Please make me think
Digital media has adapted to, and amplified, the lazy, biased human nature. What about the friction and critical thinking required by culture?
The first book I read on web usability was “don’t make me think”, by Steve Krug. It was, and still is, a great introduction to the basic principles of functional and accessible digital design. Back in the immature days the world wide web used to be a terrible place for regular humans, and an impossible place for people with disabilities.
Over the last 15 years the digital design industry has cracked important codes. Design principles, web standards and frameworks have enabled a usability quantum leap. The web has been democratized, digital is now the default, we have replaced atoms with bytes, dull manual work is increasingly done by intelligent machines, and all industries have been transformed in some way or another.
Virtual problems in real reality
The friendly, increasingly symbiotic, relationship between the screen and the end user has paved the way for the imminent fully-virtualised world. Media habits have changed dramatically. The efficiency in the general economy has increased multiple times. We are more connected and updated than ever. We’ve given everyone with a cell phone access to a global public sphere. Marginal costs are falling, and digital business models scale really well. Anyone with an idea can, theoretically, become a successful entrepreneur. Plattforms can fix otherwise unfixable systemic problems. We can do amazing stuff by combining our collective cognitive surplus.
So, why are our fragile liberal democracies in such dire straits?
I used to be an optimist. I was sure we were at the brink of some sort of a global, positive singularity. That we would reach a new level of enlightenment and global understanding. Then the middle east exploded. The Snowdon surveillance story surfaced. The mediated interaction in social media makes people feel lonely in their real lives. Hoax news started spreading like wildfire. Brexit happened. A climate denying xenophobic is soon to take over The White House.
Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior. It is a socially transmitted package of experience, knowledge and symbolic meaning within a broad group. Most of our usability principles are oriented towards individual user behaviour. We use design to to form and nudge habits, to get the end user hooked, we create flows and use smart algorithms to adapt to the human laziness, feed their pre-existing sense of relevancy, confirm their view of the world. The lack of friction in the new digital solutions are becoming the norm. And we see create a deeply problematic, systemic problem: Inability to deal with conflicting views in a respectful way. We do not look for nuances. We simplify complexity. All our dilemmas are turning into either/or. Learning, and changing, is hard work.
Escaping the comfort zone
My most important “ pain point” right now is weltschmerz. To ease the pain, I have been reading. Long texts, way longer than the recommend text length of 1600 words. Some of the most rewarding texts use difficult terms, and with reasoning in many steps, they take a lot of effort to follow.
I have even been reading good old books. Paper. No hyperlinks. Linear, fixed storytelling that requires concentration, focus and self-discipline. To escape my own like-a-holic behaviour I have tryed to engage in discussions with people that think very differently than myself. Unpleasant, hard conversations. I have had an urge to meet with friends and neighbours, physical real world conversations. I have been writing. That for me is sort of a strenuous but necessary design-like inner process. Divergence. Breaking things apart. And convergence. Building a new narrative that gives at least an intermediate sense of meaning.
I have in other words done a lot of stuff that requires an effort. I have reached out for more friction. I have been trying to break out of the self-confirming comfort zone served to me by my personalised Facebook algorithms. I exposed myself to opposing views, long form, hard questions, complex answers.
My user task? To understand more. To challenge myself. To think deeper.
The KPI? A change of synaptic patterns within my own brain. Hopefully for the better. Also called learning.
Design for the slow thinking
At some point in this process, I startet thinking about human nature, and the role of the design industry I am myself a part of. Yes, humans are lazy. But we are more than lazy. We are also biased. We look for evidence to confirm what we already think we know. Our mindsets are formed by our experiences. We act instinctively on the basis of pre-existing patterns in our brains. We are not rational. We are economical in the sense that reciprocity, mutual reward, seems to be an organising principle for social transactions.
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman talks of two interconnected systems in the brain, the intuitive, fast system 1, and the slower more analytical system 2. As designers we are really good at dealing with fast thinking. We mainly talk to the reptilian brain, and measure impact in aggregated performance. We observe user patterns in real-time. We measure clicks, views, completion rates and shares to optimize performance. Most web designers tend to be really concerned with best practices to make the flows, screen layouts, colour schemes, navigational principles and content create as little friction as possible. Increasingly we also add algorithms into our design solutions, to personalise, increase relevancy and open up for more new and targeted business models. Designers are conquering the world, through the combination of creativity and structure, ideation and measurement. The whole methodology — design thinking — is becoming a buzzword for business managers. Great news. If the managed business is good, that is.
Simple answers, but what were the questions?
There is currently a conflict between the end users craving for comfort and easy answers, and the needs in society for slower and self-critical reflection. How do we, by design, stimulate the slower processes necessary to challenge our instinctive reactions, ingroup bias, and “tribal rewards”? How do we increase the conversion-rate on interesting, challenging conversations? How do we cultivate curiosity?
The problem right now, both in the US and Europe, is a growing and scary wave of national populism. Linear, simple answers in a complex and increasingly confusing world. This political movement is the tip of a deeper, cultural iceberg. There is an increasing lack of trust between people in many countries. Many real-life communities are already segregated by ethnicity, class, political, and cultural views. Algorithmic editing and personalised media increases “relevancy” for the individual user, but is at the same increasing segregation by making separate bubbles of reality for different group. This happens in a time where we, across our different perspectives, views and idenities, need take important decicions on behalf of future generations. The gap between laws and ethics grows exponentially. To quote Isaac Asimov: “The saddest part of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Asimov died in 1992. Just as the web was released to the public.
There is a two-way dependency between meta and matter, as Dan Hill puts it. And right now, we seriously need to adress the meta trouble. Designers, who know so much about human both the human psyche and the yet unleashed potential in tecnology, can play a crucial part. But we need to be more conscious about the accumulative effects of digital design. And we need to talk more about how to enrich the human mind, and less about how to exploit it.
We need to enable new connections across pre-existing social and demographic graphs. Our virtual connectivity should somehow translate into interesting, useful, real world social interaction. We need to burst the filter bubbles, create more serendipity and develop a learning culture on a societal scale. Traditional models in media can obviously not carry the full burden of the postmodern democracy. A next-generation liberal democracy needs a next-generation public sphere that challenges, not pleases, the intellect.
Liberal enlightenment values are currently being dismantled from above. We need to build like hell from below to keep some sort of balance.
Now, that is something to think about.
