Jan 2020~
Designing Against Digital Addiction
Human-centric design was created to protect the needs of the user. This notion has begun to deteriorate in this digital age of users becoming the product, and the product essentially using the users. We, as designers, have begun to lose sight for whom and/or what we should be designing. Design within the digital space emphasizes user engagement over value for the user. Screen addiction, online abuse, and fake news are all repercussions of intentional design decisions made for keeping eyes and thumbs on digital media. Instead, can we use design to help make us better engaged citizens, more creative thinkers, and more caring human beings? Humanity should be the foundation (or at the forefront) of the design process, something we must harness and push forward.
Media previously could be described as hot or cold. “Hot” media, print and radio, required less sensory involvement of the user and “cold” media, television and telephones, required more sensory involvement from the user. But how much sensory involvement does social media require of its users? With the creation of the digital world, we now have a new medium which is so ‘hot’ that it can cause harm. Social media is less about user involvement and more about participation…at all costs. With this participation, not always willingly, the online world has stolen time from all other mediums. It has essentially become THE MEDIUM. Unfortunately, in keeping with McLuhan who argued that the medium that delivers the message is more important than the message itself, digital addiction is the medium and the sensory that is being overextended is our intellect and well-being. This sensory addiction is going to be the greatest mental health crisis of our generation if we allow technology-centric design to shape our products, environments, and services.
Within this peak of digital monopoly capitalism, how is it possible for good design exist? The growing monster that is digital media distracts people from being innovative, though everyone experiences and uses it as a “tool for innovation." Instead, the tools have become only agents for distraction. Everyone is being fed the same Instagram renders, Pinterest Pins, and inspiration blogs.
Designers can find themselves stuck in loops of inspiration where we “think” we are discovering new content, but the internet has discovered it for us. This false sense of ‘curation’ is bad design designed very well. We must call this for what it is: commodity and fetishism, or the perception of the social relationships involved in production not as relationships among users, but as economic relationships among the monies and commodities exchanged in market trade.
In order to break this endless cycle, we need to begin designing out of the digital realm whenever possible. Use less screens and more actions; build more parks and less escape rooms; look at digital design as ‘tools’ to complete a task, not the task itself. In other words, the internet is not something from which we should strive to break but design it to become something you can simply “put away.”
This paradigm of being proud of designing digital addiction, and calling it “innovation,” needs to shift. Designers need to stay technology-fluent, yet human-centric... placing control not with machines, but into the user’s hands. Look at the conditioned Pavlov-response of push notifications; that is, we think one wants to see what the phone has to tell us, but the phone wants to see our reaction. It is almost as if user-centered design has shifted to machine-centered design or business-centered design, which goes against the fundamental rule of human-centered design. We, as experience creators, must start designing with healthier physical community behaviors in mind.
As both designers and users today, we are starting to feel the effects of having our attention kidnapped by too many services. Thus, if we keep designing to the current belief that digital engagement equates to good interface design, we are failing the users. By designing for engagement, we are realistically designing damaged communities by replacing face-to-face experiences with needy digital interactions. Therefore, if UI is the design for distraction, shouldn’t designers be anti-UI and start creating less for the interface and place more emphasis on the user? We need to examine whose values these smart systems promote, and who wins or loses when these values permeate our life.
Society is awakening to the need of establishing a more mindful relationship with technology. Designers should start thinking of the outcomes of their work in a much more long-term context. What future do we want to create and, more importantly, try to avoid? If we pay attention to this, the shift will start by replacing the focus on humans as data points to the focus of nurturing the well-being of the users and the community in which they live.