The case for Liminal Design
On the narrative of design for complex emotions in technology.
It is easy to assume that the beautiful messiness of desires, awe and transformation belong to worlds far away from the good folks that brought you smartphones, digital assistants, and Hello Kitty vibrator ads (matching flip-flops included!) in their versions of the internet. But the opposite is true — and also very much possible. We just need to be more explicit about what it means to be interesting and fully human. And then really go to work on the one thing critically missing from the current stage of technology: liminality.
We don’t have a choice. Asking Siri what the weather’s like tomorrow doesn’t require anything fancy. 13 degrees Celsius. Thank you, done. But the ubiquitous nature of technology has very large companies mediating a lion’s share of our relationships with others and with the world around us. And that technology is transactional at heart: designed for efficiency, scale, and predictability — the very opposite of any truly meaningful experience.
Unless we want to rid ourselves of technology completely — and we don’t — the first order of business is to look beyond, well, business. We don’t need new technologies, or more features. We need more ambitious design — and a relationship to it akin to what we have with art and fiction. We need to build products and experiences that include and hold the complex emotions that make us fully human. We need better conditions for sincere exploration.
Fictional Solution
Contrasting with the transactional nature of our day-to-day technological tools are art and fiction. By the very nature of being art, these stories and objects transcend utilitarian functionality. That’s how they were created, and it is in that context that we approach them. This is key: we only approach a story or a liminal space if it denotes something we can’t have where we already are. Liminality is voluntary, a social space and expectation that we enter to play out an alternative narrative. This narrative needs to hold enough promise for us to invest in and experience what is not real. It needs to create narrative desire.
There are two contradictory but quintessential elements of narrative desire. All story — art included — require these two opposing forces to dance together: to be both inevitable and surprising, at the same time. If a story lacks inevitability, it is just random and chaotic. It lacks meaning. At the same time, if it’s just inevitable we are back where we started: the transactional and predictable. In a fully mechanical and predictable narrative, there is no need for us to invest ourselves in fictional characters and events. We already know what will happen and therefore the experience can’t teach us anything new about the world or ourselves.
But if the story promises to be both meaningful and surprising — at the same time — we stay invested and feel a strong need to know what might happen next. All stories worth attention work like that. The space between these two opposites is narrative liminality: what is, and what might be. Liminality creates room for narrative.
Suspension of disbelief
Even with the most brilliantly written and directed film, none of the structure matters if we don’t allow ourselves to be present in the fictional universe it serves up. If we can’t focus on reading what is on the page, no Russian master can save us from ourselves. We need suspension of disbelief. And it is with this intentional departure from the noisy, loud, and often all too real world — to step into the darkness of cinema or theater — that is our price for admission. This is where we hand ourselves over — if just for a few moments — to a world and events that we know are not real. That is the whole point. This is us creating liminality.
The notion of liminality (from the latin term limen: threshold, boundary) was first introduced by the ethnologist Arnold van Gennep to describe the initiation rites of young members of a tribe, which fall into three structural phases: separation, transition, and incorporation. Van Gennep defined the middle stage in a rite of passage (transition) as a “liminal period.” Let’s be even clearer: the experienced fiction evokes very real feelings. This is not about comfort, escapism, or entertainment. This is about exploring the world and ourselves more fully. Only in a safe and liminal space can we do transformational work. And it is this liminality that we need to deploy and target in product design to claw back agency and room for all the things that don’t conclude with a transaction.
The reality of unreal
From a narrative perspective, liminality can be thought of as metaphors and semiotic distinctions. Here, it’s the contradictory space to be found between what we define as now and then, me and not me, here and there. This is a psychological mirror of the narratives found in the space between inevitable and surprising. In this liminality we can venture away from the established status quo (inevitable) and play with what is not (surprising). The feelings experienced however are real, although the space might not be. And transformation happens when we try to accommodate what we felt was real with something that we know is not. The inevitable and surprising are asking to be fused into a new narrative — a new us.
For intentionally designed liminal spaces — in contrast to awe experienced from say nature or external catastrophic disruption — the dialogue suggested between one reality and the other is both targeted and specific, i.e., it offers an experience that suggests a certain narrative path of personal transformation. Psychologist Raffaele De Luca Picione beautifully explores this complex interplay between semiotic structure and narrative liminality:
“The peculiar dynamics and the semiotic structure of borders generate a liminal space, which is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities in the semantic and syntactic processes of sensemaking. The psychological processes that occur in liminal space are strongly affectively loaded, yet it is exactly the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narrative forms.”
This is only new to technology, not to us
All this might seem like the blueprint for a high-tech vending machine for Stendhal Syndrome (a condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations, occurring when individuals become exposed to objects of great beauty). But liminal spaces are commonplace throughout human civilizations and still prevalent outside technology: a church, cinema, sports arena, theater, teahouse, meditation center, Burning Man, nightclub, etc. Even the simple act of opening and getting lost in a book is a direct way to illustrate liminality and suspension of disbelief: why we need it, that we already know how to use it, and, if we want, how we can make it part of more interesting experiences — digital or not.
I will not cover all the details of implementing this approach as a design process here, but do offer a more complete exploration of theoretical models and practical steps that apply liminal thinking directly to UX design and product development in the paper “Liminal Design” (Liedgren, Desmet, Gaggioli 2022). At the top level, this design model includes three sequential steps. First: setting a narrative target and expectations to drive suspension of disbelief; second: optimizing design through abstraction and reduction; and last, to support the targeted experience through UX feedback, friction, and in-product ceremony.
More interesting and certainly better looking
Had we asked someone 20 years ago what they hoped computers and the internet would bring humanity by the time of this article, a survey of today’s technological landscape would be sure to disappoint. Reapproaching technology through the lens of Liminal Design pries open more doors for development and innovation. It also fundamentally challenges today’s transactional and commercial nature through the questions it asks.
The beautiful complexity that comes with Liminal Design delivers not only experiences that we have lost, but also aspirations for what we have never seen. Like all changes in behavior, it is not about bending small parts of a narrative, but rather providing new ones that speak of hope more directly to our imagination. There is no one single way to apply Liminal Design. And in its wider acceptance as part of product development, I hope that the multitude of solutions it offers will also lead to the unlimited inclusiveness of just as many profound experiences.
Johan Liedgren
Award-winning film-director, writer and story consultant working with media and technology companies on narrative strategy and product development. http://www.liedgren.com / https://medium.com/@johan_liedgren
