I can understand if this is a UX/UI art experiment. But it’s not. It’s about NASA images that are collected and grouped together using machine learning.
Edit: I’m not against the experiment. I’m against how it’s presented in the browser window.
Have you read the book Hackers & Painters [1]? http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Do any of these other Arts & Culture Experiments speak to you? https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/arts-culture
The crux of my argument isn’t about the experiment itself. It is how Google chooses to present it that gets in the way of contemplating, understanding and enjoying the experiment.
About the books: I shall check them out, appreciate the insight.
https:// ____ARTSEXPERIMENTS____ .withgoogle.com/nasasvisualuniverse
We are here to see the painting. Not the frame design and not the museum. If the frame has a cloudy glass with fancy ways to open it, with flower patterns stained on it, it takes considerable strength to unveil it, and it makes you mad when opening it - it gets in the way of enjoying the painting.
UX/UI presents the content. In this case : Google’s art experiment is about using ML to discover new insights about NASA’s programs. That’s the content part. That’s the painting.
This is not good design no matter how you put it. Imagine if this page was built using simple HTML without JavaScript. Just a list of albums as you said, that load in less than 100ms and you scroll through using your mouse wheel.
The world is full of superfluous display of design in the form of decoration and a middle finger to the user. It’s sad and I don’t know what these designers are taught in their colleges. It is infuriating. Of course there are exceptions in good design but boy it makes me sad that the world is filled with vaneers on shitboxes.