All hail Claudia Tiedemann, the Space-Time-Traveling Design Innovator
What we can learn from the OG protagonist of Netflix’s Dark
Spoiler alert! If you have not seen Dark in its entirety, I would encourage you to stop reading now! No amount of time travel can save you from learning new information that drives you mad and acting horribly against your self-interest.
Not long after June 27, 2020 — the day of the Apocalypse per Dark’s canon — I feverishly caught up with my friend Tayo who first introduced me to this fantastic German series on Netflix (thanks Tayo!). We talked about everything from the show’s science to characters to human nature, ourselves inhabiting different time zones. We agreed that, for all the time traveling and parallel worlds-building, the show’s true brilliance lies in how it manages to use paradoxes to create extreme emotional conflicts for all the characters to navigate.
One central theme of the show seems to be the characters’ coping mechanism for emotional trauma. The show highlights different ways to deal with their painful pasts — by running away to a new world (Hannah), by seeking revenge and inflicting pain on others (Ulrich), by finding new purpose in other people (Eva, “saving” her son), or by devoting your whole life, and sacrificing your emotions, to the wrong but convincing solution (Adam and sic mundus).
In the finale, we learnt that this Gordian knot of hurt is by design. The show took place in two intertwining worlds — where people inflict pain on each other ad infinitum — which were created from one origin world where an “original” loss motivated a clockmaker to build a machine that unintentionally split the universe! (Or something like it.) Point is: pain begets pain begets more pain.
In this never-ending cycle of time, one and only one character managed to figure out the mess and arrive at this insight of there being an “origin” world. That character is, of course, none other than Claudia Tiedemann, the OG female executive in a traditionally male-dominated nuclear power plant, the investigator who unearthed the God particle for the viewers at home in her pursuit of truth, and a deus ex machina-esque figure three years in the making.
The Many Lives of Claudia the Design Innovator
And so here I am, 100% #TeamClaudia, convinced that she’s a design innovator. She is the most badass character on the show with her limitless patience and perseverance and empathy — what a role model for user researchers, am I right?
At GetSalt, when we say design, we are referring to the flavour commonly known as design thinking, a practice of discovering user needs and identifying meaningful insights to solve problems. Therefore, when we think of a “design innovator”, we have in mind a type of person who 1) deeply understands the needs of the people associated with a problem 2) can turn insights into a concrete action plan and 3) do the action with a little leap of faith!
What makes Claudia a design innovator in this show? Well, let’s start at the end, moments after Adam obliterated what he believed to be the origin of the knot. When nothing happened (except the cruel negative space that used to be alt-Martha and their child), Claudia entered the scene, seemingly rising from the dead (which surprised Adam who built a machine to travel space and time), ready to dispense some Claudia wisdom. When Adam asked her how she knew about the origin world, she calmly explained:
“I’ve spent 33 years looking for answers in your [Adam’s] world and in hers [Eva’s]”
What an exercise in immersion! (She must’ve taken some real good notes). And she wasn’t always so insightful at first: in 1987, she user-tested the time machine — abandoning her familial duties in the process, in search of a higher truth! — to do some observations in 2020. There, she googled her father’s death and brought back the information with her to try to stop it. However, she learned the hard way that determinism is not her friend.
But, slowly but surely, she prototyped her way to becoming the expert “person who makes sure all the puzzle pieces are in the right place for the next cycle”, with the help of young Jonas who in turn received help from elderly (but still badass) Claudia.
In 2040, she realized that she was played by her alt-self, so decided to become a double agent to do some parallel-world ethnographic interviewing and fly-on-Eva’s-wall observations. Over time, and with first-hand knowledge of both worlds, she put World 1 and World 2 together to frame the ultimate insight that there is a World 3:
“I tried … to understand how everything can be reborn from the same family tree… Until I realized that we’re not all part of the knot… both worlds are an ulcer that must have grown from something else.”
This feeling of discovery might be familiar to user researchers. We see problems manifesting themselves through make-shift solutions and unmet needs that stem from some deeper truth. She even used a medical analogy to explain the model of the two worlds and frame an action plan:
“If you remove it, you destroy everything that was born of it, but you keep everything alive that already existed in the origin world.”
While the “what” is clear (remove the ulcer), the “how” needed some work. Through her intimate knowledge of Eva’s plans, she also figured out that she can exploit the moment that time stood still during the apocalype to make a change in the system that always maintain itself. When this happened, she said, time momentarily breaks the chain of cause and affect that kept their loop going on forever.
This loophole is essentially a leverage point in design speak, a place of intervention where you can hope to see the most impact. And the ulcerous worlds as extension of a third world is the ultimate non-obvious insight, which we sometimes lovingly call “Juicy Nug”.
So, applying the Juicy Nug to the Loophole, Claudia then devised a plan to visit Adam to convince him to visit Jonas to convince him to visit alt-Martha to convince her that they’re a perfect match and let’s go save the world through the Tesseract or something. She must’ve planned this out in her storyboards, somewhere on the bunker wall, because each interaction relied on an emotionally charged relationship to achieve some outcome (Adam had just killed Martha in front of Jonas, for example). Much like a well-planned customer journey or a stakeholder mapping.
Claudia Tiedemann is not only the badass female executive in her days and the double-agent of time, but the hard-working freelance design strategist for all of Dark’s three worlds. She connected the observations she made at the power plant and across the timelines to distill the ultimate insight that none of this shit is real — and she just forged ahead to untangle the Gordian Knot. Now that’s some innovative research work, if you ask me.
Claudia’s Empathy and The Human Touch in Dark
But all of this work she’s done isn’t borne out of her natural designer instincts; she was determined to save Regina, her dying daughter, at all costs. We have seen this drive Claudia’s patience and perseverance in her pursuit of the truth.
As designers, we normally don’t have such a high emotional stake in a problem that we work on like Claudia did (when we do, it shows up in numerous biases that might actually distort our work). This is where empathy — the skill to walk a mile in someone’s shoes and feel their feels— comes in.
This other trait of a good design innovator, comes out in Claudia’s interactions with the other characters. Earlier, I said that the show is all about human nature and hardly lets the science get in the way. So, while her simultaneously world-ending and world-saving move is in itself a feat of unparalleled (ha!) design research and execution, I also want to acknowledge the depth of her empathy towards herself and others.
In a cruel move, done to preserve the timeline precisely so she can exploit the aforementioned loophole, she asked Tronte Nielsen in 2040 — her former love interest who would’ve been a great father —to end her daughter Regina’s suffering from cancer in post-apocalypse 2020. In a heartbreaking dialogue, holding back tears in the (probably) radioactive snow, she said:
“Do it quickly. It must happen, so I’ll move heaven and Earth to avert it”
Caring for her daughter is, and has always been, her core motivation. So by making sure Regina dies, she is basically motivating herself to work harder to figure out the truth. This is not new: her elder self tapped into this motivation long ago in a different form when recruiting herself back in power plant executive days. Trust me and Regina will live, she had said. She understood herself.
Claudia’s request of Tronte is, by any standards, a leap of faith. She has not seen the origin world but she believed in what she saw: everyone originating from the same family tree rippling pain through space and time. With that, she developed a strong POV that these painful life experiences cannot possibly be real.
Her self-sacrifices come hand-in-hand with her attempts to show empathy to others as well, though she had to cause others pain and suffering to maintain the knot until the last moment. Though she had to cause others pain and suffering to maintain the knot until the last moment, there were glimpses of empathy towards others as well. She went to save Regina before the apocalypse and apologized for being a distant mother. She shared a heartfelt moment with Tronte in 2040 about their relationship and his fatherhood. She set Noah free with the truth about Adam with the missing Triquetra notebook pages, with the knowledge that he would kill her.
Claudia had to deal with a lot of heavy decisions, having understood the big picture. She felt for Adam:
“I’d have like to have spared you all of that. But your path has to remain unchanged… I lied to you. And to Eva.”
Because she could not change anyone paths yet, she had to live with the hurt she’s caused with the hope that it is preventable, next time. After she sent Adam to the loophole, her middle-aged self came and asked a simple but powerful request:
“Papa. Tell him that I’m sorry”
And off her older self went to 1954 and apologized to her father in the past, and to bury the time machine — thus completing the cycle one final time. It was all she could do without affecting the grand solution, and despite her calm demeanor, it must’ve pained her to know everything she knew.
Claudia became known as the White Devil, though instead of bringing deaths to the characters, to me at least, she’s the harbinger of crucial moments of personal change. She gave some characters what they needed, not what they thought they wanted. And she was able to do this because she has been everywhere and everytime.
At the end of the day, she’s an empathetic design hero who took a leap of faith for everyone around her, by listening, observing, prototyping, and persevering. She also envisioned, quite literally, a better world for the residents of Winden. Claudia Tiedemann, you set quite a precedent for the rigour of design innovation. Although we can only time travel in one direction, we can certainly take a page out of her book.
Now time to rewatch the season finale for the 3rd time, and listen to “what a wonderful world” on repeat.
Epilogue: Claudia Playing the Systems Game
Claudia’s standout performance can be viewed also from a systems thinking-esque point of view. It became clear that, the by end, she has been acting as the puppeteer of the entire show — buoyed by the constant accumulation of wisdom from each new version of herself as the cycle repeats. She sees how everything and everyone is connected, and so came this iconic comeback to her nemesis Adam:
“You still don’t know how this game is played.”
Without knowledge of the loophole, and the origin world, Adam’s pursuit of any solution is rendered moot. The system is setup to repeat itself, based, ironically, on the desires of the show’s patriarch and matriarch, Adam and Eva. As Jonas explained to alt-Martha on their way to the origin world:
“You and I. We’re the reason that all this happens. Time and time again. Because you can’t let go of what you want. And I can’t let go of what I want.”
What the show is saying through Claudia, then, is that while a system may stay the same, knowledge over time can become wisdom which can become real actions.
Think of Adam and Eva as bureaucrats set in their ways —one who wants to destroy the false origin, the other who wants to keep it together to save their child — both maintaining status quo. They end up always killing — and birthing — each other and setting up a loop of never-ending p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶ events.
And in marched Claudia, the bright, rising star of the organization with a master plan and a heck of good vision. It was her, after all who planned to use the loophole moment to talk to Adam and convince him to talk to Jonas (after just killing his Martha) to save alt-Martha and go to the origin world to save Marek Tannhaus and his family from a road accident to save HG Tannhaus from heartbreak and prevent time traveling technology from invention. What!?
I posit that this is not some fortunate series of events: Claudia knew everyone’s hopes and dreams and leaned on this particular chain of histories and heartbreaks to reset the entire system.
Her detached view of the system — thanks to her World #3 Juicy Nung and possibility of Regina’s survival in the origin world — made her the ideal, if not only, character to innovate and to disrupt!
“It’s time for you to understand how everything is really connected. Everything you have done. Everything Eva has done, has maintained the knot for eternity in both worlds.”
So she said. In reality, as a non-Netflix character design innovator working with all sorts of clients, we should probably strive to communicate a little better and rely a little less on spying on our “competitors” and internal “detractors” who we disagree with. Do take a look at the leaders in our field and what they’re doing. Learn from their successes and mistakes, and decide what makes sense for our clients.
The show makes ample use of the “we don’t have much time” excuse and no one seems to mind because everyone felt like, yeah, their world is a little weird eh? Imagine if you keep telling your team to “trust you on this”, like forever.
So if there’s another non-takeaway from this, it’s probably that “teamwork makes the dreamwork” with your team and stakeholders requires a lot more transparency than what Winden’s lawful-chaotic situation is affording Claudia.
Oh, and stay curious, because, you know, “what we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” 🌊🌊🌊
