B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Chad Hurley brought the skills that he had acquired as an undergraduate in the print-making class at Indiana University Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to his first major design. It was completed just a few months after he graduated in 1999. He drew a not-especially inspiring logo for a new online finance business, known as PayPal. He used an italic sans serif font rendered in blue on white. As a design student, he had been fascinated by the potential of the new hypertext HTML computer language and taught himself to write code. He did classes in art and technology, and in building three-dimensional models for the web. They gave him the creative equipment to become a very successful example of a new version of designer, one who dealt in the non-physical world as much as the physical one. Jonathan Ive, born ten years before Hurley, is old enough to have approached design from a physical point of view and was able to integrate it with the digital world. Hurley was born too late to have a professional engagement with the analogue. His first really significant piece of work wasn’t PayPal’s logo but its payment button, a one-click way of transferring money for safe keeping until the vendor’s goods had reached the purchaser. It turned out to be particularly useful for acquiring eBay products. It was a device that worked so well in making eBay a success that less than three years after Hurley had designed it, eBay bought the whole company for $1.5 billion. It’s a button that manifests itself as nothing more than a glowing image on a screen, but it represents a far more complex set of mechanical and formal issues than any door handle, keyboard or switch. And the PayPal button was perhaps the most valuable switch ever made. Three years later, Hurley had designed something that was even more valuable. With two former colleagues from PayPal, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, he produced a way of sharing videos. It could handle those created on mobile phones, which made it particularly attractive. It was called YouTube, and it was successful enough to be worth $1.65 billion to Google in 2006.

Back in the 1970s, the appearance of the first video cameras aimed at non-specialists was embraced by a generation of radicals as the means by which the grip of big media would be broken, giving ordinary people a chance to reflect their own lives and experiences. It was a vain hope. Crudely edited community video channels were never any kind of threat to the BBC. Set against Hollywood, they turned out to be anything but liberation, and were actually the sort of home movies that nobody wants to see.

At first sight YouTube looked like something entirely different. But within weeks of its launch there were some YouTube uploads that had been viewed by millions. Almost immediately, it had become a massively influential alternative to every TV network in the world. It was the medium in which music careers were launched, news was broken, terrorist threats were delivered, Holocaust deniers spread their venom, and kittens danced. This most likely was not what Hurley and his collaborators had in mind. There were a lot of myths around the foundation of YouTube that involved swapping dinner-party videos seamlessly, or locating live footage of Janet Jackson’s famous wardrobe malfunction. Another version had it that YouTube would be some kind of dating site, popularity measured by likes.

The design problem that YouTube had to deal with was both technical - what once might have been called mechanical - and creative. How could the site handle all the different video formats? How would it deal with files that were too large to email, or for which it did not have a media player that worked? But it was also conceptual. Was YouTube going to be a site for people to post videos of the products that they wanted to sell on eBay? Was it a social medium, keeping people in touch with each other?

Hurley decided not to make it too specific. YouTube evolved into a medium that could be used for almost anything, rather than a specific language that could be used for only one form of transaction. Its function was closer to printing than it was to being an alphabet. And it arrived at a time when there was enough spare web capacity for a lot of content to be delivered inexpensively.

Chad told Bill Moggridge - pioneer designer in California’s Silicon Valley and a former director of New York’s Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum - that he did his best to make the YouTube website not look overproduced or corporate. And he gave it a name that suggested what it could be used for: a personal television network.

When YouTube was acquired by Google, it had less than 100 employees, a stark reminder that while technology was creating value, it wasn’t doing much to create jobs. Kodak in its heyday had supported 140,000 highly skilled jobs.

YouTube’s explosive success says a lot about the state of the world. It reflects just how rapid the pace of change has become. It took fifty years for the telephone to go from a prototype to market saturation, ten years for the fax machine to do the same, and just a matter of weeks for Apple’s iPad to sell a million copies. It is a reflection of how much the practice of design has been transformed by the digital world. It is a demonstration of how quickly such developments can transform the way that we see the world, one that is brutally frank in its representation of success and failure. Every clip is measured. No talk, no post, nothing that I have done has ever clocked up more than 6,000 views. By the standards of YouTube, where millions of people see the same images in hours, that is less than invisible.

Every hour, months of content are uploaded to YouTube - so much material that nobody could ever see even a fraction of it in a single lifetime. It has created something analogous to the storerooms of a major museum, on a vast scale. When an institution has a collection of four or five million objects, it’s impossible for any individual to make sense of it without the help of a catalogue. In its raw state it makes no sense, it has no meaning, there is no way of seeing or understanding it. There is no YouTube catalogue. YouTube makes sense of content through the relentless driver of popularity. It is the most-viewed clips that rise to the top of the search engines, and so reinforce their positions. It is a phenomenon that runs counter to the notional democracy of YouTube. If the images are not at the top of the tree, they become invisible, and the culture of YouTube is tilted irreversibly in directions that tend to reinforce existing tastes rather than challenge them.