4 words I learned at the #FBTB16 conference
Last Friday I attended the From Business To Buttons conference in Stockholm.
👏 to InUse for organizing the conference.
It was a star-studded event with Al Gore as the pièce de résistance.
I left feeling inspired and bubbling with ideas. To sum up my takeaways from the conference, I’ll share four words that stood out.
1. Brobots
Susan Weinschenk is a Ph.D. in Psychology, and author of many books on design and psychology. In her talk, she highlighted our future relationships with robots. They will become our friends. If you watch this short video you will understand the human side of our computerized soon-to-be peers.
2. Anthropomorphism
Susan also talked about “anthropomorphism”: How we attribute — how we are as humans — to robots and other inanimate objects.
anthropomorphism definition. (an-thruh-puh-mawr-fiz-uhm) The attributing of human characteristics and purposes to inanimate objects, animals, plants, or other natural phenomena, or to God.
This means that we empathize with robots because we believe they are similar to us. We have feelings for them. If they get bullied, for instance, we react.
3. Ringxiety
Ringxiety is also known as the “Phantom Vibration Syndrome”. We believe the phone is ringing, but it’s not. The reality is that we are addicted to our phones, and our screens.
Golden Krishna, a Design Strategist at Google, and the author of “The Best Interface is No Interface”, opened the audience’s eyes to our screen addiction. As adults, we spend 8.5 hours per day looking at screens. And, according to a study, children become less empathetic after interacting with screens.
There is an app for everything. But the world doesn’t need anymore apps.
The solution: don’t solve design problems by yet another screen. We should instead think how technology can be used to solve problems without a person interacting with an interface.
One of Golden’s examples is Digit, a service that connects to your bank account and saves money for you, without you needing to do a thing.
”We serve computers when computers should serve us” — Golden Krishna
4. Equanimity
Another theme during the conference was design leadership, and how you should act as a design leader. Both Jeff Veen, the former CEO of Typekit, and Simon Bennett, brought up the term Equanimity in their talks.
Equanimity (Latin: æquanimitas having an even mind; aequus even animus mind/soul) is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind.
Their talks highlighted the importance of a manager to create a safe environment for the team, an environment where you can handle stress. Jeff Veen brought up the notion that we can control our emotions, and that we need to have a mental buffer when reacting to changes around us.
“We choose the emotions that we have” — Jeff Veen
Jeff’s argument is that a team thrives when we have a sense of equanimity, a mental calmness.
Summary
To sum up all the talks in a few sentences:
- We feel robots are similar to us humans. We have feelings for them. And they will become our friends
- We need to see past screens when designing products and services
- We need to see ourselves as leaders, not just as designers, and create safe environments for teams
Thanks,
