Reading Response #7 to Artful Design • Chapter 7: “Social Design”
Sami Wurm
Nov 12th, 2022
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Reading Response: Design for Humans
One of my favorite books I’ve read this year is How To Be Perfect by Michael Schur. In it, he talks about a myriad of moral philosophers and their views in an easy-to-understand, concise, and sometimes fun/silly way. One of the philosophers mentioned in the book is Immanuel Kant, who proclaims as the basis of his moral philosophy that each human being must be treated as in end in themself; not as a means to an end. While there are others of Kant’s ideas that I disagree with, I really resonate with this sentiment and it has stayed with me in how I lead my life and how I think about the media/games/art that I consume. I think it fits perfectly with chapter 7 of Artful Design.
I appreciate a lot of the principles in this chapter, but I would like to focus on the one most important to me. Therefore, I’d like to respond to Artful Design Principle 7.1, which states:
Principle 7.1: Design for Human Connection.
Not as a means to an end, but as an end-in-itself.
I feel that all of the other principles really fall under this overarching ethos. Whether we are talking about design for familiar people, friends, or strangers, the most important thing is that we emphasize the importance and the blessing of finding connection itself. Not to imply that we are using connection to get something else.
Under this overarching concept, my interest was also really sparked by Principle 7.13: Design for Familiar Anonymity, which talks about the idea of design for strangers and how we are able to connect with and open up to strangers in different ways than the people in our lives. This is shown most clearly in the textbook examples given of Ocarina, We Feel Fine, and The World Stage. After reading about these applications, I began to think of examples in my own life where familiar-anonymity feels more comfortable than closer relationships.
In my life off-line, it is always easier to perform for a room of strangers than in the kitchen for my parents. In my life online, my friends and I often talk about the ‘freedom’ of using apps like vsco or tiktok where you can post whatever you find funny/cool/artful, and the people who see your posts (if anyone) are mostly not people who know you or have preconceived notions about who you are. For this reason, we feel more free to be ourselves on these apps than we do on instagram or facebook where our followers mostly know us personally and could judge us. I have also seen some really cool social experiments and connections formed over platforms meant for anonymous connections with total strangers (interesting examples include Omegle, The Unsent Project, Words With Friends [listen, my grandma has made some very real friends with the people who she finds to play Words With Friends with online]).
Sometimes, we can be our truest selves when we are allowed to be free from ourselves and the narratives and preconceived notions about ourselves that we carry around with us all the time. This is an interesting sentiment to keep in mind when observing and designing platforms that allow us to form true connections with ourselves and others. And once again, it is important to remember that our self-actualization and the true connections that we form with others are ends in themselves. These connections do not need other objectives and bells and whistles placed on them; that is to say, “Simple is Satisfying” (Principle 7.5, page 360), and “That which cannot be meaningfully automated should not be” (Principle 7.11B, page 376).
I definitely feel that social designs should be kept simple and not try to replace or diminish their human aspect. Having worked in AI ethics for a while, it is super clear to me that the ‘human’ is not always being kept in the loop as we continue trying to make new social networks/experiences. This failure to keep social design human-centered feels like a let-down for many reasons. When we talk about Social Design, we cannot replace human intuition and development with better algorithms, and we cannot facilitate greater truth or more raw humanity/connection with better algorithms. It is important to remember that these algorithms are built to produce work based on the past; they cannot dream of a better future like we can.
All of this to say, our designs really come down to humanity in the end. We want our designs to facilitate experiences to some varying degree, and then to fall away and allow for old and new methods of connection to come about. I am so excited to see the new ways that we can build technologies that allow for these types of human-connections, and I hope that we always remember the people that we are building these new tools for.