Years ago, when I designed a left-brain friend’s business card, I moved elements so that they were visually centred, based on the (subjective) weight of positive and negative space. He altered my design by moving elements until the math lined up on top, even though the assumptions that math was based on didn’t take into account the visual weight of the elements.

This also happens in the sound domain. Recently, I saw a demonstration of a recording interface that is built around a console mixer. The operator is given knobs to twist and sliders to manipulate, to find a balance of all the audio tracks, based on a (subjective) balance the audio tracks. Computer-based recording unwittingly encourages us to use our eyes to find the balance, and this interface design is meant to break that habit.

Google is naturally going to want to be sure that any change is going to be a net positive.

Bowman perhaps cannot give specifics. It’s hard to know if his creative vision was thwarted because of Google’s natural tendency to ensure it doesn’t harm its assets. What great ideas did he have that were stifled because he could not or would not provide data? Could he have allocated the data-management aspect to another data-oriented designer, and focused on the visionary aspects?