previously on wonder.systems: climate-change hurricanes have broken down abstraction barriers in a way far realer than postmodernism prepared for.
Storm walls flooding, what comes between internal and external? Uber Corp is, according to a judge, a price-fixing scheme masquerading as a taxi service pretending to be a user interface. In the wreckage, black box blobs of social interaction are broken open like sea urchins by crawling Big Data starfish:
you could also say the data model for posts has primarily been oriented around the metadata for each post, and less so the blob of media—the actual data—that comprises it. [...] Suddenly all those bits that comprise the blobs — blobs of photos and video and audio — we're all posting to the internet are now inspectable. <
http://whoo.ps/2016/03/14/subatomic-units>
A/B testing (and other more statistically sophisticated techniques) make the Interface just the automation of the User: how can we get them to click what they click faster, with less thought and more flow? This Fordism is met by a Taylorism: as designers we want to measure a product's us(er)ability, time/motion study their actions.
The above quote is over-generous: as the wonderful book Design for Real Life points out, we often design for only the behaviour of median people, or (in the new user-experience design canon) for fictional ones called "personas":
For all our efforts to concoct diverse background stories and reasons for using our design, we frequently only create idealized personas: attractive people happily interacting with our products and completing tasks. We feel better just by looking at them. [...] The personas we create often don't leave the door open for these imperfections—and so we never imagine them in crisis situations. <Design for Real Life>
Personas are useful tools, but have a tendency to be enshrined by institutions:
My thesis again - it's currently being knocked back for registration as a "medical" thesis because I have chosen the wrong person to bless with denomination of 'user' - not the medic, or patient, but the person who fixes the machine. Or have I User-ed them - I think more that they are one actor in the system whose interaction I recognise to be more important to the goal (the system-shove) at hand. <Grace Kane, response to HURRICANE GLASS>
Yesterday leading a new user through my thesis software reconnected me with it in a way I hadn't felt in months: things I'd been sighing over became crises of teaching: it felt envigorating, and vital. I fell easily into the pattern, helping observing questioning imagining; maybe I can only work on something so long without needing to see it through new eyes. There's a humility that I need, the opposite of the designer arrogance of deciding what is wanted by others.
Both that humility and that decision-making are essential, but the former seems often lost in "user-centred" design.
I came away from that study thinking, why are we testing with anyone with high literacy? Designing for people with low literacy would make it easier for people who are distressed, distracted, sleep-deprived, on medication, whatever. If I could build this into everything, I would. <Dana Chisnell as quoted in Design for Real Life>
What if we designed, earnestly, for a single user? Generalize: what if all design was just an interview by other means?
We are in the silver age of targeted advertising: pretty customized signs covering slightly worsened shlok. (sometimes the web seems just this, a pretty sign covering a worsening reality) Or, now/soon, customized mass produced shlok. Mass-customization is just software-eaten 80s/90s market segmentation: keep your company the only source of <x>, but now users are allowed to have a gold <x> with a laser engraving.
What would be the humble design approach? Offer up your abilities to the user, hand them the master's tools and share the means of production. Humble designs are complexity prosthetics: we help the user choose their challenges and how they face the world. Humble design is humble automation (all design is automation): we streamline and software only the straightforwardnesses of our life that are in our way, not those that make a life full.
What a way to begin the day. You get to know a landscape by painting it; you get to know a dish by washing it—washing and rinsing it both, and there is a way of rinsing I have developed over the years that uses less water, a low-flow method. Let some water run into the bottom and then work the dish to create a rotating wave that sloshes centrifugally up to the upper edge of the dish. Then dump that water and fill it again, and spin again. <Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches>