Is product design making us dumb?
If daily devices are getting easier to use and everyday things are getting simplified for us, will we be able to overcome future challenges?
Since the beginning of my journey as a designer, I’ve always preferred to study the psychology behind the design than spend too much time with colors, shapes, grids, proportions, etc. Obviously, all of those points are really important, and every designer must dominate those principles, but that didn’t connect to me as much as behavioral studies. It was just after I had contact with some of the studies from Don Norman, mainly his incredible book “The Design of Everyday Things”, that I was presented to Experience Design.
I got amazed by the fact that many other designers were more concerned about studying the users than the technical knowledge that involves the practical aspects of design.
Despite that enchantment, a few quotes started to repeat during my studies, almost like some kind of mantra, saying things like: “The user is never wrong. If someone doesn’t understand a product, it is a design problem” or that “Design should shorten the learning curve and simplify the usage”.
Because I’ve always believed that challenge is the main motivator of the learning process and that the resolution of complex problems would be the greatest capacity of human nature, I started to ask myself what were the reasons to erase the user difficulties. “Is this healthy at all?”, “Is product design making us dumb?”. Those questions started to annoy me for a while and made me think about the Intuitive Design and User Experience role in modern society.
Designing bridges over natural selection
Since the beginning of mankind, humans used tools to solve their issues, to hunt, to fish, to defend themselves and to collect fruits. Our nature implies on creating tools and products to improve our skills, but on the other hand these technical evolutions came with the need to create, to overcome a difficulty.
For human beings, natural selection was only the first stage of our evolution. When our genetic evolution ended, it made room for technological evolution, but both processes stem from the same point: need and difficulty. When an environment gets cold, the animals that live in the area doesn’t have any option. Those species that are adapted to this new environment will survive and will keep procreating, the ones that are not adaptable to this climate change are going to perish. Despite that, when humans got threaten by the adversity of the natural environment, we created weapons, clothes and tools to survive this new scenario, bypassing the natural selection and propagating our species. Even today, our fuel is our need to evolve, to overcome barriers, from children learning to speak and developing themselves, to adults facing the difficulties that life presents every day.
Considering that, if we deliver an increasingly easier world, aren’t we going the opposite direction of our nature? Wouldn’t we be preventing the intellectual evolution by removing all levels of difficulty and interpretation from their path?
The complexity of a pencil
I started to notice that not all difficulties are the same and they don’t represent the same level of evolution. A good note that explains the previous thought is the story of “I, the Pencil”, written by Laurence Read, that I only discovered by reading the revolutionary book, written by the liberal Nobel winner Milton Friedman, “Free to choose”. The story brings a statement that no man will ever know how to build a pencil from scratch. There are people who know how to extract wood, others who know how to transport it, people who extract graphene, who transform graphene into graphite, who knows how to produce the pencil resin, assemblers, pencil designers, those who operates cutting machines and those who press wood, who produce the ink, etc. No one knows the whole process, and each phase demands different (and specific) knoledge and tools so it is possible to do what they have to.
But what does this have to do with the difficulty levels mentioned? Well, everything! The more advanced society becomes, the more dependent on specific technologies we become to evolve. Going even further, we need more people (and more specialized people) to perform certain activities that allow us to do what we need to do.
When going to space, for example, an astronaut does not necessarily need to know how each of the thousands of lamps and screws on his space shuttle were made, he doesn’t know how to create, from scratch, the dozens of screens which he is operating. The astronaut only needs to know how to operate this equipment, and he can only do that because thousands of other people, men and women, have created countless devices that work for him in an intuitive way. Likewise, a writer does not need to know the step by step of building his pencil to write a book, he simply uses the pencil in an intuitive and easy way, so that he only needs to focus on just one task, his text. Every single person needs countless products every day, and each one of these products requires other countless amount of people (designers, engineers, architects, biologists, painters, economists, etc.), skilled on their specific areas, to achieve a nice result and deliver a great functionality.
A great axe makes a great chop
Design and User Experience are the culmination of several areas with the same goal: provide a product that is intuitive. Providing a good experience and an easier design for the user is not necessarily underestimating their intelligence, it means facilitate the usage of a tool that will be used to solve other challenges, much more (intellectually) complex than the tool itself. It shouldn’t be necessary hours to learn how to use a tool, it should be made optimized to spend hours at the disposal of those who use it so they can do their duties.
Design’s mission is to facilitate people’s daily lives and tasks, and not just an aesthetic advertising appeal. UX (User Experience) Design tries to help society to evolve trough an easier path, solidifying old lessons and transforming them into facilitating tools for future discoveries. We are not getting dumb, we are getting smarter and skilled on subjects that couldn’t exist without good usability.
