Living, Breathing Products: Thoughts on Organic Design
Lately I’ve noticed some trends converging into a larger trend that might aptly be described as Organic Design.
While at a talk by a roboticist from Jibo named Maxim Makatchev, I asked him: How do your designers craft and codify their design intent if the robotic interactions are so complex and human-like?
He answered that the engineering team built an artificial environment for the designers to compose Jibo’s movements.
In interaction design we use a single acceleration curve, duration, and sometimes keyframes. That’s simple enough. But imagine an orchestration of vocal, screen, and bodily movements working in concert resembling human emotions, customized based on the inputs. That’s complex.
The implications of this approach seem pretty powerful, and now I’m seeing similar trends everywhere everywhere I look.
Here are some examples.
- Machine Learning: Requires some software to “learn” over time, just like an organism. How/should the level of learning be reflected in the interface?
- Voice Design & Chatbots: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, etc. are all becoming more humanlike. How do you design a personality or conversation?
- Maps: Cities as systems seem to function much like living breathing organisms. If this is true, what can map interfaces learn from biological systems?
- Data Visualization: As data grows in importance, there are more opportunities to communicate that data. Do data relationships resemble a complex system?
- Explorable Explanations: The idea of interacting and exploring as a means towards learning. Often using simulated environments.
- IoT: If all apps begin talking to each other, that begins to look a lot like the communication systems between plants, insects, fungi, and so forth. What does ecology and systems biology have to teach us about IoT?
- Responsive Design: The number of places, shapes, and forms a design can live in is increasing.
- Customer Journeys: Tools for designing and mapping customer journeys are taking into account the sheer number of permutations that a customer can go through in their experience. Solutions are increasingly designed around more bite-sized interaction units, rather than strict, predefined pathways. (Which sounds a lot like molecular bio!)
- Engagement Loops: The engagement loops for AI-based apps look increasingly random, as engagement becomes determined by complex rather than simple inputs.
- Biomimicry: Engineering and design seem to be learning more and more from the animal kingdom.
- Industrial and materials design: With 3D printing and other new manufacturing techniques becoming available, I’m seeing more and more things made in shapes that were never before possible. Like this car’s frame structure designed partially by an algorithm.
- Genomics & Microbiology: Once we thought that DNA was only edited during inception, but with horizontal gene transfers, viruses, and a variety of other things, we’re learning how much more complex that stuff can be. What are the implications for taxonomy, gene labeling, codification and communication?
- Sounds & Haptic Feedback: When you poke a rock, it doesn’t do much. When you poke a living thing, typically there’s a response. What about when you poke or touch apps? Haptic feedback is growing in importance on smartphones and watches. For sound, Facebook now goes so far as to offer a SoundKit for developers, so we’ll see where that leads in the future.
- Parallax & Design Physics: Apple did a great job bridging the gap between the phone interface and the real world by introducing parallax on the home and lock screens. This is one step towards a system that’s more integrated with the outside world. Similarly, tiles at OpenAI and Apple TV respond to the position of a cursor, giving them a certain lifelike quality.
- Eastern Philosophy: The simple idea that all things are related seems to have various influences on Western thought. It carries some level of influence on the Simple-Cause-And-Effect focused scientific community, and I often wonder if it’s spreading more into Western design.
- Flexible Learning & Workspaces: The architectural idea that spaces should mold around social movement is taking hold in classrooms and some workspaces. This represents an inherently organic approach.
- Context Awareness & Sensitivity: As apps get smarter, an awareness of both the environment and emotional state of users seems to get more important.
And some more thoughts and questions…
- Skeuomorphism went out because it was seen as fake, tacky, and loud. Flat design came about as a reaction to that, amplified by startup culture’s drive towards efficiency in both design and development. Might organic design be the next trend, now that efficiency is a given, and flat design is boring and soulless (in its extreme form)?
- Do these trends represent an embracing of the randomness and chaos found in nature?
- Is there some career out there in the future that might be called “product ecology”?
- Will people ever get tired of swiping at glass screens? I know I am. What about “fleshy” or furry products?
- Will apps have different life stages that the go through, as they accompany you through many years like a friend? I’m imagining my Facebook profile 30 years from now. (It better be a friend I trust.)
Also interesting to note that Cybernetics 2.0 was created to incorporate autonomy as a core feature, to accommodate political and biological systems. Soon it’ll make sense to consider autonomy a part of software systems, too. Let that sink in…
Frank Lloyd Wright & Organic Architecture
Wright was famous or his architectural style that blended a geometrical vocabulary seamlessly into the natural, surrounding environment. In a sense, you could say it aimed to be unobstructive. He called it organic architecture, summed up nicely in the Wikipedia article:
The idea of organic architecture refers not only to the buildings’ literal relationship to the natural surroundings, but how the buildings’ design is carefully thought about as if it were a unified organism.
Clearly, the dude was ahead of his time.
Apps as Lifeforms
So Organic Design can be succinctly described as the idea that designs are increasingly influenced by biological principles.
And if you stretch it to its extreme, that’s when it really takes form: What might a world look like where apps and devices function more like living, breathing organisms?
