What brutalist design argues

Brutalist software is not bad design that has been celebrated. It is a specific aesthetic position: that the visual appeal of an interface should not be a primary design goal when that appeal serves only to smooth over friction that the user should be able to feel. It is, at its best, an ethical argument.

The brutalist tradition in architecture — raw concrete, exposed structural elements, the building as declaration of its own construction — has an analogue in software. The interface that shows you its own seams. The tool that does not pretend to be intuitive. The application that requires you to understand something before it will do something for you.

The commercial smooth

The opposite of brutalist software is not beautiful software — it is smooth software. Commercial smooth. The interface that reduces all friction to zero, that anticipates your intent before you have it, that pre-fills, auto-completes, and recommends. The smooth interface is an argument that your cognitive load should be minimised, that the interface's job is to take decisions off your hands.

This is a political position, even if it is not announced as one. An interface that removes friction also removes the pause in which you might reconsider. The smooth interface is efficient precisely because it does not let you think.

An interface that refuses to be smooth is making a claim about what your attention is worth. It is saying: this deserves the effort of understanding.

Søren Villads, MU0ZVV

Specific examples

Brutalist software is more common at the edges of the software ecosystem — in developer tools, command-line interfaces, academic software, and in a small tradition of artistic software that includes tools like SuperCollider, Pure Data, and certain text editors that have not changed their default interface in fifteen years.

These tools share a characteristic: they were designed to be mastered, not to be immediately usable. The learning curve is the feature. The interface complexity is proportional to the task complexity. This is a different theory of the relationship between software and user than the one that dominates commercial product design.

The aesthetic question

Can brutalist software be beautiful? The question contains an assumption — that beauty and ugliness are stable categories rather than contextual judgments. A command-line interface is ugly in the context of a consumer app; it is elegant in the context of systems programming. The brutalist aesthetic is not anti-aesthetic. It is an aesthetic that has decided what it values.