Technology

Advocating for Analog During The Design Process

Jon Kolko

May 11, 2023

5 minute read

When it comes to digital technology, interaction designers have historically played the role of chicken-little role. In the 80s, we found ourselves pushing back against interface complexity through usability engineering, which typically recommended putting fewer UI controls on the screen. In the 90s, while some digital artists were loving on Flash, many interactions designers pushed back on crazy animations and unique information architecture structures in favor of simple layouts and simple wayfinding. While everyone was enamored with innovation in the 2000s, we were often the naysayers, asking for simplicity and begging our stakeholders to remember that users have a hard time with change. And when we found ourselves working on real, meaningful social impact in the 2010s, we often advocated for less technology (and found ourselves losing to shiny tech for tech sake, as witnessed by the huge investment in, and popular failure of, the One Laptop Per Child experiment.

We also seem to find ourselves banging our fists about ethics in AI, although that ship certainly seems to have already sailed (and companies may have grown tired of hearing from us, as per the firing of the entire Microsoft Ethics team.)

But there seems to be an undercurrent of tedium around digital technology, coming from several unlikely sources: the technical leaders pushing digital on us, and the Kids Today who grew up smack in the middle of it.

It's widely reported that both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates drastically limited how much technology their kids could use at home, and while "dogfooding" is a common idea for startups (who use their own products in order to become familiar with an end-user experience), the leaders in technology industries see themselves in a contrarian position with their own families and with the financial role they play in culture (and the financial commitment they have to their shareholders.)

Gen Z, and whatever constitutes post-Gen Z, are adopting analog technologies because, as generations do, they are viewing analog as vintage cool and as rejections of the norms foisted on them by later generations. Witness the resurgence of flip phones, Polaroid's instant camera, Point and shoot film cameras, and the reported dumping of social media.

We're also seeing consumer products emerging that cater to the want for analog. Palm made a resurgence in phones with a dumb phone, and while it didn't initially succeed (ironically, due to poor technological implementation), it's slowly having a set of successes. Concept phones like The Light Phone raised 3.5 million while still a concept.

Designers humanize technology. Sometimes, that means making the experience seamless, the aesthetic beautiful, and the features appropriate. But increasingly, our role may be to selectively argue against digital technology entirely. This might be an increasingly loud voice of support for the analog touchpoints of service design instead of the “all apps, all the time” approach product design. Or, it may look like the chicken-littleing of our history: the tedium and sometimes-successful voice of the user in the context of a voice of technology.

It also may manifest as a broader acceptance of discursive design, and a broader set of knowledge about adversarial design. Experimental stories of the future have always had a place in academia and in small niche circles of artist/designers. But these stories, once seen as highbrow explorations, are now more and more relevant.

One of the better known of these explorations (albeit still in very small academic circles) is the work of Dunne and Raby called Technological Dream Series: No 1, Robots, which is part of the MoMa collection.

It’s truly bizarre, and at first glance, many practitioners may write it off as being art, with few immediate implications on their work. But look a little closer, and compare it to Amazon Astro. Amazon’s robot, released in 2021, met criticism for being spyware, corporate-spying, dumb, poorly designed, and, most importantly, useless.

What if you were on the product team, had seen Dunne and Raby’s work, and had influence enough to get people to listen to you? What would you say, and what could you use this provocation for?

For me, speculative design fiction like this open the doors for a conversation that centers around the question, “Do we really want to do that?” It isn’t intended as inspiration or something to copy. It’s intended as an opener into a meaningful conversation about technology absurdity. Dunne and Raby’s explanation of their work adds color to what it is intended to do, but it’s most clear when Tony explains that “This project was trying to zoom in on that more psychological or emotional relationship between us and advanced technology products in the home, and speculate and explore different qualities and different possibilities. To see what people were attracted to and what they were repelled by.”

It’s really that: the role of designer-as-advocate-for-unplugged-analog is about zooming in on the emotional relationships we have with technological “advancement,” used loosely. Amazon’s robot is ridiculous, but why? Is it more or less ridiculous than a robot that is discomforted when you aren’t there, but then becomes happier when you are, as in the Dunne and Raby example? Is it just a different kind of ridiculous? And who is going to say it out loud during product development, with enough volume to change the direction of the project?

With ChatGPT theoretically threatening jobs on a mass scale and megalomaniac executives at the helm of complex, dangerous technologies like self-driving cars, it may be time for us to shine a black mirror back on our product teams not simple as a “warning of things to come!”, but embodied as a real set of design skills intended to contribute to the launch of appropriate and financially viable products. Discursive design stories and futures, once a tool for academia, now seem a pretty fundamental contribution that we need to integrate into our product teams. It’s not chicken-littleing; if the desire to return to analog is not simply a fad (and I don’t think it is), we need these types of stories and visions to drive a tech-light or tech-free value promise.