Why Designers Must Save The World from Ourselves
Let me start this out by saying I am not a designer. This is not one of those pieces saying how important “our craft” is.
I am not even a product manager.
I am not sitting here saying why my job or occupation is so important.
I am a consumer, first and foremost. I interact with a lot of founders and wannabe founders but I always try to bring things back to the consumer’s perspective.
I love the feeling of ease at booking a hotel room on HotelTonight or calling an Uber with the touch of a button of the joy at using a standing desk that actually fits to my form and my motions.
Design is consumer-centric, we know this by now.
That puts a huge burden on designers to not only create products people want to use but also to show them that they should want those products.
This is where somebody would probably pull out the story of Marc Andreessen asking Steve Jobs how people would react to using a touchscreen after years of physical keyboards on their phones and he responded, “They’ll learn.”
This is where somebody would urge you to think like Jobs and just make people learn.
But I don’t want to do that.
The duty of a good designer is much more than that.
The Weird Burden of Our Great Future
In his 1970 work Future Shock, futurist Alvin Toffler looks at the time-based equivalent of culture shock and the book’s namesake, future shock. Up until 1970, the pace of technological progress was so fast that the institutions attached to it — like norms around work, home life, travel, agriculture, religion, and civic organizations — struggled to keep up. People started reporting, for the first time ever, reporting feeling disoriented in their own societies and cultures. They felt what the Japanese tourist feels in Paris, except worse, because now they couldn’t just book a ticket back home.
The future was coming at an alarming pace and there was little the average person could to to stop it. We were going there — even if it meant kicking and screaming.
At one end of the spectrum, you had the futurists, who predicted beds that would serve you breakfast by 1985 and having colonies on Mars by the year 2000. We are masters of our technology and will use it to serve ourselves as we go into the future.
At the other end of the spectrum, you had the neo-luddites — a reactionary movement doing the kicking and screaming. At their most benign, they were the Hippies and Student Movement of the 60s and 70s (the political implications of future shock shouldn’t be overlooked) and at their most dangerous they were Ted Kaczynski and the pipe-bombs of the Unabomber.
After an arguable technological slowdown in the 1980s-1990s and the rise of what Peter Thiel calls “indefinite optimism” — a belief that the future will be better but we don’t need to plan how — we’re on the precipice of another generation experiencing future shock.
The rise of mobile technology and efficient, high-speed networks that can connect a man standing on the street corner to his colleague in an airplane over Moscow is significant. You can access the entirety of human knowledge on a small, relatively cheap piece of titanium, plastic, and silicon in your pocket. You can communicate with somebody on the other side of the world for essentially free. You can document your life and uproot your work from the confines of the office and the cubicle.
We joke about how Snapchat and Candy Crush are the best we have to offer at the technological table today, but the reality is we’ve moved into the beginning of a new era — and that’s just in consumer technology. That doesn’t even take into account the advances we’re making in Artificial Intelligence, life sciences, space travel, manufacturing/3D printing, and virtual reality.
And compare today to just 10 years ago. The advances are staggering for the common consumer. The idea that you could go into your phone and press a button and a stranger with a car would pick you up and take you somewhere would be absurd. The idea that you could easily teleconference with multiple people all over the world would be absurd. The idea that you could print your own pieces of a handgun would be absurd.
The future is coming faster than we think — and that’s just for people in the first world.
Scroll up to the chart above. Note where a good chunk of the world sits on the Y-axis (GDP per capita). They sit at the equivalent of the beginning of the 20th Century for the West. That means, pending nuclear apocalypse, this really is just the beginning of progress for most of mankind.
So, what does any of this have to do with design?
The designers and the product managers are the deciders of how we interact with the products around us. They’re the ones who, little do they know, get to decide the extent to which we feel future shock when interacting with their specific products. They get to control the extent to which somebody feels alienated and confused — as if dealing with something out of a laboratory — or the extent to which somebody feels delighted and amazed — as if dealing with an extension of themselves — with a new product.
This burden is particularly strong for designers in an era of future shock. Technologies don’t go mainstream until consumers have an easy and reliable way to interact with and use them. The Internet did not become mainstream until browsers like Netscape brought it into their homes. The Palm Pilot was a hamfisted attempt at what the iPhone would dominate with years later. Blockchain technology is currently just something for nerds, technologists, and libertarians until there is a designer or product manager who comes along and makes it understandable for the common consumer.
The burden continues into how we interact with the future as a whole, too. If too many people feel alienation and confusion at the products and services they use at one time, the risk of fanning the flames of technological reactionaries skyrockets. There will always be neo-luddites who view every bad thing as the disease of civilization, but the question becomes whether or not they remain in the foothills of Cascadia or come out into the streets of Austin, Seattle, Denver, and Washington.
Go Boldly Into the Future
The future holds with it the potential to liberate humankind from the most universal pains and experiences. Unlimited connectivity, near-zero-cost healthcare, universal educational opportunities, affordable housing, inexpensive travel, and even the potential to cure ailments like cancer and aging.
The conditions for this future are simultaneously simple and complex. It requires a cultural context optimistic and accepting enough of experimenting with and trying out new options and people understanding that change happens at a rate that is difficult to comprehend. We need not only political institutions that won’t stymy growth but also cultural institutions that accept it. Individuals need the understanding that they’ll hold many jobs in one lifetime, not just a career — something Toffler spoke of in 1970 as commonplace but still difficult for the recent college grad to understand today.
And we need the designers and product managers who are bold and excited enough to build this future with understanding — what Jon Kolko calls empathy. When building a product, designers need to place the consumer as a human being capable of experiencing the world and needing to go through many flows in one day to be at the center of design.
It’s easier said than done. I’m not a designer but as a consumer, I can tell you I am excited for products that make me surprised at how far we’ve gone when I reflect on what they do for me.
