable right now for this reason, and going ahead we need to start researching in this specific direction for this other reason.” Whether or not this diminishes the quality of his writing isn’t at hand; the real question is how much it changes the form of his argument.
If Bret were to take that particular tack, he would have to find different sources for research; he would have to build his argument in different ways, likely citing more real-world examples than conceptual videos; and, most importantly, the conclusions would be far more closed-ended. I believe there is a place for rants – in fact, I think Bret’s rant was one of the best pieces of writing to be released in 2011 – but that is not the goal of Distance’s essays.
Distance’s essays – and yes, that is why I call them essays – are meant to take a confident, unambiguous stand on an issue, and they are meant to back those up with enough research to state their case without coming off as flame bait or invective. In a very high-level way, that is how I edit essays: they should say “I believe this, and here is the context, and thus here is some research, and knowing that, there is why.” So that’s four points – three and a half, if you’re picky – that all contribute to the central conceit of each essay. This form isn’t new, but it is something we seem to have largely forgotten in our field, and so the broader goal of Distance is to shed light on that form, signify why it’s important, and prove by doing that it can help us out. It’s an attempt to write better, and to encourage readers to read better, too.
