The Future of Design
By: Shirin Khara
Tags: Virtual Reality, Empathy, Design, Mixed Reality, UX Design

Technology platforms were created to support and enable greater access to information, while fostering communication and connection. Without embracing empathy as a conscious choice and slowing down to question your product, it’s possible for unintended consequences to occur. Acknowledging your user input is the most complicated, yet most important part of the product-creation puzzle.

We seem to be transferring our behaviours from one medium to another without questioning anything. When a user says ‘I want to be able to send a text’, they’re actually saying ‘I want to be able to communicate asynchronously with the people that I care about’. This is the difference between form and essence. Form is something that changes regularly, for example sending a text vs. sending a postcard 20 years ago. Essence doesn’t change v often. It’s important to listen to the essence, not just the form, of what’s being said because when you design products and service, you also endeavour to build connection.

This is not the future that Karl Friedrich Benz wanted when he created the first automobile, this is an unchecked side-effect of innovation.

Some questions to be addressed when building a product include the following:

· Why am I creating this?

· Who is my audience?

· How could this product be exploited?

· What can I do to address potential problems?

A possible future gone wrong.

Keiichi Matsuda’s film Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media. It’s easy to dismiss this concept as extreme and fictional, but this scenario is possible if we aren’t careful. Early automobile engineers would agree if they could see the consequences of their creation today.

Online gaming is a community that was originally created by a group of people around the world who love games, with the intention of building a community to support them. Anita Sarkeesian is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analysing portrayals of women in popular culture. She regularly receives hate mail and threats, simply because she is a woman who works in the gaming industry. A group aimed to bring people together through a shared love, unfortunately ended up excluding those who don’t conform to what’s expected.

Anita Sarkeesian

Thatgamecompany in Japan created the game Journey, where everything is scripted to communicate and connect beautifully. Their lead designer Nick Clark described it as creating a universal emotion, rather than a sophisticated emotion requiring language.

The order of the day is to design systems that tap into and enhance our underlying humanity. A player’s identity in Journey is reduced to a single symbol on a scarf. Communication is carried out via a chime, when players call out to others. By removing identity and language, localisation needs were removed, thereby removing the ability for people to be abusive to one another. Players have the ability to give life force to each other in order to survive difficult levels in the game. The game developers were successful in building something human, as an intended consequence. The core game mechanic was always to foster friendship. The creators always intended this game to embrace connection, compassion and companionship, and to facilitate bonding and connection. In 2018, David O Reilly released a game called Everything for the PC, Mac and PS4. Journey and Everything are proof that digital experiences can produce feelings of connection and belonging.

“An exuberant celebration of connections, of the ties that bind the universe together, I burst into tears.” -Kotaku

Another example of an unintended consequence took place in the game Quivr. After a female player was groped in the game by male players, the creators immediately addressed the problem. They spent a week designing, prototyping, and figuring out solutions, a gesture-based personal forcefield which is essentially a bubble around you to keep you safe. What was groundbreaking about this was that this problem was addressed within a week, and the forcefield code was subsequently shared with the entire VR world.

Quivr

As technology becomes more integrated with human experiences, it needs to enhance the connection between people using the devices, as well as between those who aren’t. The unintended consequences of our choices need to be addressed by designing safeguards, taking the time to think about connection and belonging and finding a way to use design to address the deep issues that face us as a global society, before it’s too late.