Why isn’t technology working better for humans?
This is the question that is at the center of technology design. People have responded to this question in various ways, shaping our approaches, habits, and mindsets. Our preferences and our biases. All the ways we answer this question add to the collective wisdom about how technology designers approach what they do.
Although provocative, the question isn’t just about fixing what is broken. It is also about imagining the possible. But it’s about imagining what’s possible within the bounds of a specific set of constraints: the constraints of humans.
Technology design is human-centered.
Technology design work begins with the need to understand the human context, human capabilities, human expectations, and human outcomes. And to bring this understanding into the decision-making process when we design technology. And this is why designers refer to their work as “human-centered design.” Human-centered design is the radical idea that we should treat people as people, unique individuals with uniquely human lives, and not as objects or data points to be pushed through conversion funnels. Because this is not just being good at making stuff but being good at making stuff for people.
“Technology design is not just being good at making stuff, but being good at making stuff for people”
Human-centered design is about what it means to put the human at the center of the creative process. To apply the lens of human experience and outcomes to every decision, large and small. This post is about what we technology designers, as individuals, should bring to that creative process. It describes the personal qualities and traits contributing to creating truly human-centered technology.
The adjacent possible
A big part of technology design is the process of exploration. In science, there’s this idea of “the adjacent possible.” The adjacent possible is the range of answers at any given moment to the question, “Where do we go from here?”
In a typical game, a player can make a finite number of moves at any one point based on the current state and the game’s rules. This limited set of moves defines the “adjacent possible” set of game states at any moment. Players are good when they see the “adjacent possible” better than their opponents.
Similarly, technology designers explore what exists within the constraints of systems, technology, psychology, and behaviors of users. At every point in the design process, some ideas are just one step away from the current state of thinking.
This “adjacent possible” constantly changes as designers’ understanding of the problem continues evolving and the ideas we pursue as we go. Technology design never happens in a straight line. It zigs, zags jump sideways and backward and often ends in dead-ends.
Sometimes the adjacent possible expands as new possibilities come into view. And sometimes, it contracts because we’ve learned something that takes options off the table or because every idea carries the rejection of incompatible ideas.
So much of the growth of designers entails growing the ability to understand the adjacent possible throughout the design process. The more designers can do this, the more likely we are to find genuinely innovative solutions. Creative possibilities that are not visible to others.
Design Mindset and Values
I would argue that our access to the adjacent possible is not a matter of the tools and methods we use, but of the mindset and values we bring to the creative process. The way that we broaden our access to the adjacent possible is something that happens daily. What matters is how you make choices throughout the creative process.
If your creative process is going well, it’s going to throw a lot of choices at you.
A lot of decisions to make for which the answers are not obvious. It’s about how you respond to those difficult choices and adapt as you move through your creative process — ideally, it is always a discovery process.
Good designers have open eyes.
Designers have to come to this process of discovery with open eyes. They need to soak up all of the information they can about the context of the problem to understand the nature of the problem. Some issues are rooted in old market dynamics; others are rooted in technological shifts. Good designers learn about both. They always try to take in as much information as possible about a problem. They are always seeking a bit of context and more detail. It is not just about users or the market but also about the organizations they work within.
Without human awareness, we can never be truly human-centred.
Designers will read articles about the people who lead these organizations to understand their thinking better – to learn how their philosophies shaped the company’s culture. Regarding the human side, going in with open eyes means wanting to learn as much as you can about the people who use the design. This is why research is foundational to any human-centered design practice. Design without research is like solving a physical puzzle with closed eyes.
Good designers are curious.
The insistence on always knowing more speaks to a more profound trait of good designers. They are inherently curious people – these are people for whom every answer leads to more questions. They always want to know more about systems, organizations, technology, and, most of all, people. Our work requires us to constantly wonder about our fellow human beings. Wonder about their thoughts, their feelings, and their experiences.
How can you be human-centred if you aren’t curious about people?
When our relationship with our users is one of curiosity, of genuinely wanting to understand them more deeply, that understanding will always inform every part of the design process, even if we aren’t talking about the users at that moment.
Good designers go broad and deep.
Going broad means being curious about lots of different kinds of things. It means taking on many problems and working across a wide range of product categories and industries. Because you might not think that what you learn in one area can be applied elsewhere, but frequently it can. You can find connections between problems that, on the surface, seem very different because design solutions have broader applications than the specific context in which they might have been created. And valuable insights can come from unlikely sources. So you can find yourself surprised when a previous project for a leisure company inspires the answer to a problem for a financial services company.
Going deep means immersing yourself in whatever problem you’re facing to allow it to become your world for a time. To carry it around with you, always running in the background. Because that background processing is what enables those kinds of lateral, intuitive leaps that lead to innovation.
Good designers think holistically.
Experiences are complex. A lot is going on in any given human experience. When designers go deep, they can develop a holistic sense of the problem and a holistic way of thinking about solutions to the problem.
Designers of human experiences are orchestrating those experiences across many variables and appealing to users’ senses, rational minds, and irrational feelings. We are doing all this while balancing their tasks, goals, and needs with the capabilities and constraints of the systems we’re building.
Experiences are so complex that they can’t be reduced to a set of ideal choices determined with scientific precision by research. Research can inform our creative decisions but can’t dictate them — experience is too messy.
We don’t do research to inform the design, we do it to inform the designer.
The designer must take in the problem from multiple points of view and synthesize a holistic understanding of the problem to create a holistic solution. They think in terms of systems, design, visual, and interface systems, all layered together, working together toward a cohesive goal.
Good designers are connected.
Part of thinking systemically is recognizing that we, designers and users alike, are embedded in the larger system called “humanity.” Our work is not done by a lone genius slaving away in the workshop, the way a painter, composer, or mathematician might work. Being human-centered means broadening our perspectives beyond ourselves and our own experiences. It means seeking input from those we know see things differently from us – because that is how we stretch, learn and grow. So we stay connected to the larger world, consistently placing our work in the larger context of what we collectively know about people, technology, and society and how all of these things influence our experiences.
Good designers are open-minded.
Figuring out “where to go next” requires having an open mind. The philosophy can be described as “Strong opinions weakly held.” It means always having a point of view on the next step to take, but at any point, be ready to drop the best idea and start over — even if starting over means having no idea. Sometimes that means admitting that we didn’t understand the problem as well as we thought. Or to admit that mistakes were made along the way. We need to move beyond our egos, which get in the way of letting go of things that no longer work.
Our willingness to change our minds makes our ideas flexible and adaptable to new and changing contexts. If we don’t take in that flexibility as a part of our process, we come out of it with brittle ideas that break down when the context shifts. We can avoid this brittleness by resisting the impulse to subscribe to a single approach for all design problems. To remain flexible, we must collect a toolkit of design practices. There is no one true way to do this work. There are various methods and the knowledge of when each is best applied.
We select the best tools for the job rather than trying to shape each job to the tools that we have. Put down the computer, and pick up a pen. Put down the pen, and start telling a story. Whatever it takes.
Having more than one way to think about a problem gives us more than one way to see possible solutions, expanding our access to the adjacent possible. So like a tree whose branches bend in a strong wind, we can bend instead of breaking, weather the storms of organizational, technological, and economic change.