Turn on the lights

by frankie@matter

I spend a fair amount of time people-watching, and it struck me some time ago that our behaviors around smartphones have come to mimic advertisements for phones themselves. They say that art imitates life, but if you look around you will find the converse is now true.

Yes, the smartphone has become the tool for the digital age, yet it remains laden with pros and cons. It has opened instant lines of far-reaching communication and inadvertently created a handful of new and rather dubious behavioral problems.

I say dubious as we still find ourselves limited to a world that lives very much behind a screen. Never have we been more connected, and yet we must isolate ourselves to become so. It would appear that the experience of interacting with a cellphone is ill-considered, an afterthought at best. This raises tough questions as to our role as designers and the limits of our thinking. If we are to design experiences, then we must consider the bigger picture, i.e., the inherent value in accessing information through a handheld screen and the behaviors associated it.

There is another tool in our history analogous to the current smartphone, though which we now all share and surely take for granted: lighting. Prior to the creation of the light bulb and its infrastructure, if you needed light, you had to carry a candle, an oil lamp, or a torch around with you — much like now, where we are required to carry this simple rectangle around wherever we go. Then a handful of inventors came along, all working on some variation or another of electric light, and collectively “turned on the lights,” taking this tool out of our hands and making it available to everyone. Now we all have lighting at the flip of a switch and it is embedded in our environment.

We likely need a similar implementation for the digital world. Whereas the light bulb gave us access to the world around us, our technological progress is very much stuck in the “oil lamp” stage. We need a new format by which to access the digital world. We need to “turn on the lights.”

Big ideas require big thinking, and a sea change requires great effort. Progress is ultimately limited by many variables, and its default is improving on past technologies. The “phone” itself, happens to be a relatively old idea, spanning almost two centuries in an era where a decade seems long ago. While technology advances, we must find new and holistic ways to design for it, and stop looking to the past. As designers, never before has our thinking been more important nor our responsibility so great. In the words of Henry Ford, we don’t need faster horses.