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The end of UX.

In every field of manufacturing, there are some key milestones that shake the foundations of its industry. The release of the iPhone may be the most obvious example, but I remember many before. As a kid I was a fervent lover of hi-fi systems. I knew every model back then, from Akai to Yamaha. The money my mother saved up for me to go on a schooltrip to Greece didn’t go to Greece, it stayed in Belgium and bought me my first hifi system, a Pioneer. Let me just share this rather special moment with you:

 

 

 

This was my very first stereo-set, minus the turntable.

About a year after I had bought the stereo set, I had an epiphany at a rather unusual place. My dentist was someone who always boasted the latest gadgets and when I was lying on his dental chair with a slew of pliers in my mouth, something shiny and sleek on his wall caught my attention. The thing had 2 speakers and was spinning a compact disk behind a glass door. It was the latest design stereo from Bang & Olufsen. Let me share that magical moment with you too:

 

 

This is the Bang & Olufsen BeoSound 3200. Cool huh?

I was absolutely stunned when I first saw it. As my dentist braggingly slid open the glass doors to change the disk (he was an unbelievable brag), it opened my eyes to something I never even realized before. Stereo systems, as cool as they were, could be made even cooler through well-thought design. As a kid drawing my own imaginative sets, why didn’t I think of that? Who needed all those fancy buttons no one used anyway? OK, it didn’t have that fancy digital equalizer I could keep glaring at in my bed all night long, but in all its simplicity, it had so much more. When I asked him what it cost, I knew I had 2 choices. Either I’d become a dentist or I’d pursue a career as designer and create these things myself. Since I have no talent for medicine, I chose the latter.

 

 

The discovery of ourself.

Design has gained so much momentum over the past 100 years that it has become a no-brainer — or at least it should be — that in any development phase, we need a designer. Unfortunately the role of designer is very often a transient one, ranging from the mandatory passage in the initial design thinking workshop to visualizing interface screens, all without proper involvement in development.

 

 

 

 

Maybe you have heard about the Design Ladder. This pretty straightforward hypothesis was developed by the Danish Design Centre in 2001, illustrating how companies worldwide apply design within their organization. Step 1 involves no design at all. Think of companies in the 80’s that got software engineers accidently deciding on the look & feel of the user interface, with no help from a designer at all. Step 2 had companies uncover the added value of a designer as a formgiver and stylist of their products. It is the era where graphic artists got solicited by executives of the flowering digital era. Steps 3 and 4 look beyond design as mere form-giving and treat it as a development process and a strategy respectively, the latter being the ultimate goal for any organization. Later 2 more steps got added, to include more macro-levelled steps up to design as a strategy for entire sectors and nations to compete with each other, respectively.

 

 

 

Although some organizations claim to have reached the highest rungs or make significant strides in doing so, the vast majority is still balancing on step 2. But of course the ladder has many more rungs in between so as long as we move step by step, we’ll get there. The key understanding though is that designers are among the key people to help organizations move on up. Yet we face a challenge, and it’s a mighty big one. Disclaimer: if you’re wondering what rung Pimp. has reached, well, that rung hasn’t been discovered yet.

 

 

More than 2 dimensions.

Well beyond my adolescent passion for stereos, I started my career as a graphic designer for print media, moved into the field of digital user experience design and slowly but steadily witnessed how sturdy enterprise applications with complex business logic struggled to stay fit in a mobile world.

 

 

 

Over the years UX Designers have learned to deal with a broad spectrum of behavioral and cultural science domains aimed at helping the U in UX. A UX designer is a psychologist, a sociologist, an anthropologist, a decorator, an architect and much more rolled into one. As we move away from a consumption driven society towards a service-oriented one, designers shift along and find new ways of modeling for experiences that refocus on embracing full ecosystems. Yet to this day the focus of design in digital technology still heavily revolves around user-friendliness and aesthetics for 2D experiences. It merely gives form to interfaces, through which we interact with the technologies behind the UI.

 

At this stage, smart 3D is occupying the horizon. Today’s technologies themselves are becoming intelligent enough to understand how we behave as people in a 3D world, and act accordingly. Input models like gesture control, voice recognition or motion detection enable our devices to understand us the way we understand ourselves. So in effect, the world around us becomes our interface, easy and comfortable enough for us to interact with.

 

 

 

However, we’re not very comfortable designing for 3D media yet. Whereas the mobile revolution took some odd 10 years to establish the common user interface language of swiping, pinching or zooming, to this day there still is no standard for 3D interfaces. Consider devising a UI for augmented or virtual reality. We try to hang on to what we know from our experience in 2D, but we realize there’s no guarantee this is exactly what the user needs. It feels like groping in the dark.

Amidst this, it’s clear that what we’re witnessing today is a dissipation of technology as a product with a tangible interface. 3D opens up a world of possibilities for us to interact with, in a way that feels much more natural to us. Designing with this extra dimension in mind can help people make use of their senses to explore the environment around them. Humans are exceptionally well at detecting motion and our bodies are capable of so much more than simply sliding our fingers over a glass screen.

 

 

 

Our focus clearly needs to expand. One obvious step for designers is thus to think more like storytellers, animators or choreographers and submerge in the field of motion and interaction design for 3D space. If we don’t adapt, our services in a Metaverse world will render as irrelevant as a desktop publisher in a mobile app world.

 

Humanizing emerging tech.

 

Today we stand at the crossroads of data-driven technology streams all trying to onboard the disoriented user. But if we are to hop on, these complex layered software models will need to force us, designers, to change our dogma.

Consider the hyped world of crypto. If you’ve got any experience in crypto, you know how to set up a wallet, buy and trade on the exchange and maybe occasionally invest in some nifty NFT’s. But for the average Joe, the overall user experience is just too complicated. The slang, the acronyms, the hazy descriptions,… they all make you feel you were born over 5 decades ago. There are exchanges like Coinbase or Kraken that give you a smooth and complexless interface, but what does it tell you when you have no real idea what’s moving under the hood? We’re missing a conceptual model of what crypto and the world of blockchain can do for us. And that’s just one of many technologies that will flood our markets. Today, it clearly shows that the undercurrent of a lot of technologies is fed by some really smart people who genetically think in ‘if/else’ functions rather than usability patterns. For a world that’s so promising, it’s an open invitation to better experience design.

 

 

 

Furthermore, emerging tech introduces the need to design with a crucial fourth dimension in mind, which is time. Future technologies won’t be restricted to fixed screens but rather be malleable through time. Time has the capability of being relative, stretchy and rather fickle with information. It handles data differently at various intervals. If we design with time in mind, it means we need to deal with uncertainties. We’re getting a bit philosophical, I know, but consider the next scenario.

Suppose there is a famous innovative startup in the sports industry that has engineered a technique to boost your physical performance by a factor of 100 when playing any sport. All you need to do is drink their energy fluid, which comes in flash bottles, flavoured in 4 fruity aromas. The fluid isn’t any regular energy drink that relies on levels of caffeine, sugar and taurine to boost your spirit, but contains well-designed nanosized robots that release specific types of glucose molecules. These tiny particles are recognized and transported into the brain by the blood brain barrier. Once inside your brain they find their way to the blood vessels in the neocortex. These molecules were programmed to detect certain neuronal patterns in the brain when your body feels excited (when playing sports for instance) after which they emit light to further trigger the activation potentials in those neurons. This optogenetic character ultimately activates muscles in ways you wouldn’t use them before, making you more performant. Yet, these programmed molecules behave differently when your mind is clouded by, say some bad news you just received. It sparks the same neuronal patterns which now feel depressed instead of stimulated, changing your mood for the worse.

The scenario depicted above is not a case for the near-by future, but it’s not unreal either. Synthetic biology, or synbio in short, has the power to be a key driver of future design. It will be about conceiving excessively small nanofactories we can implant in organic structures — like ourselves — to optimize and alter its functions according to will. A precursor to longevity if you will. But how do you anticipate designing these things when no single neuron is the same, when people change moods or simply feel off? Only time will tell, I guess.

 

 

So the question rises, how can we onboard people in technologies no one yet fully understands? How will the role of interface designer hold when your medium is a changing thing? How will we compete with tools like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion that challenge our skills? Overall, where exactly does a designer fit into? Surely this is the domain of engineers and scientists? Well yes, it is. But although these bright analytic minds apply a mathematical for of creativity, you’ve already noticed some more humane parts are missing.

 

 

Which is why today we mainly experience technologies that, for all the high prospects they anticipate, face shamefully low adoption and only concentrate around circles of the anointed few. John Thackara, the author of ‘In the bubble: designing in a complex world’ already stated: “We’ve built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means but hazy on ends. It’s no longer clear to which question all this stuff […] is an answer, or what value it adds to our lives.”

Aside from being a motion choreographer tomorrow, a designer might do well to take inspiration from sciences like biology, psychology, chemistry and many more the day after tomorrow. If, for example, you’d convey the message to a user that a certain feature of your product is on or off, you could use visual indicators in a 3D space. But maybe the materials of the product could relay that same message themselves and interfaces would learn, grow and evolve over time.

 

Some tips to move along.

 

If you’re a designer reading this, you might feel things aren’t moving that fast. You have many years ahead of you, doing what you do today. And you’re right, you have. But as a designer, like me, you have an innate inclination towards designing the best possible experience for users, because it’s the user that employs you. And such a thing involves mulling over looming technological innovations which are crafted to do just that.

 

 

Now comes the hard part. How do we do that? Well, as a famous African proverb goes, we eat an elephant one bite at a time. In a previous article I wrote about designing organizations into the future (and up the ladder) by applying relatively simple techniques like design thinking and offering small steps towards integrating it into any organization. It gives you very simple and concrete steps where to start. The thing is though, we should start. We shouldn’t hold back waiting for the future to come and expect to be taught its inner workings so we can start designing for it.

 

 

As the future is uncertain, one thing is very certain, which is everything is uncertain. So the best thing to do is just start. Let me illustrate what I mean by a simple example I lent from Dirk Knemeyer, a social futurist and founder of Involution Studios. Consider playing chess. Why do you take a chess piece in your hand and go over all possible positions when you could first think what the best position would be and then just put your piece over there? What is the effect of moving that piece when there is no actual change in position? In all likelihood, we’re using our body to extend our thinking skills. We think through doing. It’s a technique called distributed cognition. It’s what we should do when we start designing. When a technological challenge arrives, for which we have no clear design answer, we should simply start playing around. Use our emphatic skills to connect to our user and use our investigative skills to probe around and prototype possible outcomes.

 

 

We should take care not to let design depreciate to a kind of mindless execution of technology, but a precursor to it, whereby a designer questions implications, influences flows and logic, researches materials and methodologies and ultimately materializes different possible futures that answer to various scenarios, much like a UX Designer does for the conventional digital product today. Design should therefore be a tool for investigation, and a designer should evolve towards a role as facilitator.

 

 

Moreover, designers will not only be facilitators, but will surely need to be system-thinkers too. What we design for is not reduced to a couple of screens, but extends to a set of digital and physical solutions in a wider ecosystem, set within variable contexts and timeframes. We design systems to which technologies answer. More than today it will be a designer’s responsibility to recognize and find a solution to possible errors in that ecosystem. It will ultimately be a designer’s role to connect the gap between the public and the academic thinkers, communicating in understandable ways and break open the barrier between science, technology and society. By all means no effortless job, but very much a rewarding one.

 

 

Maybe it’s not so bad for a designer to learn to understand what’s under the hood again. You won’t be a Python or Solidity programmer, but it won’t hurt either to try to understand the conceptual model behind it. I often read posts or watch Youtube videos about programming that really challenge my creative brain and when I encounter a concept I don’t yet understand, I hop over to another post that explains it in just enough detail for me to get the picture. If I do this once in a while, with small steps of about 30 minutes per day, I am able to slowly connect the dots. It helps to understand what the sector is working on and better grasp how to start designing into an ecosystem around it. If anything, it makes us more credible with those who will actually build the thing.

 

 

It can also be a good idea to check out sites like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, see how new products are being released, designed & marketed. Or you could follow established design studios (like SuperfluxIDEO or Smart Design) and watch how they go about designing for emerging tech. I hope this article connected with you in some way. If it didn’t, whatever. At least I had fun writing it! Give me your thoughts in the comments below.

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