As someone who has witnessed the amazing changes in custom software development over the past 25 years, I have seen the vast improvements that both the Art and the Science of technology have experienced. While they once stood independently, those two principles have definitely converged. Personally, though I have been in the development world for a while, I am still amazed at the level of creativity, technology and change that we see every year. Could anyone 20 years ago have pictured the capabilities of Silverlight’s Deep Zoom? Or Flash’s level of glossy interactivity?

One of Amadeus Consulting’s Guiding Principles is to ‘Develop great software with both science and art," because we feel so strongly that these two software development factors converge to make the most successful and inspiring technology for our clients. To us, science means how you use something, and art is not only how something looks, but how you interact and think about something.

Let’s walk a little bit through the history of the two principles and see how they have finally come together to form and create the tools, Websites, and software we all use every day and at Amadeus Consulting.

We have Science, but where’s the Art?

The time was 30 B.C. (Before Creativity) also known as the eighties, most people associate with the time of DOS and very minimalistic looking user interfaces, simplistic inputs and structure, structure, structure.

When COBOL was the primary development language, there really was not much of an Art to any of it, computers simply had not been thought of as a medium for wild creativity. Sure there were games, and word processing programs, but the design was pretty flat, very text driven. The only real ‘artistic’ consideration was the background color, which certainly felt exciting at the time. I even remember my go-to method for text placement, counting pixels! (Can you imagine asking anyone to do that day-to-day now?)

Art + Science, working side-by-side

Fast-forward to 15 years ago or 15 A.D. (After Design). With the introduction of HTML 1.0, customization and art were starting to trickle into custom application programming, allowing people to not only choose background colors, but different fonts, font colors and even pictures. The science and art of software programming were working side-by-side, and often as is the case with tricky technology, against one another.

As this was the Web 1.0 phase of the Internet, the level of interactivity from a user standpoint was zero. If you lacked the technical skills to be a custom programmer, you interacted with the Internet in a very static and read-only way. One of the difficulties I remember having is getting photo and text to line up with one another. Because the tools for text input were far more developed than for graphical input, getting a photo in the right place required a lot of trial and error.

The Marriage of Art + Science

Bringing us up to current times or 2010, C.T. (Creative Technology). So much has changed in not only software application development over the past 15 years, but also the way that people interact with the Internet. The paradigm shifted with Web 2.0, where input on a technical and graphical way is not reserved for the expert, but now tools exist that encompass powerful ways for people to create Websites, blogs, videos, you name it. Interactivity is at a premium, and critical to not only the short-term, but long-term success of many online applications.

Tools like Microsoft’s Silverlight, allow software application development both graphically and technically to live within one tool, and work harmoniously together from wire framing in Sketchflow (a tool within Silverlight) all the way to creating 3D graphics. Many of the tools that our Creative Developers use integrate the best of Art + Science to create interactive web design. We develop for Silverlight and Flash in order to create highly-interactive and rich Internet Applications.