If we designed physical spaces the same way we designed UIs, every item in the
house would have its own bright neon color. Kitchen utensils would all bear a green neon handle so you know it exists and you can grab it. Seats would be blue, the floor would be white. Utensils would be limited so that that you cannot harm yourself, which means that knives are ruled out. Instead, they are replaced with food processors that handle it for you. Food packages would have different symbols and colors depending on its health profile based on the US governments health recommendations. Certain meats have a greener color on their packaging to indicate they are sustainable options.
It was funny in the company meetings when someone tried to design a purple, square chair rather than the standard round blue, user research showed that no one would feel comfortable sitting on it. After all, purple is not a color commonly associated with chairs.
Bathrooms would be possible to lock, but the mirror would be a one-way mirror where behind the mirror a room of advertisers can sit and watch what you are up to.
Besides changing the wallpaper, you would not be allowed to change anything about the space. Doing so would constitute unauthorized access and potentially mean that you no longer are allowed to receive mail from your bank, nor access your passport in the drawer, as they argue that you may have changed the space so that the lock doesn't work properly.
Upcoming is also a new mandatory robot that would be installed into your house. This robot will listen to everything you do, cook your food for you, buy your groceries from one of three supermarkets, handle your mail, and also take care of any guests that might come to visit.
Lately, I have been thinking that, while good art often uncovers what is hidden, allowing us to see lucidly across large spans of time and space, the short-form clips of our age seem to instead obscure our sight.
Take, for instance, the "tradwife" trend on TikTok and Instagram. There is perhaps no more powerful antidote to the digital mirage of seemingly young, healthy, and manicured women endlessly showing off pampered babies and sponsored cleaning products, than the short story collection I recently finished reading. In Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, a young housewife cries out to her husband (and to us all): "Others are not even married at my age. But I am already an old woman [...] My back is broken. These children, the home, samsara—do I have even a minute of free time? If I bear one child per year, what will I become? Don't you want me to live long enough to be a mother to these children at least?"
Lucidity. A concept Camus explored in a few of his essays, and that in many ways echoes a kind of personal philosophy that Andrea and I have been developing. To us, lucidity means to see the world for what it is, instead of ascribing grand narratives or superstition to it as a way to console ourselves for the perceived "meaninglessness" of existence.
In The Stranger, Camus writes about a man named Meursault and describes his complete indifference to the world. Meursault is meant to be unrelatable. Someone who seems almost inhumane, and so, who would not be able to relate or empathize with us either. Through his actions and attitudes, Meursault reveals what Camus calls "the absurd," which has to do with the perceived absence of meaning in life. However, Camus also introduces symbolism to reveal that as humans, we can rebel against the absurd.
In the very first scene of the book, when Meursault finds out his mom died, his apathetic response is difficult to stomach, as it is later on, when he encounters the titular stranger. In both scenes, Meursault focuses on a light that flickers or the sun that blinds him. His fixation on light during moments in which more "important" things occur, like the death of his mother, increases the distance between Meursault and the reader.
The light and the sun to me represents two things in this book. On some level, the distance we feel between ourselves and Meursault serves as a reminder of our innate urge to care, even when the world appears to be meaningless. An urge to care that Meursault does not seem to experience.
But the depiction of light also serves as another reminder, that when we feel the weight of the absurd the most, the shining light can set a path forward. The light shines on our skin and makes us see, and so it reminds us to be present. When we are present and experience the world for what it is, lucidly, we can revolt against the absurd.
This idea of lucidity and Camus' articulation of this concept was eloquently spelled out in a recent episode of Philosophize This on The Stranger, and I felt myself just nodding along in agreement.
One of the major shifts in my thinking has been to be mindful of the resources that I have an "excess of". In tech, I see all the time: "storage is cheap, just store everything", "hardware is cheap, don't bother optimizing". We have done so much to improve efficiency, pricing and storage, but as a result we are just using more and more. And then, as a result, my computer still heats up into an oven when opening a Google design blog post that contains only text and pictures. This phenomena of using more resources despite increased efficiency is also called Jevons Paradox: when the cost for a resource drops, if the demand is price elastic, the overall quantity of what we use increases. This happens all the time; the term was specifically coined in reference to our usage of oil. It seems that when a resource becomes cheap, we stop handling the resource with care. For example, it used to be that we really needed to care about performance, now we care far less, and as a result older devices become obsolete faster.
This paradox makes it likely that given the finite resources we have, increased efficiency alone will not stop global warming.
Another phenomena I have observed is: small inefficiencies might seem like they don't matter, but they add up and become a big problem. One person throwing plastic into the ocean does not cause any issues, but when everyone does it then it becomes a problem. Yet all the time we tend to not care about the small damages we cause, because the focus is always on the "biggest problems". Especially a business-minded person tries to look at where they can make the biggest impact, and tries to stay laser focused on that goal. That means that secondary goals like "the environment" or "worker's rights" fall by the wayside. Yet, these issues matter but because of how essentially all hierarchical structures operate, the objective as a manager is basically deciding where to allocate funds, and all departments need more funding.
There is this obsession in finding what is the one thing that can make the largest impact, yet in this multifaceted and complex world we live in, such reasoning leads to important topics falling by the wayside.
I also think when we argue like this, it makes it really easy to shift blame: a small country can point to a larger country and argue that whatever they do to combat climate change doesn't matter as long as the larger country continues to pollute; an individual can point to systemic issues to argue that whatever resources they use don't matter as long as the systemic issues are not solved. They are just "a drop in the ocean", and I think this contributes to the extremely wasteful attitude that ends up leading to Jevon's Paradox.
I do not have a societal solution, but I do not think prioritizing time this way works if we are to coexist. On a personal level I have adopted an attitude of radically caring for the resources I use. This attitude means: not leaving the faucet running, turning off the lights before leaving the room, avoiding plastics, recycling, not wasting CPU cycles, not wasting storage. I have no illusion that I alone doing this will solve climate change, but I do think if we all adopt this philosophy, it would make a big difference.
Recently, I finished up Donald Norman's An Invisible Computer. It's a fantastic book, probably one of my favorite books, and it starts off with a powerful quote:
"The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever. The computer should be thought of as infrastructure. It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive, but it is too visible, too demanding. It controls our destiny. Its complexities and frustrations are largely due to the attempt to cram far too many functions into a single box that sits on the desktop. The business model of the computer industry is structured in such a way that it must produce new products every six to twelve months, products that are faster, more powerful, and with more features than the current ones."
As much as I like the book, however, there is one important concept that I disagree with. Norman titles and concludes the book with this idea: that technology should be completely invisible. By invisible, he means that technology should blend so seamlessly into our everyday life that we do not notice it is there.
"[.. talking about the goal of technology] The end result, hiding the computer, hiding the technology, so that it disappears from sight, disappears from consciousness, letting us concentrate upon our activities, upon learning, doing our jobs, and enjoying ourselves."
Sounds great in theory, in practice of course what we find is that companies make something that is easy to use, and then do not necessarily act in the users' best interest, but the user is stuck with what the company provided and is neither empowered to seek out other options nor fix it. I think this is an anti-pattern, and I talk about this in depth in my essay, The Curse of Convenience.
However, there is also another section that I found particularly interesting and shines a light on the direction where I think technology should go, which is Norman's idea about what makes a good tool. Norman has this to say:
"Good tools are always pleasurable ones, ones that the owners take pride in owning, in caring for, and in using. In the good old days of mechanical devices, a craftperson's tools had these properties. They were crafted with care, owned and used with pride. Often, the tools were passed down from generation to generation. Each new tool benefited from a tradition of experience with the previous ones so, through the years, there was steady improvement."
I do not feel like modern phones and computers are like this kind of tool. A good retro camera is something we learn inside out, with its quirks and unique abilities, and becomes part of our craft and personality. This is not so much the case with a modern iPhone. Modern technology removes as much personalization as possible and makes it hard to repair for the sake of convenience, looks and ease-of-use. That means that you do not put effort into truly knowing your tool nor personalizing it, and so as a result, do not appreciate it as much. Instead of customizing and learning about your unique device, you buy a new one, that acts just like the old one. Devices become impersonal and invisible.
In a recent interview, Norman laments the fact that his all time best-seller, Design of Everyday Things, did not cover that tools should be designed to be repairable too. To me, repairability is in opposition to his idea of technology becoming invisible. At the same time, I think repairability and customization go hand in hand with his idea that you should feel pride in owning a tool, and that that is what makes a good tool. A device that you tweak and make truly your own, you will care for more and want to repair as well. As I replace parts of my Thinkpad and change the way it looks and feels, I find it becomes more personal to me.