When a Visionary Ancestor Comes to Town

The Oppenheimer moment — A summation of Alan Cooper’s Closing Keynote at UX Australia 2018

Kim Bonavia
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read
Alan Copper delivering his Closing Keynote at UX Australia 2018

I had heard a lot about Alan Cooper. Among other things, he’s one of the godfather’s of Interaction Design.

My three key takeaways were:

  • It’s more about designing responsibly, it’s about the ramifications of design for future generations
  • Reverse your thinking of design. Rather than always thinking of the good, think of what can go bad with the design (if it’s in the wrong hands) and combat the bad before release
  • Stay grounded throughout this process

Let me explain…


When Alan began his keynote closing talk at UX Australia, I wondered what he was getting at when he told the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. However, it became clear after explaining Oppenheimer’s disgust at being an inadvertent creator of so much death and destruction.

Alan was telling us to design for good, not evil.

He continued shaping his point by citing more recent examples of people whose innocent creation lead to unintentional consequences.

Without naming the companies, two examples sited are:

  • A social media company finding out that their product was used to influence an election through foreign meddling, hence divert the course of history
  • Another well known social platform used by pro-Nazi’s to promote fear and hate-mongering

Alan’s point wasn’t just talking about ethics in design or designing responsibly. It was more than that. He took design thinking to another level. We need to consider possible toxic behaviour when designing a product, not after it’s released and by that point, intervention is merely reactionary.

It’s about being a good ancestor. It’s about the long term effects concerning our children and children’s children.

He posed two questions to us:

“How do we know what we know? How are we going to know?”

“Divert the course at the source”

The light bulb moment for me was the analogy of the mighty Mississippi River. When designing, even though the design is of best intentions, identify weaknesses and possible evils of design upstream at the source. Not once it is too late and has been compromised in unexpected ways, by those undertaking toxic behaviour.

To be a good ancestor, according to Alan Cooper, we need to:

  1. Vigorously examine assumptions
  2. Externalities are a complex web. They can hide but everything is connected. By saying ‘that’s not my problem’ creates bad ancestry. It’s not just up to CEO’s or community leaders to fix problems, we can all participate.
  3. Time scale: Consider the entire lifespan of our products and what we’re designing

An unofficial fourth factor of ancestry thinking is to think of the tactical tools for ancestry thinking. People become representatives of the system. It’s easy to slip into the system. Keep your head up and raise everyone’s awareness of the problem.

“System failure is an intrinsic feature of the system” — J. Gall

Images of Alan’s ranch in California were an ideal backdrop for the topic.

Throughout his talk, Alan articulated his point on a slide deck which was driven home his point. The inspiring slides were the self-shot images of life on his ranch in California. Not only were they pretty but also functional. There was grounded goodness in them that reminded us to be good ancestors at the most basic human level possible.

They cleverly intertwined the complexity between nature and technology, and how we are custodians of that responsibility.

“We are the keystone in the arch”

In his closing, Alan encouraged us to be an ancestry thinker and change the vision in technology.

Alan, you lived up to your reputation.

Thank you for your encouragement… and for pronouncing ‘Melbourne’ correctly. It didn’t go unnoticed by me or my colleague sitting next to me!

Hi there! 🙋🏻‍♀️Thanks for reading. If you liked the article, please leave a clap 👏🏼(you can clap more than once, by the way!). You can go ahead and share it with people who’d be interested. 😁 If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

NYC Design

A publication for designers in New York and followers all around the world. Design thinking is what makes us write here on Medium to share with the designers of the world.

Kim Bonavia

Written by

Where user needs and business meet

NYC Design

A publication for designers in New York and followers all around the world. Design thinking is what makes us write here on Medium to share with the designers of the world.

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