Digital Copycats: Escaping Plato’s Cave

Hello!

It’s Kar and Will again. Last June we launched the Will-Wai experiment to evolve our one-size-fits-all design process.

We started the experiment because it felt like we were living in a sea of sameness, where websites looked the same. Not only are we copying websites, but also entire products and services — some of which don’t seem to solve for any problems. (In one of our introductory blog posts, we question whether “design is at risk of turning into a middle-class problem solving machine”.)

And now, we seem to have reached a new inflection point of copying, thanks to Facebook.

“Facebook is copying Instagram’s copy of Snapchat’s story”, read a brilliant headline from TechCrunch in February.

Another visualisation of how Facebook’s clones have ripped off Snapchat:

Bloomberg

Looks like Apple’s joined the copying bandwagon too.

Fast Co.Design

We couldn’t resist — here’s one more diagram to accentuate the point:

Thanks Recode

Poor Snapchat. (Minus the IPO.)

We shared our findings from the experiment at SXSW this March, and you can find a link to our presentation at the end of this post.

To help set the context, here’s a short write-up.

First time at SXSW, whoo!

So what’s this got to do with Plato’s cave?

Plato’s allegory of the cave describes a group of prisoners who have been chained to the floor their whole lives, facing a blank wall. On the raised walkway behind these prisoners, puppeteers use objects to cast shadows against the wall. Overtime, these shadows become the prisoners’ reality. The prisoners give names to these shadows, unaware of the fact that they are shadows and of a world outside of the cave.

In the same way, we feel like we’re living in a Plato’s Cave today, where tech giants are casting the shadows we see everyday — and we are the prisoners.

How are we living in a Plato’s Cave?

👉 Our puppet masters: Facebook and Google are massively influential. 2/3 of the world’s digital ad revenue flows through this digital duopoly. Alongside the likes of Apple, they are the “urban planners for a billion people’s attentional landscape”, in the words of ex-Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris. Together, these tech giants dictate the conditions of the cave we live in today.

👉 Us as prisoners: However, it’s not just a one-way thing; we are helping tech giants dictate what shadows to cast each time we interact with them. Everytime we ‘Like’ something on Facebook, we’re contributing to the algorithms that dictate what content we see on our newsfeed. Anytime we use their services — with our online behaviour being monitored to microscopic detail — we’re complicit in generating increasingly sophisticated, and addictive, shadows.

👉 We’re addicted to these shadows… because we see ourselves in them. Or rather, these shadows have been so well designed they make us see ourselves in them. Snapchat filters, Instagram stories, emojis: they all enable us to project our own shadows to the world. Everyone becomes a content creator of themselves.

A friend’s Facebook status recently 😂

👉 The industry is imprisoned too: And then there’s us — designers and non-tech giants — desperately trying to insert ourselves as faux puppet masters of the cave to compete in today’s attention economy. And now it seems we’ve adopted a cookie-cutter approach to design out of sheer convenience: to churn out digital copycats.

So what?

The danger is when we as designers (and our clients) blindly adopt the design process and operate within the cave without being aware of it.

As Carissa Carter, Director of Teaching and Learning at Stanford d.School says, by adopting these hexagons, we end up following THE design process. It becomes almost too easy; we follow a design-led process expecting it to generate ‘human-centred’, ‘personalised’ products, services and experiences by the end of it (because everyone wants personalisation). However, the reality is we’re simply perpetuating a sea of seamless, frictionless and on-demand experiences that are far from human-centred.

And this is something we’ve tried to tackle in our experiments: how do we account for all the invisible, the unseen, the unintended consequences potentially generated from user-centred design? How do we tackle the sometimes limiting and potentially assumptive discourse of designing for customer needs and wants, which seems to only create more digital copycats for a select group of people? (Our ‘Below the iceberg’ route below is designed to address some of these questions, and we’ll have a separate blog post on this soon.)

A slide from our presentation showing ‘different’ design processes

So that’s why we decided to do something about it. Through our experiments, we learned that evolving the design process requires experimenting with and adding rigour to our design process. The only way we can break out of the cave is by evolving how we design.

How do we escape?

From our experiments in London and Hong Kong, we devised three routes out:

1. Below the iceberg [a way of thinking to distort the shadows being cast] — a separate write-up on this will be posted soon!
2. Conscious experimentation [a way of doing to break free of our shackles]
3. Uncomfortable design [a feeling — the most visceral feeling you will get in design — to help us access and harness realities beyond the cave]

How each of our routes are designed to help us break out of the cave — from disrupting the shadows to bringing light into the cave (Illustration: Isaac William)

Check out our presentation on SlideShare.

Thanks so much for reading. Any questions? Find us at @willwai1 or willwaiexperiment@gmail.com.