Playing Catch-up with Culture and Technology.
After 13 weeks of teaching HCI research and design courses, I got a chance to shadow Dr. Erik Stolterman’s course on Experience Design at IU. After a long time, I got the feeling to be a student in a class although that was not the main purpose of me being in that class.
Figure 1: Stolterman’s Model of User Experience
Coming to the point, the class theme was to discuss about “Current UX Trends” and the entire conversation started by Dr. Stolterman presenting his model of User Experience built through the “interaction” with Technology. But, for the class theme he tried to put this as a plane across time (past, now, future). Wiberg and Stolterman (2021) used this schema to talk about how HCI research uses time and temporality as a resource and material for design work. For example, how can we build “slow interactions”, use time as a dimension to define interactions with artifacts, or study temporal dimensions of experiences alongside experiential qualities. But, in the class and throughout this Blog Post, I am going to talk about time from a trend perspective, i.e. about the timeliness of technology or designs being “time-proof” or users being time-advanced or old for technology.
This discussion intrigued me to the core as I always tell my students to think about the race of technology with the users quoting the example of VR. VR came in 1980s but just did not succeed in public (i.e. users) because of the untimeliness of the technology. And, Stolterman just provided me the right schema to think through how the trends work. But, here is where I started thinking on how the plane of culture-technology is probably not perpendicular to the time axis, and there comes the patterns of trends:
1. When the plane is perpendicular to time (Figure 1 or Plane A in Figure 2): The plane moves with time and that’s where we have technology and users moving with time and the designs are made to be time-proof. But, here is the point, in my opinion, when the plane is perpendicular to time, the innovation or creativity in user experience kinda starts losing momentum. For instance, what happened with smartphones and the concept of apps. Users are caught up on the technology of smartphones and apps being in their pocket and now it “feels” (as a designer) very obvious in terms of experience and the in-built interactions.
Figure 2: The plane is actually Flaky!!
Here comes my thought on how this plane is actually not perpendicular (see Figure 2) and I call it a “Flaky” plane which is always at an angle and sometimes have a rotational velocity to it which is what causes all the tension and exciting elements of designing for those spaces . Yes, the math geek in me is thinking and you have to bear with me and Cartesian theory for a while. This flakiness of the plane is what creates this entire spectrum of tech user personas, ranging from “tech-savvy” people to my dad (Oops! I did it again). Here are the other FLAKY PLANE trends to think through:
Figure 2.1: Flaky Culture-Technology Plane- Top-View
2. When the plane is not perpendicular and the technology is ahead of the users (Plane B, in Figure 2): The plane is at an angle with technology ahead of what the users could adapt to. This is what happened to VR, but where all the interesting innovation happens and changing the behaviors of the users in how they use technology. Many examples come to mind, such as biofibers where you clothes can react to you, wearable technology where interactions as seamless, Bluetooth connections where everything is hand free, smart systems where you talk with you technology (spooky!), and so on. For UX designers, here is where the fun part comes in where they can be overly excited about the potential opportunities and use cases that they can make users go through. I wonder what is going to happen with the new toy- Metaverse. Let’s not go there yet!
“Through the flakiness of the plane comes exciting, fun, tension-filled design frames.”
3. When the plane is not perpendicular and the user culture is ahead of technology (Plane C, in Figure 2): The plane is at an angle with user culture ahead of what the technology is still trying to catch up in all the happiness and excitement of the above pattern. A student asked what might be a good example for this. Take the case of non-binary gender representations or racial equity struggles that user culture is already trying to reflect on BUT the forms you fill for a job interviews still ask you if you are just a male/ female or give single selection options for identifying which race you belong to. TENSION! But that’s the beauty of this tension where designers get to tackle the entire plane together and try to play “catch-up” and bring their responsibility to provide guarantee through their designs and user experiences they are creating.
4. Its just not the angle, but also the rotational velocity of the flaky plane: The plane is angled, but it’s also important to look into how fast the plane rotates in a ∆t to see the timeliness of culture of technology advancement/ change with respect to each other. For instance, we discussed about what happened during Pandemic. There was a sudden change (in a very small ∆t) in user culture and the technology just could not adapt soon in that instance. Again, in that ∆t, where we had to play a faster catch-up, there was again innovation through appropriation of existing technology and creating user experiences that were never thought of.
Thinking through these different patterns made me think how it would help UX designers ideate about experiences they have to create for their users and also sometimes use the “flakiness as design material.” This is a very important skill that UX designers have to build to consider their design frames and defamiliarize themselves on where the users exactly stand with respect to the timeliness of technology. If not, this would create “not-so-obvious” assumptions about users. This also points to what I always tell my students about “You are users and designers as well. Use that to your advantage.” Thinking about UX trends in this way is a very good lesson for designers to position themselves in this 3D space represented in Figure 2. It just feels like an amalgamation of designer’s creativity, innovation, empathy, and responsibility in the game of UX trends!
