Tag: film

The Browser Company on “Emotional Design”:

Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant... handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?

A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”

But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.

[…] When our software optimizes for numbers alone — no matter the number — it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.

[…] We wanted to optimize for feelings.

It’s hard to justify “delight” in a spreadsheet. Most commercial design processes prioritize what can be measured (clicks, conversion, time-on-site) because those numbers can be optimized; there’s always a clear next move toward a ‘solution.’ But as Nick Foster notes here, focusing purely on the solution can mean ignoring the elegance of how you got there. Benek Lisefski lends more to this in saying that relying on data alone has a way of flattening things out:

… relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure... [The commercial design process] creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

I see a similar tension in movies. Martin Scorsese’s critique of Marvel is essentially about the same trade-off between a “perfect product” and something with genuine risk:

…Cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation.... What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk... The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands... market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

Massive budgets don’t guarantee resonance. Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures mentions a time they chose not to optimize a button purely for attention because they wanted to prioritize trust and quality instead. As Lisefski puts it: “While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness.”

This e-flux essay makes a case for looking at social media as more than just a place to post photos:

Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces, and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions. (...)

We treat the internet as something ethereal, but “the cloud” is mostly just rows of humming server racks in giant warehouses. Because we don’t see the physical hardware, it’s easy to miss how much of our digital life is manufactured.

… Before we enter the social media sphere, everyone first fills out a profile and choses a username and password in order to create an account. Minutes later, you’re part of the game and you start sharing, creating, playing, as if it has always been like that [...] The platforms present themselves as self-evident. They just are—facilitating our feature-rich lives.

Before movies matured into a standard format, they were all “experimental,” including plot structures. We now take for granted conventions like following a protagonist through a rising action and climax, but things didn’t have to turn out that way. Social media is the same. The focus on “engagement metrics” and “personalization” isn’t a natural law; it’s a design choice optimized for business incentives.

Treating social media as ideology means observing how it binds together media, culture, and identity into an ever-growing cultural performance (and related “cultural studies”) of gender, lifestyle, fashion, brands, celebrity, and news from radio, television, magazines, and the web—all of this imbricated with the entrepreneurial values of venture capital and start-up culture, with their underside of declining livelihoods and growing inequality.

Software gives us a simplified, imaginary relationship to the hardware it runs on. We don’t interact with transistors; we interact with “desktops” and “recycling bins.” In the same way, social platforms produce a specific kind of “user.”

Software “fulfills almost every formal definition of ideology we have, from ideology as false consciousness to Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology as a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’”
Software, or perhaps more precisely operating systems, offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software produces users. Without operating system (OS) there would be no access to hardware; without OS no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, through its advertisements, interpellates a “user”: calls it and offers it a name or image with which to identify.