Well-designed Good(s)

One of the projects I worked on while at Pratt was developing Experiential Marketing Heuristics which I did with a gentleman named Lu Johnson.

Experiential Marketing is basically a type of marketing that is geared towards an emotional experience. It grew out of a reaction to traditional features and benefits marketing that didn't connect customers with brands.

So we have here, Mohammed Ali and the Apple slogan: "Think different." Nothing else, no description of the product, no picture of the product, just a loose association that to buy Apple is to think differently and therefore associate yourself with the Ali. That's experiential marketing.

Lu and I looked at how experiential marketing is created and developed heuristics to be applied websites. So, if we think about how this works, these emotional effects that happen in marketing are applied in designing websites and web applications. We're using emotion to affect a user's behavior. And by affecting the users's behavior, we can start to change that behavior however we as designers see fit.

Designing for behavior is an evolution of these heuristics in an ethical sense. If you look at experiential marketing, you start to see that it all is really sort of manipulative and is designed to sell more products. Designing products to influence behavior to sell more products is one thing (this is where experience comes in, experience v. bottom-line), but designing for sustainability and designing to change behaviors for the better is another.

So now we're getting into a tricky area and I just want to drop this on you real: There's obviously a moral aspect to this, because if you think you have the ability to change behavior, then you have a responsibility to change that behavior for the better. Let's just start with:

Kant's Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Meaning (an old professor from undergrad says): "The real ethical question is not "to whom am I responsible?" (Levinas), but rather, "what sort of world do I want to live in?" (Kant)."

By way of example let's look at Jim Wier.

Jim Wier is profiled in Charles Fishman's book, The Wal-Mart Effect. He is the CEO of a lawn-equipment maker called Simplicity. Long story short, he refused to sell his lawnmowers to Wal-Mart because their brand is incompatible with his. Wier wants to live in a world where value comes in the quality of the product, not in its price.

Apple does the same thing. People have been clamoring for sub-$500 netbooks from them for a few years now, but they refuse on two counts: 1. They don't see any reason to join the netbook market, and 2. Their brand is associated with quality and design and experience rather than discount prices. Not to say these things cannot be compatible, but no, generally, you pay more for better quality.

So, arguably you could say that if every product manufacturer were concerned with quality rather price we'd be living in a world where things last longer and price would go down through pure economics relating to means of manufacture and part cost rather than the quality of how something is put together, or by replacing quality parts with cheaper parts.

When you're designing things, you have to consider the entire lifecycle of your product in order to ensure that your product is experienced in the way you see fit.

So we have Snapper building lawnmowers because they're passionate about building lawnmowers and they want to make the best lawnmower they can make. Period. Not the best lawnmower they can make for X amount of money.

Apple does the same thing. They're trying to build the best experience you can have with computers and now phones. And that experience is going to be part of (or the majority) of the cost and benefit of the product.

If you don’t like what’s being done with something you made yourself, pulling the plug on it is a lot easier. Dean Allen did this. And he pissed a lot of people off. He disappointed others.

But he stopped selling crack.

So that's the thing: designing good requires careful consideration. Some people will not care about your endless desire to validate your own personal self-worth by clicking a button all night long. Some people will not care about your cognitive sustainability and your inability to single-task. Designers need to have empathy. Designing for behavior change and designing good is a balancing act. So you could have this:

Sure you can laugh. Some people compared it to this:

The Homer. Created by Homer, for his brother Herb's automotive company. Homer designed his dream car.

But taste is subjective. You design what you want and regardless of your view point, your opinion will always matter most to the users you're designing for, and you need to be passionate about it, otherwise it's just another artifact. If we're passionate about it, there are enough viewpoints that maybe we'll be all right.

Me? I want this mouse. Why? Because I believe in simplicity, not having to learn how to use something, not having to read a manual or customize. I want something to just work. You might want to use that other mouse to play Call of Duty or EVE online.

Let's add one more layer to this. We've gone from using emotional design in products to change behavior so that people come to expect better quality for more money. I don't want to paint Apple as a "good guy" because this is the 2nd phone I've had in two years. Though they're designing for experience and what they feel is "good," they aren't designing for sustainability, which many will consider to be evil. Though that's a different subject, it's along the same lines.

Robert Fabricant posted this little poem on Core77 asking the types of questions that have been largely missing from design thinking.

It’s the sustainability buzz-word again, but it’s more than just sustainability of physical products now. It’s attention. It’s capacity. It’s health.

This illustrates how technology isn't required to change behaviors. The tube stops have circular markings overlayed with additional data like walk times that inform your decisions by making implicit information more explicit. This information will change your perception of what is the best choice in context.

ECON mode shows ambient sensors, grows leaves

Growing leaves "track and rewards a driver's efficiency”

That’s where we are today. Now think of this:

Dan Hill's "Well-Tempered Personal Environment" does the same things as these previous examples on a higher level. It's aggregating all the actions a person does and creating a "score" for them, and making the implications of their action explicit. That is, making things that are invisible, visible. We could use this to show contributions as well, especially if we’re creating a smart grid for electricity.

My dad taught me this: There's a certain stretch of 19th avenue that has timed lights.

All independent of car movement, if you're aware of this pattern, you can time the flow and never have to hit a red light. But what if it weren't independent of your actions? What if the information in the dashboard, your car, the streets and the lights were all connected via APIs and you were rewarded based on how you were driving?

By driving the speed limit, you get there faster.

Instead of things being designed in a vacuum, they need to be designed in a wind-tunnel. Things are picking up, and you start to see everything is affected by everything else. Every product you create fits within a system and it needs to be designed holistically to fit there. That's why well-designed goods need to be, well, good in a myriad of senses. Because it all comes back. That's really what I'm really aiming at.

I'm going to hit you with some more quotes from people smarter than me:

“Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.”

By designing good, you're inventing a culture.

Tim Brown of IDEO says, "...it’s essentially [our] responsibility to have good ideas. Not about the work [we] do every day — we all have to do that — but about new ideas for the company. What are we going to do next? What fields are we going to work in? What are our new big things?"

So we take these two things: Inventing culture and asking the right questions. So not only should you be designing these things to affect behavior in however you see fit, but it's also about keeping an eye on the bigger picture. If you design something so well that everyone copies it, that is a cultural shift. If you're designing for that behavior, and you get that shift, you need to know where you're going with it.

Okay, so this is the last thing I'm going to ask you to consider: On the left, Iron Man (written by Warren Ellis -- It's surprising how much of a connection there is between some of the best thinkers in interaction design and comic book and sci-fi authors) talks about seeing through satellites. That inspired BERG's Here and There, which is a horizonless mapping of the Manhattan.

With this map, you're not only seeing where you are, but where you're going. It's about locating the piece you're designing amongst the whole of things. And that helps when you're designing something because everything is built within a system. This isn't mine, it's Matt Webb's, also of BERG, and this thing he calls a macroscope, is among the most vital of our tools as designers.

We can apply that to a smaller scope as well, so when we're designing systems or applications, you have to design in the context of the application, but also of the user's place in space and time.That's how designing in context comes in. When we're designing in context, we start to emphasize the micro-interactions and all the different touchpoints that a user encounters. Soon (already?) these touchpoints will be ubiquitous. If a city has a million touchpoints, how are we going to make the city work for us? And if we're designing a million touchpoints, how are we going to protect the user? His cognitive load? This is why we need to think ethically about the decisions we make.

I'm saying that good is subjective, but what I think is good is this: If we are at the precipice of ubiquitous computing, then everything is going to be a spime. If everything is a spime, everything has an interface. If everything has capacity for complexity, where will we get simple things?