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What it means to "connect” with others when objective communication may be fundamentally impossible

Even people with what vision scientists call color normal vision don’t see things quite the same way. The devil in the Blue Dress is that my blue might not have been your blue. Some research says that given a chance to choose a wavelength of light to represent an ideal yellow, most people pick pretty close to the same one. But ask about blue or green (the “grue” region of colorspace), and you get 80 nm worth of different answers. Might have something to do with the way the photoreceptors in the eye work. Or it might not. No one know

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to communicate those differences. Telling the person next to you what’s going on in your head, what your hallucination is like—I think that’s what we mean by “finding connection,” by making meaning with each other. Maybe it’s impossible, in the end. Maybe we’re all alone in our heads. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on being alone together.

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Food and the dying patient

So why do so many demented patients die with feeding tubes?

Food is how we know best to care for one another, from breast to deathbed. And thus it runs contrary to every impulse we have as humans to stop feedings. As a dying person becomes unable to process food on her own, our tendency is to plug life into her with a tube pumping artificial nutrition.

Since the beginning of time, humans have fed their dying by hand. Spooned slowly so as not to overwhelm, a trickle of broth or a favorite food ground up to taste may be the last small pleasures for a dying body.

But hand feeding has increasingly become a quaint piece of human history. We fed until they would take no more, and knew that we had done everything we could. But with the feeding tube, we can, and feel we must, keep going. Patients frequently die with plastic tubes weaving mysteriously under their gowns, entering bodies at unnatural angles, rendering them a little more alien to us. Those who are most needed sit a little further away from the bed, afraid to dislodge tubes that are supposedly keeping their loved one alive. And the patient’s mouth will usually remain dry and empty until the end.

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Why God Will Not Die

Given the secular company I then generally kept and the reading habits I had and still have, I was accustomed to the idea that religion was a refuge for those not brave enough to face the uncertainties of the real world. But now I asked: Had not Russell, too, sought a refuge, a “soul’s habitation,” and had he not finally claimed rather more firmness for it than was really there?

The thought came and quickly went, but it would come back. Even granting that faith was “ridiculous” (the word I heard so often from my friends), was it any less ridiculous to pretend that one was Sisyphus and then declare that by sheer force of imagination one was happy about it? Absurd indeed! Why should this form of nonsense be regarded as any less ridiculous than religion, once the spell of eloquence was broken? But then, too, why belittle Camus for coping with his perceived dilemma as well as he could? And if we were all becalmed in the same boat—Camus, Monod, Russell, the pious poet who wrote the hymn, and Jack Miles—what were we to do? Sink the boat? Was I now to be ashamed of all of us? What good did that do them or me, or anybody?

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Shower thoughts (on religion)

I see religion as something like culinary - something that early man instinctively invented, an invention that is not essential for survival, yet is essential for survival. Without it, the rest of human activity can technically remain the same. We can talk, walk, move, reproduce without culinary, as long as we regularly consume the right amount and mix of nutrients. Both religion and culinary function as coping mechanisms for the weak minded - tricks to distract us from the harshness of reality and pointlessness of our existence.

Both religion and culinary bring wonder and joy and inspiration and beauty and order to our lives. They pull together people, create cultures, bridge cultures, create identities, structure life, create distinctions, divide people, kill people.

Religion is like a drug, an opium. Religion is like culinary.

How technology is designed to bring out the worst in us

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On the philosophy behind many design decisions

Silicon Valley is reckoning with having had a bad philosophical operating system. People in tech will say, “You told me, when I asked you what you wanted, that you wanted to go to the gym. That’s what you said. But then I handed you a box of doughnuts and you went for the doughnuts, so that must be what you really wanted.” The Facebook folks, that’s literally what they think. We offer people this other stuff, but then they always go for the outrage, or the autoplaying video, and that must be people’s most true preference.

On our different modes of decision makings and how tech taps on them

Imagine you had an input cable. You’re trying to jack it into a human being. Do you want to jack it into their reptilian brain, or do you want to jack it into their more reflective self? The problem is we don’t have language in the West for making these distinctions, but there’s a very big difference between being asked to pause and take a deep breath for 10 seconds and then decide or being pushed to make an immediate choice.

On the implications of going too fast

This is one of the things that I’m kind of worried about — human animals, when dialed up past certain boundaries of speed, make poor choices. Basically the entire game now in high-frequency trading is to blow up the mountains so you can lay a cable so you can do a trade and a financial transaction a microsecond faster than the other guys. We’re competing to go as fast as possible in domains where, given the impact, we ought to be going as slow as possible.

UX design and its responsibilities

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Closer to home, architecture is the hardest design profession to study and get into and has incredibly high standards. Architects can debate style and aesthetics all night, but at the end of the day, their shit has to be up to code. Architects have to make sure that engineers and contractors carry our their intention and are ready to make changes to their vision to accommodate reality. There’s no minimal viable product in architecture because bad architecture kills people. Bad UX is now just as deadly.

Ikea’s Doomed Quest To Design A Couch You Can Carry In Your Hands

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But the core idea was, and still is, amazing. And that was maybe why Ikea tried it again. This time Ikea turned to kids. The idea seemed to suit kids perfectly: lightweight, safe, and playful furniture! The plastic was improved, and so was the valve. And this time Ikea tested the collection. They invited kids from all over the world to play with the entire collection. The collection passed, but as soon as Ikea started mass-producing the pieces, the same old problems arose. The air started leaking and the party was over.

What do you learn from making mistakes? Well, first of all you try something you believe in. And you learn to argue your case. And you learn how to be brave and curious and rebellious. Even wild. Sure, it’s only furniture–but wouldn’t it be fun if someone figured out something new and wonderful? Something really smart and sustainable? Just like this could have been. Are we going to make mistakes again? Yes.

This Cat Sensed Death. What if Computers Could, Too?

It’s hard for me to read about the “dying algorithm” without thinking about my patient S. If a more sophisticated version of such an algorithm had been available, would I have used it in his case? Absolutely. Might that have enabled the end-of-life conversation S. never had with his family? Yes. But I cannot shake some inherent discomfort with the thought that an algorithm might understand patterns of mortality better than most humans. And why, I kept asking myself, would such a program seem so much more acceptable if it had come wrapped in a black-and-white fur box that, rather than emitting probabilistic outputs, curled up next to us with retracted claws?

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It’s time to evolve from human-centered design to humanity-centered design

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Design thinking as a process with its emphasis on rapid prototyping, testing, iterating, is at least partially to blame. While it was never created to replace strategic planning in organizations, it struck a chord with organizations under pressure to transform as quickly as possible.

But there is a more significant consequence: This short termism prevents us from solving the dizzying array of long-term problems we face: climate change, growing political instability and polarization, economic inequality, unsustainable social systems like social security and healthcare, digital systems compromising our privacy and security, and the specter of joblessness resulting from AI and automation.

The key, then, is to design with these larger problems in mind. If you are building a product that enables people to manipulate how we perceive the world, for example, how do you design it in a way that provides absolute transparency so users can recognize what’s real and what is not? If you are designing a new farming technology, how do you avoid reinforcing the short-term consumerism that is at the core of so many of our environmental troubles?

The Problem of Prolonging Life

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In the ICU, there was no such thing as natural death, and few were comfortable with the timed event that had taken its place. Half the time, doctors wanted to keep going when families wanted to let go, and half the time, families—especially, but not only, African-American families—wanted to keep going when doctors wanted to quit. Sometimes doctors ignored advance directives from patients and even ripped them out of the charts. Sometimes a family would balk at implanting a feeding tube in a demented relative, only to hear a doctor say something like, “Nobody starves to death on my watch.” Sometimes doctors complied when a long-estranged son or daughter—commonly referred to in hospitals as “The Nephew from Peoria”—flew in at the last minute and insisted that everything be done, even things that doctors and other family members thought were torturous, wasteful, and hopeless. When fragmented families collided with a fragmented medical system, the results could be disastrous.

[...]

In bland, untidy conference rooms edging the ICU, specialists asked families they’d never previously met to assent to the removal of life support, and spouses and children pondered questions—spiritual, legal, and medical—they rarely considered before tragedy hit. Did they have the right to say no to a doctor? To force a doctor to continue treatment? Was it God’s will to do everything possible to prolong a life, no matter how much someone beloved was suffering? Was it suicide to refuse medical care? Was it murder not to give it? Was it a sin? And how were they to decide when the people they loved could no longer speak for themselves?

[...]

In any case, Dr. Rogan said, “Everyone takes for granted that it’s the family care physician who really acts as a quarterback.” And where was my parents internist, Dr. Fales? Why did Medicare reward the surgeon and the cardiologist far better for doing the procedure than it would have Dr. Fales for making a reasoned argument against it? “I spend 45 minutes thinking through the problem, and I get 75 to 100 bucks,” Dr. Fales said when next we spoke. “Someone spends 45 minutes putting in a pacemaker and is paid six times as much.”

Musical garbage trucks

Kopitiams act as a daily touch-point for residents and elders

"Kopitiams act as a daily touch-point for residents and elders. The hawkers know their customers’ routines and are in a good position to see if there’s a change in behaviour and have more empathy towards them. Colleagues at Forget Us Not - Building a Dementia Friendly Community working the ground." –––– George, Lien Foundation

https://www.facebook.com/todayonline/videos/10155234660842572/

Designing for Trust: Observations from my first year at Airbnb

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Although Airbnb requires some information from our users to book, we don’t require disclosure. That is, we ask guests to tell us who they are, but it’s up to them to tell us about themselves. We could, of course, enforce this by requiring a certain number of words in the “about me” section of users’ profiles. But that would miss the point entirely. This leads to the next theme of designing for trust: effort.

"Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see?" And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it." Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. But I felt something. And it was a physiological response. And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way.

an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

Brainstorming isn’t about new ideas, really

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It turns out that the power of brainstorming doesn’t really come from spontaneously generating new ideas. Rather, the real strength in brainstorming stems from the process’s ability to:

Quickly generate lots of ideas, to help get an overview of the conceptual landscape. These are not necessarily new ideas (or good ideas). They may have been brewing for a while as individuals considered the problem beforehand. These ideas can become the seeds for solutions, to be investigated with prototypes. [The] goal is to give you a mass quantity of ideas quickly . . . not solutions, but the seeds to possible solutions. Solutions take real hard work. Brainstorming gets you the lay of the land quickly for possible solution areas to investigate. But good solutions are like body building, there’s no way to cheat the hours of the gym you got to put in,” says Art Sandoval, vice president of engineering at LUNAR Design.

Gather a team into a physical space where they can share perspectives on the problem and are all aware of the potential solution spaces as they are surfaced. Done well, it can energize a team (and done poorly, it can deflate one).

Get clients or stakeholders to buy into the design process, and also learn what is important to these decision makers. “[Brainstorms are] excellent at helping clients buy into the creative process…they get to join in on the brainstorms, they see lots of ideas, they get to vote for their favorites and a dialogue happens during the voting process that is crucial,” says Yona Belfort, product designer at Vital Innovation. “Some kind of sorting always follows a brainstorm, and it’s during this process that one can learn from the client. What have they already done or are currently doing? What can’t they do? Won’t they do? And most importantly, what are they excited about?”

The “A Bit More” button doesn’t reinvent the appliance’s form. It finds its soul instead

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But when conducted best—including in Breville’s case, and despite Hoare’s insistence otherwise—design is more related to the philosophy of what things are, called ontology. It is a discipline of essence, that great bugbear of contemporary life, not of knowledge. Pursuing greater compatibility with a thing’s essence requires that the designer focus on the abstraction formed by the designed object and its human users together—whether it be toasting, dwelling, publishing, socializing, or anything else.

The designer’s job is not to please or comfort the user, but to make an object even more what it already is. Design is the stewardship of essence—not the pursuit of utility, or delight, or form. This is the orientation that produces solutions like the Breville “A Bit More” button. The design opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed emerge not from what people know about or desire for toasting, but from deeply pursuing the nature of toasting itself.

The distinction might seem academic. Isn’t the UX-oriented toaster designer simply seeking deeper knowledge of the essence of toasting? Doesn’t the designer-genius simply have special, immediate access to that deep nature? Indeed, that’s possible. But mostly through accident. The designer who starts from the problem of knowledge will only ever find essence by happenstance. And that is why so few things feel like the “A Bit More” button. They are struggling so hard to meet requirements, please people, or exalt the arbitrary choices of their creators that they fail to pay respect to the thing in question—and thereby to see what it is, even, let alone to change it for the better.

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