Text: Jens Persson
The tech gadgets we surround ourselves with in our everyday
lives are getting more complex each year. At the same time, they
often seem more simple and intuitive to use. These digital products
of our time are constantly changing and adapting with our
behaviour, finding new ways to be helpful. Devices such as smart
phones, laptops and wearable fitness trackers are simply more
complex in nature than the physical objects created by designers in
the past.
I sat down with Heather Wiltse to talk about how we can unpack
and understand these multi-faceted digital products. How can
designers contribute in promoting transparency for the user and
perhaps influence what these networked digital things could look
like in the future?
"These things are developing so quickly and design is having a
hard time keeping up as they are being shaped by other
trajectories; such as marketing, business and technological
engineering. For example, a smart home is all about making our
lives more convenient and efficient, but connected devices are also
designed to collect data about people and their behaviour. The
actual needs of the end user are not the only ones considered when
these products are developed, or even the primary ones.", says
Heather Wiltse.
Heather Wiltse is an
assistant researcher at Umeå Institute of Design. Her research
focuses on the character of digitally designed
things and the roles that they play in experience and
society
The message here is that design needs to catch up in defining
and shaping these products, ultimately to take care of all of the
users and functions of modern digital things in a more holistic
way. Today, that is often not the case.
"If you're not paying for it, then you're the
product"
In the book, Heather and Johan coin the term "fluid
assemblages", referring to these layered, networked things that are
composed of a variety of components (assemblages) and that are
constantly changing (fluid). One such product is Spotify.
"In the case of Spotify for example, which we discuss at length
in the book, they are turning their users into an audience in order
to then be able to deliver their attention to advertisers. This may
be fine, but we need to recognize that using Spotify to listen to
music involves a very different set of dynamics and consequences
than using something like a tape player to listen to music. Today,
the creation of such digital products and services are driven by
these other forces that have a vested interest in collecting data.
As is often said now, 'if you're not paying for it, then you're the
product'.
"This is the case with Spotify, Google, Facebook, and other free
services that rely on an advertising model. So, this is clearly not
user-centered design in the sense of caring about human experience,
values, and integrity. Although the experience that users have with
these things is often quite good in terms of engagement and ease of
use, this is often an experience that is intended to mask what is
actually going on when people interact with these things."
"So, the book actually poses an open question: How can we, going
forward, work with these things which are in fact really exciting
and full of possibilities? For us, it's a question of figuring out
how we can do it in a responsible way, exposing current and often
problematic dynamics but also imagining and prototyping how things
could be different."
Design vs. Platform Capitalism
Heather and Johan make the case that it is vital to provide some
form of meaningful transparency and choice regarding what fluid
assemblages actually do. Clearly, design has fallen behind here. In
at least recent decades, design has been driven by user
centeredness, the goal being to create useful and appealing
products for end users such that they will want to buy them. Today,
other considerations drive the creation of networked products.
"Platform capitalism" is one way to describe the complex nature of
such products, services and companies and the larger forces driving
their development.
"Platforms - such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, and
others - provide hardware and software resources that others can
use in creating products and services. This is of course quite
useful, but it also puts these companies that own the platforms in
key positions where they are serving as the meeting ground for many
different actors, and where they can record all of the activities
that run through them. This is an enormously advantageous position,
especially since the primary way of pursuing economic growth now is
through leveraging data. This situation has been called platform
capitalism."
"Under platform capitalism, data collection is a top priority.
So, rather than making things that are transferred from producer to
consumer at the time of sale, there are now ongoing relations
between producers and consumers. Consumers get continual product
updates and personalization, while producers collect tons of data
about what people do. The ultimate goal is to have people logged in
all the time across devices, as Spotify boasts to advertisers. This
is a drastically different kind of design, and of relations between
making and use, than the industrial design that came into being at
the time of the industrial revolution"
"We have already seen that if you have companies that are
extremely powerful with no checks on them, things can quite easily
go wrong."
Today, everything is designed around keeping users logged in,
keeping us interacting, ultimately making it an addictive
experience. That means that often new functions and products are
developed solely with the purpose of keeping people on the
platform. Such product development is hardly driven by the real
needs of the user."
Being Digital - The Human Experience in a Digital
World
Design research is very much about going from an existing to a
preferred situation. It's not just about understanding, it's also
initiating change. So, how do Heather and Johan presume to create a
framework where these things, these fluid assemblages, can be
unpacked and understood? And how should a new foundation be put in
place where user-centered design once again become part of
influencing what these fluid assemblages will look like in the
future?
"The goal for the next three years of this research project is
to try to develop ideas that can help us understand and talk with
others about what is going on, and how these things could be
different. Number one, how do these fluid assemblages show up in
the world? This relates to the actual making of things, and to
their expression and aesthetics. Often fluid assemblages try to
mimic earlier types of things - for example, an Apple watch that is
really more like a small computer than a mechanical watch - and try
to hide the complexity of what they are actually doing. But what
other aesthetics could be possible, and more appropriate and
transparent?
"Obviously, it's a massive design challenge to make something
visible that is so complex and layered. And these things might be
like computational black boxes, but they are not ones that we can
just open up in any straightforward sense! But one way to get there
is to create new design practices describing how these products
show up in the world and how they could be different."
"Number two, we want to further explore what these things
actually do as part of larger networks. What are the functions that
are not facing the users but other entities, what kind of data
collecting is going on? At a larger scale, we can even ask how our
images of the world are being shaped when we as societies represent
and deal with everything in the terms of computation.
"From the social media products that many of us use every day to
industrial processes, scientific practices, cultural production,
governance, and more, computation has become the dominant mode of
sense-making in the world. Computational things - and specifically
fluid assemblages - are the touch points where data is produced and
access to the world is mediated. How these things are designed and
used in the future is thus, in our view, crucially important."
October 2018
