We Need to Talk About Digital

by Owen Thomas 
This post has been modified from its original version—a short talk given to design students at Wolff Olins Show & Tell 2016. I hope it’s useful to you no matter who you are.

“We need to talk about digital” is the brief I was given for this talk today. There’s a tendency to insert digital into any conversation without really knowing how it fits—after all, it’s a pretty vague topic.

But we actually do need to talk about digital, because you guys are about to be released into a world that doesn’t understand it.

The world is bemused by the idea of Digital: it’s seen as an Emerald City, a sparkly fortress far away and separate from everything else. We imagine Digital’s inner workings as a mysterious and scary process full of UX and Agile Methodology and fire. We think people in Digital wear green-tinted glasses (this part is actually true).

But not all is as it seems. Howard King once wrote what I think is the best definition of what digital really is by describing it as an intermediary:

I think of it in the broadest sense as any technology that connects people and machines with each other or with information.

Consider what a machine can be: an electronic device, sure, but also a people-powered organisation or even an economic system. A machine can be a lot of things. Digital is a useful intermediary, but less useful than these machines and the information themselves.

By breaking out of our conventional notions of digital, it too can be something bigger. Forget the hype around smartphones, apps and VR and instead think of digital as appendages that help us interact with the world around us.

Designers create appendages.

Appendages are just things that are added to something more important: people. It’s a designer’s job to help define what an appendage is—like helping you pick apples from a tree, designing these appendages solves a problem that makes life a little better for people.

For example, let’s say I want to know if it’s raining outside so that I can dress myself for the day (a complicated enough task without worrying about the weather). You’re tasked with designing me a solution. What do you do?

It could be your first instinct is to design a beautiful weather app, with thoughtful micro-interactions and maybe even a unique feature that offers clothing recommendations based on the forecast.

Except when it comes to the weather, most people just need a window.

In this case, the ‘machine’ I need information from is the weather, not my phone. Adding the phone produces a secondary machine layer that I have to deal with: navigating an interface to pull weather data from the Internet.

An interface is a barrier.

I’m not saying that interfaces are bad. We’re in the middle of a technical revolution that’s seeing mobile phone markets growing across the globe, screen usage at an all-time high and the interfaces needed to navigate them more necessary than ever.

Screen-based solutions, however, are just one way of solving an appendage problem and with them come interfaces and the additional barriers these produce.

Let’s look at a specific example—an app that unlocks your car—pulled from Golden Krishna’s excellent book The Best Interface is No Interface:

There was me, walking up to my car. And there was my goal: to open my car door.

(This isn’t complicated.)

1. Walk up to my car
2. Pull out my smartphone
3. Wake up my phone
4. Unlock my phone
5. Exit my last opened app
6. Exit my last opened group
7. Swipe through a sea of icons, searching for the app
8. Tap the app icon
9. Wait for the app to load and try to find the unlock action
10. Make a guess with the menu and tap “Control”
11. Tap the Unlock button
12. Slide the slider to unlock
13. Physically open the car door (my goal)

All but two of the steps had to do with the app’s digital interface.

An app integration for your car seems like the ultimate idea of a modern convenience (after all, your keys are now in the same place as your photos, camera, messages, food recommendations…) but compare this to the steps required to use a car key—finding the key and unlocking the car—and you begin to wonder how this idea ever made it to market.

There’s a risk of over-thinking solutions if we focus on the idea of digital instead of what people actually need. The Internet has forced us into a relentless struggle with attention deficit and information excess, underlining the fact that life’s challenges (however great or small) require better appendages, not better interfaces.

I strongly believe that ALL design — whether a mobile app or a gig poster or a chair— is about appendages. Think of the various spaces we interact with as machines and appendages as the design solutions we use to interact with them: a gig poster is the voice of a band in absentia; a well-made chair makes a room more comfortable.

Our priorities, job titles, design tools and personal styles are all trends that change continuously over time, but our purpose as designers does not. It’s time to think of digital differently—not as an exclusive niche with complicated and technical processes, but as a simple statement of intent:

Strive to understand people’s needs, help them solve them and make the world a little bit better as a result.

Thank you.