If I had a quarter for every time a designer was asked to make a product fun, I’d have a fortune by now. Fun is one of those words like good, love, and art: so simple and all-encompassing that it eludes definition. So, what do we mean when we strive to make a product more “fun”?

Most interfaces are bound by rigid systems that immaculately align elements to a grid, creating a sense of rhythm and unity. However, in interface design, ‘fun’ is often derived from the lack of order. Like iMessage letting users drop stickers anywhere on a chat thread or our old pal MySpace, who let its users edit their page’s CSS ad nauseam. Those product decisions are widely considered fun because they’re chaotic. They appeal to the child-like aspiration that the world isn’t actually a set of interconnected systems and rules but a vast landscape of undiscovered possibilities to be explored in a seemingly infinite amount of time.

The trade-off, of course, is that fun isn’t efficient. In fact, fun is the opposite of efficiency. Fun is what happens when you lose track of the destination. If we think of digital products as tools that must optimize for the fastest and most intuitive way to accomplish a task, then we are talking about sacrificing fun and serendipity in favor of efficiency and productivity.

That’s the paradox of the Fun Designer. The more efficient and scalable a product is, the more predictable, un-fun —and oftentimes successful — it becomes. How might we balance the opposing forces of fun and efficiency?

Perhaps a good analog for fun in product design is Wabi-Sabi. If you’ve never heard of Wabi Sabi before, it’s a Japanese world view that stands in sharp contrast to the hyper-polished modern aesthetic that most designers love today. It’s centered around the acceptance of transience and imperfection.

Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.

In the context of interface design, the “force of nature” is the human controlling the interface. If pixels are people inhabiting the Earth, the user’s thumb is the almighty weather himself. “Appreciating the forces of nature” in an interface means letting go of the rigidity in the systems that govern its pixels. This can introduce a sense of unpredictability and fun into an otherwise dry experience.

Another contender for fun is the resurgence of Brutalism in product design. Like Wabi Sabi, Brutalist Product Design is unapologetic about its imperfections and it revels in its chaos. Although the original brutalist goal was to prioritize function over form, it is so contrasting with the way interfaces are expected to be designed today that it almost has the opposite effect.

Some designers interpret brutalism to mean rebelling against oversimplified design by intentionally creating ugly, disorienting, or complex interfaces.

In Brutalist design, form takes a lead role but it does so without any attempt at perfection. Instead, it is so raw and accessible that it becomes inviting for anyone to experiment alongside it. This participatory quality to the design introduces an element of exploration, wonder, and…fun!

Products that give users the license to create chaos are fun. This is true in Virtual Reality as well. During my time at Facebook VR, we spent countless hours designing meticulously organized systems for interacting with virtual objects, then regularly brought people in to test our work. What was the first thing people did when interacting with a virtual object in VR? They grabbed it, tossed it, and laughed. If it broke, they did it again but maybe more enthusiastically. They created chaos seemingly as a rebellion against the order in the real world and in doing so, their faces turned from a skeptic frown to a joyful grin.

Fun can best be achieved through interaction. What better way to appreciate the forces of nature and resist convention than by relinquishing control of your interface to the whim of the user?

If a serious product is a hammer, a fun product is Play-Doh. Empowering users to touch and manipulate everything to express themselves fully — that’s where fun can be truly unleashed.

A fun product is one where the user doesn’t have to ask for permission to interact with it. That means, no explicit modes or state changes to “enter edit mode.” The product reacts to the user’s touch and adapts its interface accordingly.

Want to drop a sticker in the middle of a message? Sure! Want to use a glitter background to bedazzle your homepage? Go for it! Don’t know how to accomplish something in the app? Poke around and see what happens until you find what you’re looking for!

So how do we create fun products? Well, the trick is to design systems that account for chaos: introduce users to unbound interaction and then walk them back into systematic order. If your goal is to introduce fun into a product, how will you account for chaos?

Make it fun: chaos in Product Design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How privacy is the next wave in product design.

I’m writing this during a global pandemic where the world has come to a stop. For the time being, we’re relying on technology to go about our daily lives. Now more than ever it’s worth taking a look at our relationship with technology and how its makers can shape it to serve the needs of its users.

The way we relate to technology is constantly evolving — in less than a decade we’ve seen content move from newstands, to our laps, hands, and soon directly into our eyeballs. This is why I’m a big believer in future-proofing design. This usually means learning new tools and platforms, like 3D and motion design. However, we are at the precipice of something much deeper than that: how we define the inner workings of the products we bring to the world.

After spending the last decade exploring the future of technology and how we relate to it — from virtual reality to connected cars and new storytelling formats — one thing has become increasingly clear: people are growing increasingly distrustful of technology.

Privacy leaks and existential threats to democracy cause people to think twice about downloading your next app. The big tech companies continue to exploit people’s fear of missing out and social anxieties. We’ve created (or at the very least, contributed to) vicious cycles that rely on addictive behavior loops, leaving people feeling lousy if they choose to participate in the world of technology. So, what options are they left with? Disconnect completely, meditate and throw their phone into the sea, I guess.

In 2019, I joined Canopy to build an alternative to this reality. Our theory is that the way personalization works today has played a key role in the damage caused by technology. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a more ethical and mindful alternative to building personalized products and we call it Sensible.

Sensible is a set of principles for software engineers, designers, and product makers to build technology that respects people’s agency and privacy when using digital products.

I’d like to share what we mean by that and how we’ve applied those ideas into our first consumer app, Tonic. But first, how did we get here?

How we f*cked up

We think this all started with the Web 2.0, about fifteen years ago. For those of you too young to remember, “The Web 2.0" term was invented by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 and later popularized by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty in 2004 and it referred to the idea that the internet should enable people to create and share their own content with others. This paved the way to online communities that enabled a lot of creativity and self expression (yay!) This trend was accelerated by the rise of the iPhone and other smartphones, which lead to an exponential growth in the amount of user-generated content online.

Viral moments proliferated and the internet as we know it started to take shape. These platforms found themselves with more content than any single person could consume. Naturally, companies turned to personalization algorithms to show only the interesting bits to their users. At the time, the only way they knew how to do it was by collecting a bunch of personal data and uploading it to their servers to train their algorithms. This was powered by what we now know as the cloud.

Then, a business model developed where companies packaged and resold this data in bulk so advertisers could better target across platforms. To measure the success of these models, companies began optimizing for engagement: the more people interacted with their products, the more valuable they thought they were.

So the cloud, business models, and engagement metrics led to a misalignment of incentives between product makers and users. As a result, every website or app now asks for your email, phone number, or even your credit card in exchange for a marginally better user experience.

User data is trafficked without our explicit consent. Companies use this data to create an assumption of who we are on the web. To top it all, we can’t change or escape that assumption. It’s as though every time we popped into our local bodega to buy a loaf of bread, they checked our ID and reviewed our purchase history. What looks like a bodega, is actually an MRI.

This has become the price of admission for the internet.

A shift in demand

We’re noticing a shift in what people demand from their digital products. People are moving away from public spaces like social media and into slower and more private mediums like email newsletters and podcasts.

According to The Podcasts Trend Report, 2019 was the first year where the majority (59%) of their 1200 respondents spent more time listening to podcasts than on social media. And over 82% of them listened to podcasts for more than 7 hours each week.

There’s a clear increase in the demand for an alternative way to deliver and consume information online and product makers need to adapt the way they build products to meet this demand. Sensible, is our response to that.

What is a Sensible Product?

Sensible products are data-prudent, mindful of their users’ time and attention, transparent, and give users top-level control of the experience.

Data Prudent

Never ask for more data than you need, which it turns out is far less than you may have been led to believe.

Mindful

Respect people’s time and attention and never aim to covertly or overtly hijack it. Never artificially obfuscate the underlying design patterns that give rise to your functionality.

Transparent

Always clearly explain, in human terms, how the sausage is made. Users should, to the furthest extent possible, be able to articulate how your product works.

Controllable

Take every possible measure to ensure users remain aware of and in control of the data they share. Build into the core experience the ability to correct misaligned recommendations and rescind any data that has been shared.

We’ve noticed a few products adopting some Sensible principles as they introduce new features. For example, Instagram’s “You’re all caught up” feature is Mindful and Transparent, even though the rest of the product isn’t.

Although it’s encouraging to see products adopt some of these principles, we asked ourselves if we could design a consumer product that provided personalized recommendations while touching on all Sensible principles; our first stab at this was Tonic.

Meet Tonic

Tonic is an iPhone app that gives you a selection of personalized reads every day. We combine machine learning and editorial input to find the unexplored parts of the web and deliver five articles that are meant to delight and inform you. Here’s how we used Sensible principles to guide the design of Tonic:

Data-prudence

First, we wanted to make sure that we could deliver personalized content you would love without asking for more data than necessary. We did this by using a technique called Differential Privacy.

Differential Privacy is defined as “a system for publicly sharing information about a dataset by describing the patterns of a group while withholding information about the individuals.” This is a practice spearheaded by many engineers and scientists who are far more qualified to explain how it works than I am (but I’m going to try anyway!).

In Tonic, we basically create a version of what you’re into based on your activity with the app — what you choose to tap on, how long you spend on an article, etc — then we add “noise” to make it mathematically impossible to decipher who you are and we send that to the server. Once we’ve delivered your recommendations, we throw that noised representation away instead of storing it permanently.

This approach is only made possible recently given the advancements in computing power on newer mobile devices, but what this means is that there is no longer a necessity to collect your personal data in order to deliver personalized experiences you will love.

In fact, we don’t even ask you to log in when you download Tonic (I know. Crazy, right?!). You can just download the app, go through a quick onboarding and start using it right away.

This means that we don’t know anything personally identifiable about any of our users, but only information about them in aggregate. We have no way to know their name, where they’re from, or how much time they individually spend on our app unless they choose to share that information with us.

Feedback

This provided a unique challenge for understanding how to design for our audience. We have no way to target a specific user and learn from their behavior without their consent. So, we decided to lean in to user feedback and create a direct channel to our team.

We put a feedback button in the main screen that, when tapped, it allows any user to send an anonymous message directly to our Slack. It’s a wonderful window into our users’ minds. We regularly get messages from users who love and hate our app and most importantly WHY they do.

The great thing about it is that, even though we are a small team and don’t have the resources for an entire research department, we all get to see how our users feel about the product we’re building. That includes engineers, product, design, marketing, and every other area of the company that is typically not exposed to this level of user insight.

Mindfulness

We knew we wanted to avoid FOMO that made you overwhelmed every time you open the app. There are already a lot of bottomless lists of content on the internet and we didn’t want to just add to the noise.

We created a constraint: instead of an infinite feed of content, we’d limit it to five recommendations every day and aimed for quality over quantity. This made the app feel fresh and gave you a reason to come back every day, without having to rely on growth hacks to bring you back.

Optionally, we can remind folks when new recommendations are ready. Of course, people can choose when the notification is sent. This was an opportunity to delight people while reinforcing the idea that they remain in control of every part of the experience.

Transparency

Most recommendation systems are a black box. How many of us can describe how Instagram’s Explore page actually works? We wanted to peel behind the curtain with Tonic and give people a clear sense of what we think they’re into and more importantly, what information we use to inform that.

Activity

One of the three tabs in the app is dedicated to your Activity. Tonic users don’t have to go hunting for it behind a menu in Settings. What they’ve done in the app is right there, visible next to the home screen.

In the tab, we show them a full history of the articles they’ve read along with how much we think they loved it. We also expose what ‘vibe’ they’re giving us based on their reading history.

A quick note about feedback: we intentionally didn’t include negative feedback because we learned that saying you “don’t like something” puts a lot of pressure on a recommendation system to honor that and not show you anything like it in the future. We focused on four degrees of positive feedback (“alright”, “good”, “great”, and “love”) and one option to “ignore” the read instead to match user expectations.

Vibes

Vibes — also, a mood or atmosphere — are what Tonic thinks you’re giving off based on your reading history, likes and dislikes. Your vibe changes as you interact with different kinds of reads everyday. We base the vibe descriptions on japanese RPG archetypes and create fun descriptions of each user so they can feel seen by the app.

My vibe is “Leader & Planner” which means readers like me “strive endlessly to master human affairs and their own place in the world” — 😏 not too shabby!

We noticed our users really love this feature as it provides an opportunity to understand why they’re being recommended their reads and how that changes over time.

Control

Transparency isn’t enough to create a Sensible product. It must also be controllable, which means that at any point users can correct what the algorithms got wrong.

We give people a couple opportunities to do this in Tonic:

Rating

As I mentioned before, Tonic assigns an automatic rating to every read based on your activity. However, if we get it wrong, people can long-press on any read article to correct the automatic rating. This will steer future recommendations to something more aligned with their tastes.

This core interaction (long press to rate) is something present everywhere in the app: any time you see an article you’ve read, we expose the app’s rating and every user has the opportunity to correct that with the same interaction throughout the app.

Swap

Rating is great for articles our users have read and decided they don’t love as much as Tonic thinks they do (or maybe even more!), but what about when Tonic gets it wrong right away and they don’t even want to read the article? They can use the same interaction: long press to swap a recommendation.

This was a particularly interesting challenge because we wanted to avoid encouraging people to use this mechanic to get into a rabbit hole of reading more than 5 articles per day. After all, Tonic should feel finite and not like an endless stream of stuff to read (see Mindful principle above).

We considered tapping a button to get five new articles totaling ten articles, or replacing all five articles for a new set of five. We settled on individually swapping one article at a time to encourage a thoughtful interaction with the app that gave each piece a time to shine.

Tonic is a small app and a proof of concept for what a Sensible product could look like. Some of these features may sound familiar, but when combined together and designed simply into the foundation of your product, we believe they deliver something entirely new. There are still many unanswered questions, like how to scale these principles to a product that serves millions of people, how do you build a Sensible social platform, and transferring your recommendation profile across devices.

At Canopy, we are exploring these questions and invite others to explore them with us. We’ve already started to see other products adopt Sensible principles — perhaps unknowingly — and can’t wait to see what would be possible if we made this a joint effort across the design industry.

Cocoon is a private social network for families that keeps you in control of the experience.

Hometown delivers local news while keeping your data private.

Hey promises to build a Sensible email client.

And others like Planetary are attempting to build a Sensible social platform.

As I sit here writing about tHe FuTurE Of DeSiGn, I hope you consider a future that is more data-prudent, mindful, transparent, and controllable.

Follow me on Twitter at @gabrielvaldivia if you’d like to share your thoughts on Sensible products or other things design!

Sensible Design: making ethically personalized digital products was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why escaping from strong opinions will make us weaker

Behind every product, there are usually hundreds of tiny little battles fought by a disciplined group of individuals who have somehow squeezed the remains of a vision between uncountable constraints. This process involves folks from multiple disciplines with different goals finding a compromise, coming up with a myriad of hypotheses, and validating them with a diverse number of users with their own set of expectations. This is a process I love. It makes the journey of building products exciting and infinitely engaging. However, this process creates imperfect products. Therefore, it can be improved.

There are many ways we could improve the products we ship. Encouraging a healthy public discourse where we can learn from the opinion of our peers could be one of them.

Yet, in the midst of cancel culture, more people are retreating to private spaces to discuss controversial topics. If phrased incorrectly, a tweet taken out of context can have catastrophic consequences. Similarly, it can feel like a punch in the gut when you work hard for months only to ship something that is received by the design community with piled-on opinions on what you could’ve done better.

There’s an argument to be made that designers encounter dissenting opinions constantly, so there’s no need to repeat that in public. We spend most of our days listening to reasons why our work is not yet up to par. So it seems natural to congratulate others when they finally get something out the door.

This line of thinking could justify the attitude of lifting each other through positivity, especially in a public environment where we lack the context to understand the decisions that defined a product. However, I’d argue that this attitude creates a veneer of support that perpetuates a system that generates flawed results.

Perhaps, a more productive approach could be to lean on each other to elevate the design profession by providing insightful feedback.

Unfortunately, the majority of feedback online is far from insightful. We tend to fall into one of two extremes: we either rely too heavily on emotional responses or are afraid of expressing discerning opinions at all. On one side of the spectrum, we have forums like Designer News, which has a reputation of hosting toxic conversations. On the other side, sites like Twitter are filled with hollow praises after releasing imperfect work, rarely providing critical feedback.

Instead, feedback could be grounded on our expert opinion and backed by design principles, which have held true across time and multiple industries.

Empathy Paralysis

Sharing feedback in public is often fraught with anxieties: you’re likely not the target audience, the team probably went through countless iterations to land the product where it did, and their decisions must be grounded on research that you don’t have access to. So, it becomes natural to assume best intentions and refrain from giving feedback at all. This deprives the team and your audience of a valuable learning opportunity.

The “I can’t know everything behind the decisions that were made” is a true—albeit unhelpful—crutch that many of us tend to lean on. Choosing to not evaluate a shipped product because we weren’t part of the team that made it seems like a missed opportunity to improve the product development process.

Although it’s true that what we get to see is only a subset of the iterations explored, a product can be evaluated by its shipped incarnation, regardless of the effort put into its making. Most users don’t have the privilege of judging a product by the process it took to make it.

This concession only happens in our industry. As an extreme example, imagine jumping off a plane and as you pull you parachute’s chord, it doesn’t open. Would you consider the effort it took to ship it?

Your opinion is not only valuable but often necessary when evaluating your peer’s work. It helps inform the process that leads to shipping products. One step further, there’s value in doing this in public; it helps less experienced designers develop critical thinking skills and creates a system of checks and balances that transcends any single institution.

Limiting feedback to “safe” private settings deprives everyone else of learning from it and runs the high risk of creating an ideologic echo chamber of how to build products. Instead, embracing sharing and receiving dissenting, well-informed, and reasonable opinions in public could lead to better outcomes, freed from any given ideology.

Questions As Feedback

In the absence of context, a formula has been laid out for designers to provide feedback in public without ruffling any feathers: ask questions instead of expressing your opinion.

In this Twitter thread, my friend Brian Lovin goes to great lengths to live up to his bio and avoid making any negative statements by phrasing all his tweets in the form of questions. Although this generated a lot of attention and kicked off interesting conversations in private, it seems to me that packaging feedback into questions is not as useful as it could be in a public setting, where those questions will likely remain unanswered. Brian brings up good points yet chooses not to make those points in pursuit of an answer he (and most importantly, his audience) may never receive.

If Brian were to talk directly to the product team, then these questions would make sense. They could discuss the experiments they ran and what they learned from research. From there they could examine what went wrong and correct the error in the process. Although this is a sensible approach, Twitter and other public settings are rarely the place to hold these types of discussions.

So, should we refrain from providing feedback in public? Absolutely not.

As described earlier, public feedback can be valuable. So the question remains: how should we provide feedback in public?

The Relatability Paradox

A few years ago, I was invited to speak at Valiocon. It was my first real public speaking engagement and I was deathly anxious about it. Despite the invitation, I didn’t feel like I had the authority to speak about any given topic. Then, Drew Wilson gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me ever since: avoid preaching to a choir and talk about your story.

When speaking to a large audience, there can be a tendency to make general statements to try to cover as much ground as possible. However, this can come off as disingenuous and shallow. The more specific and personal a story is, the more relatable it tends to be. This is the Relatability Paradox.

Feedback is no different. Generally explaining why something may be unusable can be less impactful than explaining why something wasn’t usable to you. Expressing feedback from your point of view remains authentic to your experience while leaving room for the receiver of such feedback to decide how relevant your experience may be to their intended one.

Feedback, like all data, should inform rather than drive your product. This means that there’s a fair degree of processing to be done after receiving feedback. For example: Where is the feedback coming from? Did the product have the intended experience? How much does that matter to your team’s definition of success?

Important to note: just because you’re not the target audience, it doesn’t mean that your feedback is not relevant! Don’t underestimate your taste, experience, and knowledge as another data point to be considered when reviewing feedback.

The Case For Design Criticism

Feedback doesn’t have to be constructive to be valuable. A purely negative piece of feedback can still hold value. It’s up to the person receiving the feedback to assign its value: Are they the intended audience? Do they make a reasonable argument against the decisions made? Are they a peer whose opinion you respect? These questions can help you discern the weight you give to a piece of feedback, after all that’s one out of seven billion potential voices you could choose to listen to.

One of my favorite podcasts is the /Filmcast, where a group of film critics watch and review movies. They’re not expected to make the movies any better, they simply try to articulate whether a movie resonated with them and why. None of them are filmmakers themselves, yet they use film knowledge and taste to inform their opinions. Over time, the audience decides who to align with and thus whose opinion holds more weight.

In the world of software design, there are few self-proclaimed critics who have garnered as much attention as Eli Schiff. His style of critique can be off-putting to many, but it has clearly resonated with thousands of people. Why?

My theory is that Eli’s thirsty and inflammatory approach shines a light on two tribes: the prototypical Silicon Valley Designer who benefits from preserving the status quo and everyone else. As a devout reject of the Silicon Valley in-group, Eli consistently and unapologetically points out his believed flaws in the system.

His focus is often aesthetic and—if nothing else—consistent: Skeuomorphism is beef and Flat Design is bust. He expresses it in ways he deems entertaining, which ironically often falls flat. Whether you agree or not with his perspective is a prerogative. The value here is the perspective itself, one of thousands that ought to be unleashed.

Although Eli clearly takes pride in stirring controversy (his Twitter avatar is an anthropomorphized egg) that is not the point of criticism. That which he naively deems entertaining, does a disservice to design and criticism. However, the answer is not to denounce criticism, but to improve it. Better critics will entertain by providing constructive value over destructive snark.

Final Thoughts

While some people go out of their way to avoid expressing negative opinions online, others lean on emotional triggers to gather attention. Finding the right balance is not only tricky but necessary when it comes to improving online discourse, which all of us would benefit from.

If you’re interested in improving the way you share your thoughts online, check out these resources:

• Julius Tarng wrote about giving feedback over email.
• Jes Kirkwood wrote about how to give designers usable feedback.
• Fabricio Teixeira wrote about how to not receive design feedback as an insult.

Let’s push each other to be more critical and challenge what we take for granted with better and more insightful alternatives instead of fewer and less visible ones.

Follow me on Twitter and challenge some of my opinions in public.

The State of Public Design Discourse was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2019—The Greatest Bastards

All lights go down and in the pitch dark, Mr. Rice walks into The Town Hall commanding an intimacy that the Big Apple doesn’t deserve. A room designed without a bad seat, which once aimed to give people of every rank an opportunity to be educated on the important issues of the day.

Before Mr. Rice’s grand entrance, the audience was performing street acrobatics to retain — or rather discover — focus. In spite of being surrounded by the worst kind of stimulus, Midtown was the destination to find intimacy that night. And thus, we armed ourselves with winter jackets, trying our hardest to disguise the logos, and maneuvered through subway cars and hot dog stands to find the box office.

After calming the deafening applause, like an auditory Moses parting the Red Sea, Mr. Rice is suddenly in relationship not just with his audience of hey-I-am-walking-heres, but to his dual microphone setup: one for his voice and one for his mouth. He spares us a greeting and proceeds to reveal himself through faint strokes of his guitar, and through him we all find ourselves.

There’s an audacity to his simplicity. The stage is empty with nothing but a guitar, two mics, and a table with a bottle of wine (more on that later). Nevertheless, the entire Town Hall is captivated and everything is now in service of his performance. He owns the room like Hannah Gadsby’s Nannette taught us: expertly creating and releasing tension with constrained creativity.

Now the entire theater sings with him in silence. There are countless disruptions: phones powering on in the distance, incompetent flash photography capturing nothing, and emergency exits blinding the darkness that Mr. Rice protected. The experience isn’t his songs, but their residence in the space along with too many (more than zero) whooers shouting song names into the void.

You see, Damien Rice uses a Martin 00–18 acoustic guitar. The German-born American luthier never imagined this moment when he founded C.F. Martin & Company in 1830. Neither did the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White when they designed the floors of the Town Hall’s stage, which Mr. Rice stomps on while singing I Remember.

Yet here we are: a large group of likely supporters of AOC’s 70% tax on the rich, an Irish singer-songwriter, a dusty acoustic guitar, a nearly-two-century old stage, a pack of blinding flashlight-wielding ushers, and Damien’s heart reverberating through all of us.

Damien invites a lady from the audience to share the bottle of wine during Cheers Darlin’. The song isn’t the song; it’s her swiftly loosening up as the wine in the bottle disappears. It’s her lingering gaze as Damien teases intimacy on a public stage. It’s the audience gasping as the lady’s partner watches this unfold in front of all of us.

The heartbreak-anthem writer who entered my life in 2004 by accompanying the love affair of Natalie Portman and Jude Law in moving pictures wanted to tell a story, and that story could only be told in Manhattan on a winter night in a rusty, misplaced National Historic Landmark, three blocks from an ejaculating Elmo in costume.

Marshall McLuhan would be proud; the tools did shape the message and, as a result, every single one of us.

2008—Art & Design

I refer to my bass as a limb — a true extension of myself. I use it to express tone, character, and to impart in others a transformative experience. I split my time between jam sessions with my bass and the X-acto knife. College feels inevitable and behind its doors, Graphic Design invites me in. And so, I walk through them every day—the jam sessions need flyers after all.

The push and pull begins. What is Art? What is Design? It’s certainly not the same, that we know for sure.

I’m approaching graduation and I need to check the internship checkbox. So I ask for two days off a week at the small print shop I’m working for, where I routinely argue with a Cold Fusion Developer about politics. I scramble a resume together and apply at the usual suspects: the agencies that somehow retain promise in a small town.

After the rejection letters, I find myself in front of an iMac G3 at the Clear Channel Outdoor office designing billboards for clients who couldn’t afford a graphics department. “I can design something and it will be printed onto a huge billboard on the highway!?” I thought. “After all, I live in Tampa where driving is like breathing, so tapping into the highway is as important as performing open heart surgery,” I said to myself confidently.

There is another graphic designer in the office. His name is Homer. He’s got a long beard, and we talk about Exit Through The Gift Shop. We measure each other’s taste as we take turns playing music while we work. Homer plays Damien Rice’s Amie and he comments how much he likes the line, “Amie, come sit on my wall,” as if Mr. Rice is singing to a painting. Later that day, I listen to the entire album on my drive home and cry the whole way.

2010—From Rice to Rams

I throw my cap into the air one last time and step outside for what feels like the first time. Design is more than flyers for a jam session. Content is interactive and design is functional.

I find myself looking at the heroes on my shelf and methodically replacing Damien Rice with Dieter Rams. In addition to their styles, Rice and Rams differ in a few ways. Most notably, Mr. Rice creates music, while Mr. Rams creates tools to listen to music.

Rams’ work is iconically guided by a principle: good design is as little design as possible. He argues that designers should get out of the way and let people experience content.

This is based on the premise that ‘design’ is a layer in between a person and the content they experience. This works well for static forms of creating and consuming content. You need a TV to watch a film, so you design a TV interface. You need a newspaper to read the news, so you design a print layout.

But what happens when the line between content and interfaces becomes increasingly blurry? The Internet, which skyrocketed into our pockets shortly after its inception, brings a new type of content: interactive, personalized, and ever-present. The people behind it, who took cues from the existing content at the time, continue to push what it means to exist online. As a result we are at the precipice of disruption—a statement that is seared into reality as we roll our eyes at the mere mention of the word disruption.

As the way in which we experience content continues to become more interactive, the Ramsian theory that design must stay out of the way in order to be effective should be revisited.

Interactivity breeds a conscious dismantling of boundaries, both virtual and physical. Content, which is typically constrained within a rectangle, demands more malleability. So, our screens change sizes; they become bigger and smaller all at once. Meanwhile, the dream of Virtual Reality is readying up its encore performance but this time it promises to remove screens altogether and place content all around us, indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

As the containers for how we present content start to fade away in our virtual spaces, the line between design and content fades away with them. Design informs the content and through design we experience, interact with, and create content itself.

1967—The Medium is the Message

More than ten thousand people organize to march in protest of the Vietnam war. Among them, a Canadian professor predicts the World Wide Web and writes a book that serves as the cornerstone of the study of media theory.

In his book, The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan argued that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. In fact, when he first sent out the book to print, the designer misspelled it to read “The Medium is the Massage” and he thought it was so appropriate that he decided to keep it in.

McLuhan believed that we shape our tools and, eventually, our tools shape us. The way we design a system changes how we consume and create content within that system. This idea will carry through many different mediums, far beyond the professor’s lifetime.

Thirty years later and more than five thousand miles away, a latchkey kid named Hideo Kojima will reference this concept in his video game Metal Gear Solid. Psycho Mantis, one of the final bosses in the game, is a psychic with telekinetic powers that guesses the player’s every move and automatically dodges all attacks. The way to beat this boss is to physically unplug the console’s game controller from the Player 1 slot, and plug it into the Player 2 slot. The way to interact with the physical console becomes how to progress within the game.

Thirteen years later, British theater will continue to carry the mantle with Sleep No More, which will make its audience choose their own narrative path as they run around an entire building wearing eerie masks. The characters interact with the audience and anybody can do anything to experience the content. The play is designed in a way that considers the space and the audience as an integral part of the storytelling. The medium is the message.

2013—Online Etiquette

It’s now commonly understood that digital spaces influence our social behavior within them.

Snapchat invites casual exploration and creativity but leaves little room for in-depth conversations. I would be hard-pressed to discuss the death of a family member in a Snapchat story. Twitter focuses on short text and media. This influences what type of content belongs on the platform and strips away all nuance from the conversation. Even the designers for this very platform, Medium, are not that different from its writers as they create tools that invite only a certain type of content.

The advent of digital tools creates the necessity to revisit Rams’ definition of design. It can be broader than just creating great artifacts—whether digital or physical—that stay out of the way to deliver content.

Jared M. Spool defines design as the rendering of intent. Similar to the jobs-to-be-done framework, a client comes to you with an intent and your job is to render it as real. Create a website, an app, or an experience of any kind that renders that intent.

This grants Design the license to expand beyond the creation of frameworks by which to consume content. Designers all over the world consider their output as a way to manifest intent, not unlike Mr. Rice’s consideration of music. Perhaps Rams and Rice weren’t that different after all.

2020—An Alternative Definition of Design

The tools with which we consume content are indistinguishable from the content itself. They inform each other like McKim, Mead & White’s design of The Town Hall inspired Damien Rice to turn the lights off and stomp on the floor.

Even though it may be considered sacrilegious to consider designers — tool makers and problem solvers — as artists, the distinction between the two is becoming irrelevant. We must consider the stakes as we decide to step onto a stage and influence the world, like countless artists have done before us.

Design is no longer limited to rendering intent. We’re held to a higher standard and play a role in defining the intent.

That means questioning everything and playing a role in deciding not just how we design something but, what we should design in order to deliver value. Self-appointed design critics should do more than evaluate artifacts and push people to simplistic positions like ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We should all align ourselves with the problems we want to solve, not the stuff we want to make. Is our work aligned with the future we’d like to live in or is it simply a way to make a buck?

This is more important now than ever as the lines that stand between content and the way we interact with it are becoming harder to discern. We are living in McLuhan’s world. Digital spaces (and thus, the people who design them) play an essential role in defining behavior. This influence will only strengthen over time as immersive computing enters the mainstream and redefines the way in which we interface with technology.

Rams has an unwavering view of the world, which he promotes through his work, even when it isn’t popular or profitable. One hundred years before him, McKim, Mead & White had a view of the world when they architected The Town Hall, which still stands today. Both provide an experience as vital as Rice’s syncopated lullabies. How are you promoting your view of the world?

For more succinct conversations, follow me on Twitter.

Blurred Lines was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether you’re a designer or someone in any creative field, these are a few bite-sized pieces of advice to help you level up on your career.

Find Your North Star

Explore everything you’re interested in, then double down on the few things that you’re good at and enjoy doing (that combination is key).

If money is an issue, don’t pretend it isn’t. Work on whatever you can (no job is too small for anyone) to make enough money so you don’t have to worry about meeting your basic needs. Then get back to exploring your interests. Don’t give up!

Follow Your Role Models

It’s important to take a look at what “making it” looks like (whatever that means to you). If you don’t know where to start, Twitter can be a great place for this. There are a myriad of curated lists of people to follow. Find (google?) them and discover new talent. Then, ruthlessly edit your feed until you’re properly inspired.

Engage In Conversation

Social media can often feel like screaming into a vacuum, no matter how ‘influential’ you are. Likes, retweets, and follows are impersonal and dissatisfying. Your role models will likely prefer a good conversation. If they don’t, edit your feed.

Talk to the people you admire and remind them that you’re listening. Hit that reply button and respectfully gift them your opinion. It’s more valuable than you think.

A trick I’ve tried in the past is making sure I give at least once every time I take. Meaning, every time you open Twitter to browse the feed, make sure you at least reply to one person in your feed or write a new tweet altogether. If it doesn’t feel appropriate, edit your feed.

Another trick: ask questions. 280 characters shouted into a void leaves little room for nuance. I bet your role models will have more to say if asked politely. If they don’t, edit your feed.

Become Their Peer

Following folks you admire can create an asymmetric dynamic between “influencers” and “followers.” The truth is, we’re all similar, we’re just exposed to different things at different times.

For influencers: treat a follower as an equal and invite them to play in your league. It’s tempting to preserve mystique, but I promise you that’s it’s more rewarding to create a team you can trust.

For followers: all you need is to put yourself in front of the experiences that shaped your influencers to be the way they are. Work hard, be patient, and be grateful. The rest will come with time.

De-throne Your Heroes

As you get to know the folks you admire, find their flaws and learn how they define who they are. You’ll learn that they’re fallible just like you. Watch out for thinking they’re not, it can be tempting.

The process of de-throning a hero and turning them into a “well-accomplished peer” can be incredibly empowering and will result in more authentic relationships with them, which they should appreciate. If they don’t, edit your feed.

Share Your Work

Don’t be afraid of/attached to polish. Share what you have, get feedback, then delete it later if you’d like. But share deeply and share often.

People want to know about your thought process, which will be superficial and uninteresting at first. Share it anyway and learn why. Then do it again, slightly better. Rinse and repeat.

This is the “done is better than perfect” stage. Just put it out there, swallow the embarrassment, and learn from the feedback. It is the only way to get better.

Don’t Be Fragile

Negative feedback is valuable feedback. Put yourself in front of situations that are offensive, reflect, then revisit them with thicker skin.

Remember, you’re not good yet. The path to getting there starts with entertaining the idea that you fucked up, then finding ways to fuck up less often as you go. As you embark on that path, an insult can be much more valuable than silence or, god forbid, a compliment.

An insult is a strong reaction. A challenge. A mini boss fight. From there you can learn more about why someone reacted that way and what you’d like to do about it. It’s rich with possibilities and can be very exciting, if your ego will let you.

It’s easier to nod than to shake your head. Be thankful for the courage it took for another peer to express dissent and use that to your advantage to become better at your craft.

Be Generous

Always give more than you take. Solve more problems than you create. In the end, you’ll look back and be reminded that leaving a dent in the universe happens in billions of tiny little ways. Play your part and enable others to leave their tiny little dents too.

🔑 Follow me on Twitter for other bite-sized pieces of advice like this.

8️⃣ Little Tricks To Grow Your Career was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Principal & Founder at Plume Design

About this series —

Impostores is a series that explores the perspectives of diverse folks — outsiders, immigrants, and minorities — who reclaim the word from the Imposter Syndrome and wield it with pride every day.

What’s your immigration story?

I was born in Uruguay; a small, progressive country in the lower eastern coast of South America. Uruguay is swept by beautiful beaches on the southern coast, and gently rolling hills inland. Montevideo is the capital city — as densely populated as Buenos Aires and just as passionate about soccer, tango, and asado, but more intimately condensed. My family immigrated from Spain and Portugal long ago to parts of Brazil and Uruguay, where I see them every year for the holidays. Sometime in the late 90s, when I was a rather awkward 11-year-old tween, my dad came across a job opportunity in the US. My dad was a successful Engineer in Montevideo, where my mom, a Psychologist, had her own thriving private practice. As surprising as the news seemed to my older brother and I, my parents saw the move as an opportunity for our family to experience living abroad for just one year, and decided to go for it. We put our furniture in storage, packed our bags, and set off to the suburbs of South Florida (quite the culture shock for a city kid). Fast forward two decades later, my brother moved back to Uruguay while my parents and I’ve made the US our permanent home.

I’ve always been motivated by purpose and curiosity. Following on the the footsteps of both my parents (who raised me on early Windows PCs, deep conversation and asking a-few-too-many questions), it wasn’t long before I became intrigued by technology and how it is used by people. I went to college in Florida and decided to study a hybrid form of Software Engineering and fine arts. At that time I didn’t know that User Experience existed, but was becoming more and more interested in Human Computer Interaction, software development, and anthropology courses. After graduating and interviewing for many engineering jobs, I became inspired by a group at Intel Labs called the Interaction & Experience Lab (started by Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist). I decided to join Intel, moved to Arizona and started my career as a Software Engineer. Shortly after, I transferred to California to work with the IXR Lab. It was then that I became officially introduced to Design, where I finally found all my interests aligning. Who knew UX was a thing!

Looking to work beyond the boundaries of a lab, I went to Shazam to focus on music and content discovery, building mobile experiences for over 500M users. I then joined Designer Fund as a Bridge fellow, and through that program was connected to Fitbit. It was the first time I had worked on hardware products (and very tiny screens!). As part of the wearables team, I worked on embodied interaction, product and platform strategy, and designing for health and behavior change. Early that same year my partner and I started a consulting & photography business, Plume Design. Now as a Design Lead and consultant in NYC, I’m focusing on design leadership and ways of refining design process and best practices.

What does a day in your life look like?

I often wake up to peel our very sleepy Yorkie out of the bed and take him for a walk. I have breakfast with my partner and go to the gym before heading out. Taking the subway into Manhattan, I walk through the cobblestone Soho streets to my office, an old, sunny walkup near the garment district. I usually settle in with a hot cup of coffee, catch up on e-mail, and plan my day. Depending on the project I’m working on, I might be planning design, checking in with my team, pairing on feature design or development, or being heads down in sketch, prototyping or user research. After work, my nights are usually about making dinner at home, hanging out with friends, or playing music.

Tell us about a time when you used your background to your advantage.

I’ll always be grateful to my parents for having instilled in me a sense of openness and empathy. Even if we had only spent one year in the US, the experience of living in more than one culture taught me that there are many different, equally valuable perspectives and ideas. There’s a lot we can learn from each other. This idea is one that I carry into my work everyday, whether in thinking through diverse perspectives and needs, or thinking about impact for different communities. The old saying that “you’re not your user” is true, but our privilege and responsibility doesn’t stop there — we can also help others’ voices be heard.

What is something you wish designers focused more on?

The number one area is purpose. As designers, we are very close to our users and their needs. In that position, there is a lot of value to be uncovered in taking the time to ask “why” early and often. By understanding business goals and user needs, we can be much stronger advocates of our users and create more valuable, positive experiences. Not only does this lead to responsible impact, it also creates better business outcomes.

Another area that could probably use more love is design systems. It’s a tough one with a steep learning curve. It takes effort and time to be able to understand how developers think about and implement design, and to find a middle-ground for how we build systems. It’s ultimately an effort of improving processes and communication of what we create as teams, and doing so leads to much better collaboration, happier teams, and better design.

Who are the people that inspire you?

Makers, entrepreneurs and leaders who persevere. People like Kelli Anderson, an artist and designer whose work challenges what we expect of the world. Mike Monteiro, who voices issues of ethics and responsibility in a unique voice. Yvon Chouinard, who started Patagonia on absolute passion and has set a strong example for environmental protection in the industry. Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs. The folks from Pod Save America who are opening up political discourse that’s felt obscure and unreachable to so many for so long.

I could probably go on for far too long in this writeup. I’m inspired by those who seek to bring value to the world despite how out of place or unreachable it may feel, and the work they do to persevere through the challenges to get there.

What’s your favorite slang word in Spanish and why?

I don’t think I have a favorite slang word, but I do tend to curse a bit in Spanish (you can blame my Uruguayan upbringing). One of my favorite phrases is one that my mom saved for special occasions, in a refined blend of eloquent language and cursing that always made me laugh: “La requinta esencia de la mierda en polvo.”

Not that I can explain exactly what that means!

How can people find you online?

On twitter @analiaibargoyen or on my portfolio at www.analia.design

Analía Ibargoyen (@analiaibargoyen) | Twitter

Former Experience Designer at AirBnB

About this series —

Impostores is a series that explores the perspectives of diverse folks — outsiders, immigrants, and minorities — who reclaim the word from the Imposter Syndrome and wield it with pride every day.

What’s your immigration story? How did you get to where you are today?

My great grandparents migrated from Spain and Italy to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century. Argentina, like the rest of the American continent, was the land of opportunities. They left everything behind to start a new life.

I was born and raised in Buenos Aires and studied design there too, so I always lived in the same city. I always wondered what it would be like to live in another city. In 2010, I went to New York and spent 4 months there working as a freelancer. I loved the experience but sadly, I didn’t have a visa so I had to come back.

Back in Buenos Aires, I started looking for jobs who would be open to sponsor a visa, first in New York and later in San Francisco. I found a startup that was just starting called Lemon Wallet. After many interviews and two design exercises, I got hired! I moved to Palo Alto in June 2011 and then to San Francisco with my wife in early 2012.

After Lemon Wallet was acquired, I worked in a very diverse type of companies. I worked for LifeLock, an identity theft protection company; then in Xapo, a bitcoin wallet; then I partnered with Aerolab, a design agency; worked as a freelance for a while and finally at Airbnb.

What does a day in your life look like?

I start the day very early, around 6:30 AM for my ashtanga yoga practice. Then I go back home and and have breakfast. Around nine-ish, I bike to the office. I usually spend my first hour catching up with emails, Slack, and organizing the day and deciding what I want to accomplish that day. I’m a big fan of the one big thing methodology so I try to have only one priority per day.

Daily work varies a lot. Some days I have more planning meetings, like Mondays. Some days are fully productive, like no-meeting Wednesdays. On Fridays we usually have a team stand-up, which is great because I have the opportunity to update the team with the status of what I’m working on and get feedback. Around 6pm I’m usually done.

Something very important to me is to shut down work after I leave the office. My Android phone has a very useful feature that turns off all work apps (mail, Slack, calendar, etc) with a single tap. I encourage everyone to do something similar. My personal life has improved dramatically since I stopped bringing work home.

After work I like having a beer with friends and then jamming or staying chill at home playing my own music. On the summer time, when we have extra light after work, I like going surfing in Pacifica with my wife Agustina.

Tell us about a time when you used your background to your advantage

Definitely when I applied to my visa. I applied to a EB-1 visa which requires you to demonstrate some kind of “extraordinary abilities”. I’m not a Nobel prize, but I do think I have an diverse and extensive background that helped me match the criteria needed.

As a designer, I have worked in different industries from Education, Advertising, Retail and Technology. I also have a background in music, art/exhibitions and photography. Having that diverse background helped me match many of the criteria needed for my visa application. Also having a good lawyer helps a lot!

What is something you wish designers focused more on?

I always advice designers to focus more in doing Quality Assurance (QA) and stress testing. Most designers think they are done when they deliver the final mockup/specs, and they forget there’s a lot of work to be done after that. ]At the end of the day, users will judge your design by the experience they are having and not by your beautiful Dribbble shot.

Talk to your engineers and ask them to add you to their alpha/beta releases, test as much as you can with different scenarios like viewport size, language or corner scenarios. Always be resourceful for your team if you find issues and report the bugs you find as detailed as possible.

Who are the people that inspire you?

Generally I admire doers. People that do more (and talk less) and I identify myself with those kinds of people. If you have and idea and you want to do it, just do it!

What’s your favorite slang word in Spanish and why?

Something I love from languages is seeing its change over time. Sometimes I see adults horrified when kids type with “bad spelling” and instead of embracing that change (or mutation) in the language they want to fix it, as if languages were something fixed over time.

Going back to the subject, my favorite slang word these days is falopa, which means any type of drug in old Argentine slang but not really used much more. With some friends we recently started using it to refer to anything you can’t stop eating after you started, like parmesan cheese crisps, sesame honey cashews and saba banana chips.

Estas papitas son falopa!

I would love to see if this word can come back redefined and hopefully help evolve the language.

How can people find you online?

Twitter is where I’m most active. I tweet mostly about tech and design but recently also I’ve been using to self-promote my music project. If you are interested on my music you can follow me directly on Spotify, Apple Music or Soundcloud.

Wiki Chaves (@wikichaves) | Twitter

Wiki Chaves was originally published in Impostores on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Senior Design Producer at Intercom

About this series —

Impostores is a series that explores the perspectives of diverse folks— outsiders, immigrants, and minorities—who reclaim the word from the Imposter Syndrome and wield it with pride every day.

How did you get to where you are today?

My grandmother immigrated to the US in the ’50s. She came from a farm town in Sinaloa, Mexico. She relocated to Las Vegas where she worked as a nanny. She met my grandfather through a friend who would translate their love letters to each other. They married within a year of meeting and moved to National City, where my family now lives. It’s just 15 minutes north of Tijuana, so they were never too far from Mexico.

I grew up where my mother grew up. I had the same elementary school teachers as my mom. When I decided to move away for college, it was a big shock to my family. I was the first in three generations who wanted to move away. In 2006 I relocated to San Francisco where I took up Industrial Design at San Francisco State University.

Since then, I’ve had the honor of working at some of the world’s best tech companies: Apple, Square, IDEO.org, Facebook, and now Intercom. This industry has opened doors I never imagined possible.

What does a day in your life look like?

I am never not working. My day starts early with a walk along the Oakland waterfront with my dogs. Once I head to the office, I spend the day with my team and collaborators. Lots of email and meetings, that’s the life of a producer.

After work I’m tinkering with Designers + Geeks or other creative projects. I also volunteer at a local high school in Oakland. If I’m not doing those things, I’m working on a new business venture that I’ll be launching in early 2019.

I’d be lying if I didn’t account for regular cocktails and coffees with friends and co-conspirators.

Tell us about a time when you used your background to your advantage.

I grew up poor, so money has always been on my mind. When I worked at Square and IDEO.org, I was able to represent the perspective of the community I came from when making product or marketing decisions for financial services. I have also been an advocate for Spanish localization in the projects that I’ve managed over the years. I understand why people, like my family members, prefer making financial decisions when information is presented in their native language. Speaking up for them has given me a sense of pride and an additional layer of impact in my work.

What is something you wish designers focused more on?

We jump so quickly to solutions sometimes. Working to deeply understand people and their situations will bring more meaning to our work. There is no silver bullet for this, but there are habits and practices you can cultivate in your design work to bring you closer to other people.

Working with researchers to understand both people and problems is one way to approach it. Another would be to work to understand your own privileges and bias to mitigate it in your own work. Another way to think about who you are designing for is to ensure that your team, community and collaborators reflect your potential end customers.

These are all tactics to improve learning and listen habits that can lead to empathizing with the people you are designing for before you start to push pixels.

Who are the people that inspire you?

Sonya Yu — She is a self-made serial entrepreneur, artist, mother, and friend. I’m amazed by her drive to understand people. She balances warmth and strength is a way that I really admire.

Francoise Brougher — She was head of business at Square and now is the COO at Pinterest. She is an amazing business woman, strong leader, and straight shooter who I admire deeply. I learned so much working with her and suggest everyone keep an eye on this powerful woman.

Danielle Barnes — Danielle is the CEO at Women Talk Design, where she dedicates her time to helping more women get on stage at conferences. She does everything from coaching to placement and single handedly is changing the ratio at major conferences in Design.

Mom — I wouldn’t be a good daughter if I didn’t name my Mom. She is the angel who answers 911 calls and make sure that help gets to you as soon as possible. She works harder than anyone I know, 60 hours a week for the past 20 years!

What’s your favorite slang word in Spanish and why?

It’s a tie between wacala and fuchi! My mom says both all the time. They are really funny words to me.

How can people find you online?

I’m @michelephant on Twitter or visit michellemorrison.co for full details.

MICHELLE MORRISON (@Michelephant) | Twitter

Michelle Morrison was originally published in Impostores on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mexican American Product Designer at Invision.

About this series —

Impostores is a series that explores the perspectives of diverse folks — outsiders, immigrants, and minorities — who reclaim the word from the Imposter Syndrome and wield it with pride every day.

What’s your family’s immigration story?

My family’s immigration story is probably atypical in the fabric of hispanic immigration stories to the U.S. My Mom is from Hamilton, Ohio and my Dad is from Mexico City. My siblings and I were all born abroad but since my Mom is American, we all had U.S. citizenship from the time we were born and it was very easy for my dad to get residency and later, citizenship. In many ways it’s also been different because we’re white, so people only know I’m Mexican if I want them to and I haven’t had to deal with the kinds of issues that immigrants of color often deal with.

When my parents got married, they moved to Mexico City and then to London, back to Mexico City, and then again back to London. My dad worked as a commercial banker for Banamex at the time (now Citibank) and he was transferred twice to their London office before he decided to leave the bank. My parents had always wanted to raise us kids near family, which meant Cincinnati or Mexico City, and my Mom never liked living in Mexico. I didn’t realize at the time how much my Dad sacrificed in that decision — not only a lucrative career with the bank, but also a loss of his cultural identity as a Mexican. We moved to a tiny, super white, WASPy suburb of Cincinnati where there were a handful of Jewish families, one half-black kid who was adopted by white parents, and us. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for my Dad.

We didn’t spend a ton of time in Mexico as kids, I think my Mom really struggled with the noise, the traffic, the pollution, the language and cultural barriers, and that caused a lot of strife in my parent’s marriage. We barely spoke Spanish at home and really the only “Mexican” thing about us was that my Dad would make sopa de fideos sometimes. It wasn’t until I was 16 and spent my junior year of high school in Mexico City that I really began to feel Mexican, that I began to kick my gringo accent and speak Spanish fluently, that I came to identify with Mexico as part of who I am and it became a love affair that’s still going strong 15 years later.

I don’t talk about it a lot because our immigration story is comparatively so easy next to most of my friend’s family’s immigration stories. We had so many privileges and advantages that even most white Americans don’t have. But there was always a deep awareness of somehow being different; of always seeing things from a different angle; of always understanding that there’s never a singular truth and that what we’re exposed to shapes our beliefs and view of the world far more than any innate truth about our lives on earth.

What does a day in your life look like?

I work as a designer for InVision, which is a remote company. That means my days all look pretty different because I don’t have to go to an office everyday! At first I’d float through the week working from home in my pajamas, but I pretty quickly realized I wouldn’t last long doing that. So I’m still pretty structured, it’s just that I get to make that structure for myself rather than having my work dictate what it should look like.

I get up around 8 most days, shower, make myself a green juice and a huevo ranchero for breakfast. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I work from home in Oakland, so sometimes I’ll go to a coffee shop first thing in the morning and work from home in the afternoon. Or work from home in the morning, go to the climbing gym midday for a workout, and then go home to work again after. It’s important for me to get out of the house though, get a change of scenery and interact with people, otherwise I get depressed really quickly. Tuesdays and Thursdays I go into San Francisco to work — Tuesdays at my old office at Ueno and Thursdays at my friend’s art studio in the Mission.

I also go to Mexico City a lot, since I can work anywhere it makes it really easy to go spend a few weeks at a time there, soak it up and recharge my batteries. It’s such a dynamic, fascinating city with so much creativity and vitality everywhere that it’s really energizing and refreshing to spend time there.

So all my days look pretty different but generally they all follow a similar pattern of working for a few hours in the morning, taking a break to work out or have lunch with a friend and walk in the sun, and then working again for a few hours in the afternoon. I’m luck too in that my boss doesn’t mind when we work so long as the work gets done, so it makes it really easy to find a more organic rhythm to my days. Aside from working full-time at InVision, I freelance a bit, I’ve been working on a platform to help the reconstruction efforts in Mexico after the devastating earthquakes last September (http://brigada.mx/), I’m doing a drawing course on Udemy.com and I take salsa lessons. Other than that, just all the typical northern California things…going on hikes, staring at the ocean, drinking mezcal, trying to learn to surf, hanging out with friends and pretending to be a climber.

Tell us about a time when you used your background to your advantage.

Having moved around so much, I became really good at adapting to different people and situations. Living in this tech-obsessed area, it feels like people can be really mechanical sometimes and don’t know how to talk to people that are different than them, so I often find myself being the one to draw people out of their shells. I’m good at building those relationships in a genuine way, which has no doubt benefited me professionally.

Growing up at the intersection of two cultures is also a really interesting thing — you notice things about each culture because you see them in contrast to each other so there’s a sense of getting to pick and choose the best of each. Americans are endlessly optimistic, supportive, really good at building on each other’s ideas, disciplined in their approach to work, good at envisioning the possibilities and making a plan to achieve them. Mexicans are really good at finding the joy in life, bringing passion, energy and humor into everything, bringing a depth of feeling into their relationships and being incredibly resourceful and creative. I see it as a huge advantage to get to live at that crossroad.

More specifically, I think speaking both Spanish and English fluently has really enriched my life, it basically doubles the number of people I can easily have a conversation with. That’s opened countless doors to experiences, relationships, meals, trips, jobs, etc. that otherwise never would have materialized. I also get to talk about people who are right in front of me without them knowing…which has backfired and left me very embarrassed more than a few times!

What is something you wish designers focused more on?

I think it’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s a very big world out there, especially when living in a place like the Bay Area that can feel like such a bubble sometimes. We hang out in coffee shops drinking $6 almond milk cappuccinos, working on our $3,000 MacBooks and think that’s normal. We have fierce debates about Airbnb’s new logo or who ripped off who’s design, and all that is fine but there are some big, meaty, fulfilling challenges out there that sometimes go unseen.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a platform called Brigada which was born as a response to the big earthquakes that rocked Mexico last September. It’s a platform that maps the damages caused by the earthquakes, shows what organizations are involved and where, and allows them to document their reconstruction efforts to ensure that donations are going where they’re supposed to. It launched just recently and it’s incredible to see a relatively simple platform have such a big impact in a country where historically, there’s been a complete lack of transparency and the government is constantly ensconced in corruption scandals. We’ve come so far in the U.S. that it can sometimes feel like we’re just tweaking something that’s already pretty good, but there are huge opportunities for design and technology to make an incredible impact in other places. We have to remember to zoom out and think about why we do what we do and how it can shape the way we live, for the better or for the worse.

There’s a great talk by Wilson Miner called When We Build that I think is really inspiring and forced me to zoom out and think about the forces at play that go far beyond designing a few screens of an app. I highly recommend every designer watch it.

Who are the people that inspire you?

People who never stop trying, who make an effort over and over and over, course-correcting in small ways all the time to keep moving ahead and growing without resigning to fear or laziness. People who find the courage to wear their heart on their sleeves, to live by their values even if it means sometimes standing alone, people who incessantly push to create their own paths even when the air is foggy and they can’t see where they’re going, people who seek to squeeze the marrow out of life, people who stand up for themselves and really seek to be who they are and not who they think they’re supposed to be, people who choose to learn from everything and who are open and curious about the world around them.

These people are my brother and sister, my friends, countless strangers that I have random conversations with. There are so many inspiring big names out there, the Maya Angelous, the Oprahs, the Thich Nhat Hanhs, the Nelson Mandelas, etc. And there’s no doubt that they’re very inspiring, but in a way that can sometimes feel unrelatable. In my day-to-day life I find I get the most inspiration from the people who walk beside me, who struggle with similar things, and who bring courage, creativity and persistence to their everyday lives in so many small but unrelenting ways.

What’s your favorite slang word in Spanish and why?

It’s so hard to choose a favorite! Chulear is a word I love, it means very different things in other places but in Mexico, it means to compliment someone or something. You could also tell someone chuléame which would be asking them to compliment you for something you’re trying to show off, asking for acknowledgment. I just think it’s a really nice word that you can give or ask for in a way that isn’t obnoxious, like fishing for compliments can sometimes be.

How can people find you online?

I have twitter but I don’t really use it…people can follow me on Dribbble or Instagram or they can email me at luisa.mancera@gmail.com.

Luisa Mancera (@luisamf) * Instagram photos and videos

Luisa Mancera was originally published in Impostores on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Immersive Design: The Next 10 Years of Interfaces

A look into what happens when we design beyond a screen

Like many designers, I started my career as a Graphic Designer. I dealt in picas, carried Pantone books, and swore to measure twice and cut once. Then the web came along and with it came Web Designers. We had to become acquainted with HTML, CSS, Javascript and we’re still trying to keep up with the right way to build for it.

These websites quickly demanded more interaction from us when Flash entered the scene and conquered our hearts. We turned our attention to animation to convey expressive user flows through interaction design. Then, the iPhone showed up and forced us to think smaller. We got excited about skeuomorphism, learned about pixel density, and made a vow to design mobile first.

After a while, we tried to combine all of the above into a holistic practice that would buy us “a seat at the table,” where we could think not just about aesthetics, interactions, and user needs, but also business needs. And so, the modern Product Designer was born.

I’m willing to bet that, like many designers before it, the Product Designer is approaching extinction, and setting the stage for the Immersive Designer.

Virtual Reality (still) matters

Over the last decade, we’ve seen content move from newsstands, to desks, to our laps, and then into our hands. It seems clear that the next step is to remove the device altogether and place the content in the world itself, eliminating the abstraction between the content and its audience. We call the process of designing for this Immersive Design, which includes VR/AR/MR/XR — basically all the Rs.

We are seeing this realized today in phones through Augmented Reality. Tech giants like Apple, Google, and Samsung are rushing to conquer the AR space like a modern Christopher Columbus in search of spices. We’re seeing identity transfer setting a trend in animojis and virtual characters walk around our videos like a Roger Rabbit fever dream. However, designing for mobile Augmented Reality today feels like developing for the Commodore 64 in 1982; investing in a platform that’s novel but filled with practices that will be rendered obsolete before they’re relevant. I’ve found that Augmented Reality in 2018 has two major limitations when it comes to Immersive Design: field of view and input.

Field of view

So far, Augmented Reality is still restricted to a rectangle in your hands. Content can only aspire to be a window into another world; it hasn’t quite inhabited our own yet. Users feel trapped outside in the mundane world while all the fun is happening inside the phone in their hands as if A-ha’s Take on Me never made it to the first chorus.

Input

In 2018, we’ve developed a language for using facial gestures like opening our mouth or raising our eyebrows to control Augmented Reality masks, other experiences rely on the now primitive touch interaction, while the ambitious ones rely on voice commands to interact with the world inside the screen. The input available on the market limits these interactions. However, once we inevitably obviate the phone and achieve immersion through AR glasses, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and try to answer the billion-dollar question: how do you interact with content in space?

This is where Virtual Reality comes in.

The jury is still out on whether Virtual Reality belongs in your living room or as a museum-like destination that you plan for. We’re still experimenting with the medium to find the adequate cadence for virtual experiences and navigating worlds in the much-adored metaverse. If you think about it, it took film quite a bit of time to arrive at the standard 90-minute duration, which is about as long as it takes your bladder to digest a liter of Coke at the cinema.

Today, Virtual Reality has found a fit as the best way to explore Immersive Design problems present in the Augmented Reality future we crave by taking advantage of a more immersive field of view and using natural gestural interactions. Challenges like thinking in 3D and using volumetric UI that reacts to the environment and the people in it.

Not only can Virtual Reality improve our quality of life by providing great escapism, but it can also open up a bunch of questions around how people could interact with technology if it were all around us. Among other things, I’ve found that Immersive Design invites designers to question the line between content and UI and rethink the process for creating digital products.

Content is changing

As designers we’re often told to get out of the way. To be “content first” and make room for the reason people are using your product in the first place. However, Immersive Design poses an interesting question: where does the line between content and UI start and end?

Game designers have been asking themselves this question for decades. As they envision a world to be inhabited by players, the interface to navigate it can often be abstracted into menus that live outside the world’s logic. For example, the interface to start a game often lives in this weird in-between software that acknowledges the existence of the world inside the game by using the game’s characters and aesthetics, but operates based on the rules of the player’s world.

And so, video game companies draw a line between UI and Game Designers. There’s logic to this decision: Game Designers are often proficient in 3D tools while UI designers generally work in 2D. This decision can sometimes lead to immersion-breaking solutions that require players to suspend their disbelief when the game reminds them they’re in a video game with video game systems.

The explicit line between UI and content is tolerable in a video game, but as we step into the world of Immersive Design, we won’t necessarily have the luxury of flat menu trees that exist outside our reality. We are tasked with finding solutions for UI that follows the rules of our augmented world; where do the menus come from and how do we interact with them?

As they’ve matured, video games have given us examples of how design can be woven into the environment and blur the line between content and interface.

On the left image above, 2011's Skyrim shows UI to manage inventory plagued with floating text alerts around the screen, using the typeface Futura for a game that takes place in medieval times. Although the menu is intuitive and efficient, it grossly breaks immersion and reminds the player that dragons aren’t real. On the right, 2018's S.O.S. relies on a more immersive schema that pulls out a physical map in the player’s point of view and requires the use of a radio (with radio channels and static) to communicate with other players.

We are seeing similar practices arise in Virtual Reality games. Although some games rely on the traditional 2D menu systems, others place cues in the environment to educate the user. This is important because, in VR, the player has fewer abstractions to escape to. VR controllers are often shaped around a player’s hand to promote natural interactions that don’t typically lend themselves to menu trees.

On the left, Doom VFR uses a traditional approach to user interface — a 2D panel of information floating in space. On the right, Wilson’s Heart places the UI in the world as a clipboard that can be grabbed and reacts to the lighting in the environment. Doom doesn’t seem concerned with reminding users that they’re in a video game, which of course needs to provide you with text cues for learning how to play the game. However, Wilson’s Heart makes an effort to insert those cues as a plausible element in the environment, further enhancing the immersion of that experience.

On the left, Space Pirate Trainer asks the user to literally shoot menu items to select the game mode. On the right, Arizona Sunshine lets the user grab and insert cartridges into a retro console to pick a game mode. The point-and-shoot interaction is carried over from the mouse and keyboard era and ported into the context of the Space Pirate Trainer while using cartridges to select a game mode fits perfectly within the tone of Arizona Sunshine and evokes a feeling of nostalgia that many VR players crave.

Arktika 1 applies a clever, mind-bending technique to enter a tutorial: the user is handed a VR headset inside the VR experience. By putting the headset on, the user agrees to suspend their disbelief and enter a virtual world that doesn’t follow the same rules as the Arktika world. It’s a tongue in cheek moment that ambitiously aspires to create not one but two alternate worlds. By contrast, the Arktika world feels much more real because it appears self-aware and higher fidelity than the training environment.

These are a few examples of the great Immersive Design work happening in Virtual Reality right now. For many of us, stepping into Immersive Design means placing a bet that content won’t be confounded to the boundaries of a screen. We see that as an opportunity to invent interactions that are so intuitive they become invisible — like pinch to zoom or pull to refresh. Today, our work consists in finding those interaction patterns, which will seem obvious in retrospect.

If you’d like to chat more about this, or simply just send me pictures of your dogs, feel free to reach out on Twitter.

Gabriel Valdivia (@gabrielvaldivia) | Twitter

Immersive design: the next 10 years of interfaces was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.