All right. Hello, friends. You have to be with me for about two minutes. I am a cofounder of postlight, the place whereou are, and if the company that builds software. We have a website. We have a podcast i do w with my cofound all kinds of things. The arbitrary that brings you all here is he continual asked me while im late on delivering my book to ht thihis event and the space was very glad to do. Since theyre so conceptually relevant to what we do here. So just know youre seeing guilt life in front of you and shame. But from that pointet me stop talking about myself. Talk little bit about the book here. Cliff kuangng is an awardwinnig journalist and an experienced designer. This is cliff right here. Whoo was previously ahead of a company as well as a design editor. In the role founded one of the worlds leading design publications. He works for a company that isnt all related related to this but hes a very much a practitioner and a leader and a writer and a communicator and is been working hard at it for very long time. Another person working at it for very long time is robert fabricant. Robert fabricant, the former vi president for frog design which is if you dont know its shameful, you should know, and one of the leading industrial the last 50 years, and an awardwinning cofounder. Theyve written the book that is a very good book, its called user friendly and it talks about just the way we t try to make everything easy with the software and devices and t they may be as a side effect we made everything friction free and make people less powerful. Its a very good topic to discuss and something we deal with everyday. So before i will remark there are booksks for sale and its ne you are here and im gladd you are enjoying the fear that is provided for you and you might want to consider how capitalism works and what your role is in it because those books dont its a books, so they are right there. You can credit cards accepted . All right, credit card spirit what about ch . This is shameful. You can get them sign and theyre really nice books. You should buy them. Thank you. With that note i think a nice introductory a round of applause for our cherished guests. [applause] so i will say you guys already know about me. Thank you, paul. Thisis book started six years ao and it started when robert approached me with a few questions, you know, one of which is like we design but why, and how did we cater. One of the points rubbermaid is user experience, walkie word, has become this thing that confuses our daily life and is around us every minute that we are awake. Butt theres been no account of how this came to be or why that should matter to the person on the street. How is it this discipline that was once obscure came to define so much of our lives . It turns out it ended up taking six years about 200 plus interviews, 40,000 miles flown and at this point its actually out. You can see a little bit of a review from the New York Times and you can buy it right there. Overview. Im going to take you guys through a couple different strains of what produced the city of userfriendly. So first in that first section im going to talk about this opposition between mankind and machine, between the people and the machines they use and the second section im going to talk with the second Product Design as progress and then well talk about the world to come, and the sort of the will arise and we will talk about that and then will answer your questions. Lets talk about man versus machine. In the book about technology and how we use technology and how it fits and allies youre probably expecting this will start with facebook or apple or some pla like that. Instead what is going to is invite you to imagine youre a b17 pil in world war ii. Imagine your returning home from a mission and then suddenly things are going fine, youre coming in for a nice easy landing after like like a a roe bombing run or Something Like that. Sudden panic. Nothing is working as a should. You find yourself coming in, the plane is shattering, its screeching acrs the runway. You realize your crashed. Your thoughts probably go to the people in the belly of the plane who were sitting down to wondering whatt happened and potentially dead. Youre playing skids off the runway a you dont know why. So the question is what happened to that pilot in the moment im sure theyont know. But the airport in its infinite wisdom at the time is likely to say its because of user error. Its because this person wasnt trained enough. Its because this person should have known better. Its because this person shouldnt have been doing what they were doing. That, in fact, is the progress of the time, this idea that some people are user prone and this is something you should be able to train out of the system. This is m much in keeping with e psychologist at the time who believed that mankind is some wayy was perfectible, you can train it to do anything you wanted. This is what psychchology, thiss the domant strain at that time. So into this guy, he returns to this cockpits and imagines what its like to be in that cockpit, maybe it will nervous threaten, tired, eager to get home, eager for the Plaintiff Mission to be over. He realizes something thats really interesting, which is the landing gear and the wing flaps inin the plane are interesting chewable from each other but to do the opposite thing. So coming in from landing you might reach for the landing gear instead pull the wing flap and not engage and just skimmed right off the runway. He comes up wh this ingenious solution which is the shape code, the wing flap control and the landing gear to make them shave carefully, to make the knobs shaped particularly such as by sitting there closing her eyes without any Reference Point roger you can feel your way around the cockpit, you can feel what going on and you know how to use the thing you are using. That solution lives on to this day. You can find it in airplane cockpits b but its also all the knobs in the car are shaped differently. Itshy they feel differently. Its why the buttons on our archaic control are all shaped in different ways. This is the reason why the buttons in an app are all shaped differently, different colors and things like that. To tell you this is how use this and this is how use of that. He may be thinking thats nice, a nice story a about the bombers but the pointer theres a bigger ea brought to bear in what chapanis is proposing pathway airplane cockpits should work. Like the thing he was trying to get at is this idea you cant listen people are at the best and the most ratiol. You have to instead assume they are limited, theyre stressed, tired, faith with all the stresses and limitations that make them less thann what theire best is. This isnt a bad thing. This is whatt means instead to be human, right . You may be thinking like thats a look at paternalistic or odd to say oh, humans are just what it want to say is this is a beautiful idea. This design idea that humans are not perfectible. They are just humumans, right . You can see 30 years later with the idea goes in the following. This is like one of the first print apps for the macintosh and things want to draw your attention to is a little text that says we do make sense to teach computers about people instead teaching people about computers . Thats an interesting inversion thats happening right before your eyes thanks to these crashes that were happening in world war ii which is like when i presuming that men are going to bend themselves around the machines around them. We are going to presume the machines should bend themselves to the foibles of the human beings operating them. And that will see in the second changes the dialogue that we have with the world around us. So second thing, design as progress. Im going to invite you again to take a step back. Imagine yourself in the 1920s. This is a picture of broadway or fifth avenue. I cant member whi. Massproduce goes into the home. Advertisingg is still nation. Its still extremely wildly effective this idea you can communicate with people through the medium of print advertising or radio advertising. Still a new thing people have been exposed to. Just one problem is the guy making those ads hates it. They are like we spend so much time like putting lipstick on a pig, like should we be the ones designing these things since were the ones who know about what consumers are going to react to ask so this guy comes along, Henry Dreyfuss, suave, elegant man who is this like funny quirk of hating everything the world around him. Mainly, he thinks l like theres all this crap, and differing cod crap in the world around us that should be designed, should be more thoughtful. He was making interesting point basically saying just like chapanis before them, start with the human first and the thing is, in thinkining about the hum, think now to live their lives first, he starts thinking about this ideahat its not the product itself that is important thing, its thehe context that a prproduct fits. As he sets out to codify this philosophy, start drawing these pictures of like idealized human beings, average human beings, that bear a striking resemblance to the picture of the true view man that i should be for which a liquid that shows like a human being of the center of the universe. These are nominally trunks about product size but what you dont see at all in these drawings were actual products. You just see people. What the philosophy yields are some design classics for example, the fell 500 telephone which has a handset which is basically meant to be cradled s you can be doing other things, indigent people around you and moving around your house when using a telephone, at the telephone design so successful is probably the last headset ht will be designed because he can look a the icon on your smartphone this is the icon and it hasnt changed. A popular change because. And the thing he does is create this idea of expense design which is like heres a thermometer or thermostat you are meant to change the dial on and the reason its rent on the outside with the reader in december because you dont obscure that out with your hand. In other words, hes thinking about how do you move to the world and how t to manipulate te objects around you and how do ii dever something thats a little bit easier that makes things a little bit more easy, right . The thing thats revolutionary inhis area is about its not thats like nice to have, like saving just a bit of time like twiddling with a knob which is seemingly minor change, its the sense that all these little tiny changes all t these little tiny moments in time that a a given back to people because things are easier or easier to use on more intuitive, somehow at up to progress, right . Somehow add up to extra time you ve in your life to realize the person you want to be to spend time in the moment you would rather spend them. So they userfriendly world rests on these ideas. The first being deferred to the user that we saw with chapanis and the second, equal progress. These ideas are everywhere we saw before with the macintosh computer but i would also say you see with amazon in this idea you could have one click shopping. Why was that an idea that thousands or millions of people decicided to inves in . Why was it an idea that w was compelling enough to define an entire company . If this idea that easy equals progress. And the Facebook Like button which originated incidentally as an experiment in finding the lightest way possible, the lightest weight possible to put positivity into the world. You might find that a a little strange, but nonetheless thats how it started. Lets talk about the coming world that that world has produced come this idea that easy equals progress and we should defer to the user. This guy, he s says creating ths kind of frictionless experience isnt an optioion. Theres no choice. Heres what hes working on today, who ships, carnival. One of the things that powers this expense is a ocean mcgahn which is essential to wear around your wrist. As you move through the ship there are 7000 sensors threat that ship the track your progress that also record things like what you have done, who you are with, the activityou want to do, the activities you have done and they become part of personal genome, its wreak havoc chelated recalculated 700 times per second. Those screens respond to your present. Anticipate what you want and make recmendations about what you might see. What you can think about this, you can think about your computer, this is basically a rightclick, this idea of options already constantly and everything you and everything you see and his options are esented to you frictionless, i can this idea if we can provide these things with maximum ease and presuming people are hurried that the one of time that will give them something that is meaningful to them. But the question youre probably asking yourself is like what do we lose with every singlgle choe around you is made easy . Of course makes companies these days. Making something easier makes companies able to be successful. It makes those companies very quic to scale. That amazon one click button was created within ten ten years a complete rewiring of infrastructure of delivering productsn america to potential downsides of like what are the those warehouses. The workers in it is the ease of that of the e that made that happen so fast that we cannot reckon with those changes in time to really think, is this the world we want to build . The Facebook Like button, this is a picture from the rohingya massacre. And again started with this ia were going to put positivity in the wor in the lightest possible way. And the scaly and ease of that interface did not allow us to take the time and wonder what the same for the entire world to be so connected in a way theyve never beenonnected before. And, of course, apple which put the iphone a all of our hands and is now busy rewiring the way we interact with each other in space. So here is the coming challenge from this world that im trying to paint here is that we have to tackle contradictions headon. This sounds like a panacea, but one of tngs i want to point out is that every generation deals with conflicts with tensions that result in a new things that they make. In this case you have t ask the question how do you connect and i will say p, preserve, or sovereignty but also connect with people around you. These are tensions the use from the world has been great for us and introduced. We have to ask how do we promote both speech and truth . Questions in the user from the world, opposition the userfriendly world put in front of us that when you have to answer. And how to make things both easy and easy to question mark this is may be the hardest thing, how do you make things easy to use but also easy to secondguess. Theres a world in which may be the platforms that are around us become a a little more open to question and a little bit more amenable to change. The point here is again, the underlying principle of what makes things userfriendly still remain important for the world where trying to make. Onef those principles, this idea feedback, the idea you to be able to do something and get a response and that feedback between input and output that changes your behavior is something that designers create everyday. Most new technology typically come from new feedback loops put in the world that were not there before and some of the feedback loops that we need to create are turning knowledge into action, example the issue of climate change. How can downstrm impacts be felt in tim toct . And another point is putting higher goals and a product or one of the ways in which Product Design which was privileged on the idea that you could make clickable interaction that was sitting right in front of the user into something thats a little easier and easier to manage that sort of mrs. Agee of like okay, like this thing is easy for me in a moment of what is it i really want and what values do i really believe in . You could make a cheeseburger easy to access for you just available on demand all the time but theres a sense of which like thats not good for you in the long term and you know its not. How would we put those higher order values in the products we have . And do our products to express what we want . And then finally this thing i want to leave you guys with is how do you square the difrence between what y you want and what you actually need facts thats the end of my talk. Robert can talk a little bit and then open it up for questions. Thank you, guys. [applause] i first want to thank cliff for forget way to summarize so much, not just the conceptual stuff but actual history vote into the presentation and the way its report in such a phenomenal way. Can you hear me . Sorry. I often feel like im a l little bit operating in a funny sort of twilight z zone episode which is that for choices i made 25 or 30 years ago i got to experience some of tse changes. At a much slower pace in almost a footround me. The book, that title came from a i had with my dad who is about to turn 89. He was fiddling with this own for the millionth time and he finally dropp it on the table and said i dont understand. Its supposed to be so damned userfriendly. I thought this is the word is reach my 86yearold father sixyearold father. Something happen in our culture that made a set of ideas urgent for us and also quite confusing. If you think about the timescale of what were all trying to absorb in the last ten years, and some ways its been a privilege to sorort of see this build like a settlement over a longer te. I know there are a couple of people here in the room, i saw liz walk in. Dando, i dont know if youre still here, who cant rember when the committee, they give out the stuff is pretty small. I remember when i first started doing this design work i call a cab one generation removed frorm things like what felt like the origin o of lot of this thinkin. I dont know, how many people have a c copy of the apple human interface guidelines . I see a few hands gop. I could reject an almost touch it. Someone i couould meet, worked n that design team. It was like you could touch it. Bill buxton who you spent a while talking to, almost had a chapter to himself, but didnt quite make it. Hes the guy who stripling around with multitouch because he was a drummer. He loved drumming. For a for a company back in they 90s. You could reach out and touch all the stuff and yet the truth is, over 25 years its taking a long time to realize theres an much deeper history and thats why came to cliff with is how to bring the future together. I had my own pieces of it that i had self assembled and fnd over time, but it was totally incomplete and one of the many threads cliff have reported on, not just to capture that but you really kind to bring it to life. For me thats the purpose. My wife always ask me whats the service . The service herere is to bring that history back up to the president for everybody in this room, for everybody that i know. Because the end of the day we are left with a set of choices not just on how we made by our Christmas Gifts i week or t twon amazon but increasingly how the same systems are going to shape the way we vote, the way we take care of our loved ones. All of the same ideas are starting to infuse us broader set of questions and instruions that isnt just the gleaming fancy things thatt are consumeroriented, that a much were deeply embedded in our lives. It will be two more cultural change of potential cultural tradeoffs. I think part of what im hoping this book teaches people is at the end of the date by two designers made a bunch of decisions, and it did it at this point in time. You can trace that story back further than book, you can tre it back into the early mechanical designs or the 17th 17th, 18th century, like people just make choices as designers and while there were informed theres no great set of expertise the way a doctor goes through a lower somebody else that tells you how to make choices in the right way, how to anticipate outcomes. What are the right and the thresholds can go through to know what designs are in the world. Its very much choices that info to making very often because they are designers had to make them at 11 30 the night before. I know most people have been in that situation. My hope is that this a stotory that is relevantow to a much broader audience and that due to the beautiful writing, reporting that cliff spent years on this something thats meaningful and successful to a lot of people. But it does great set of estions like the ones that cliff ended on. And those are not easy questions, but there are questions that in many ways designers have been asking, designers like josh and jonas who are in this room. Or asking over the water cooler. There are questions that are facing us as a society which much more broadly. I just recently came back from a trip to india and our team was doing the first real deep dive look at a Digital Identity platform the Indian Government has rololled out to 1. 6 billion people in this Digital Identity now, you cant get a bank account, you cant get a mobile cart. In many instances you cant even take your kids to school if you dont have that Digital Identity and dicaprio identity. On the one hand, it is their produce a ton of corruption, a time of externalities, but its also placing a very user centric question, fundamental usability question and hence of people. How do i know if its the right how do i know if i have recourse . I need to change information. How is that going to change the way i live, work, learn, all those different things. Those are the big ideas that the book set that. I think cliff has done really beautifully in this talk, and for us im hoping that this is the beginning of a bit of a different dialogue that people can start to have whatave some nomenclature and feel more confident to question and also to discuss the tradeoffs that were all making and understand better kind of why just kind of embedding all of this thinking around individuals doesnt necessarily lead t the results were all looking for. Thats what we found ourselves. The questions keep coming, soy hope is that we can use this time may be to hear from you guys about questions you might have [inaudible] yes, will do. Questions big or small kind of where we are, how we got here and what implications of userfriendly and the concept within them might be. Uest . We wi. Righere. I think a lot what was presented [inaudible] the other side of that is the moral question. [inaudible] so i dont know if its just a question around with the design but is there something from history that you been able to learn on the one hand, you have design questions that are about making things a little more intuitive and fluid . On the other hd, you have designers, engineers, product people often make decisions based on metrics around making money, optimizing engagement, all these kinds of things. Those things exist in some kind of tension, and the question is, do you see historical precedence that in some way resolve this tension . Heres the thing. I think that the idea that we only make things and only purpose they can serve essentially making money is compleletely false. The products that we make we can view the products we make. Ill give you some trivial examples which is socially as it happens was all invented by a generation of kids who grew up with two working parents come home to an empty house and esseially wanting to connect with other people and looking for that connection online. They created social networking which will be held turned out to be incredibly lucrative. The reason they create that wasnt initially to make money. There was of vital conversation happening about the object when you come the things that might serve our higher order aspirations. The thing i want to say is like this new generatio that is now gring up with some of the perils, lets say, of social media now has to bring a different set of assumptions to this thing is going to make for the coming generation. They are going to optimize for different things. Theyre going to try to resolve some of the tensions that i like that, forxample, what it means to be both private and connected to the broader world. Those seem like an possible competing demands but these are things that the new generation is coming up will create in response if theyre cognizant of the tradeoffs that have been made and the shohortcomings of e things that the been made. I dont think like, you can say like people make all these short decision but you can see look at intake its only a few people that make those decisions. I work in a really big tech city and its striking out small at some point, how small and human the decisions that get made our at this point in the something everybody aspires to hear. I would say a lot of the work i do today is about trying to see how to make big skill system for human centered. Example i gave in indy is a good example. I have a team in ethiopia right now working with the governor ththere. On one hand its a lot of work to try to get that to be something that isnt just viewed as a way of making things work better, but much deeper values in the way a government or business sees its role in peoples lives. On the one hand, theres been a lot of progress in that people i think are much more aware of the need and the opportunity to gather feedback in different ways, and how that shaped and can shape the choices they make. The other hand, there are many aspects of, you know, the world we operate in about philosophy has a get enthused hasnt infused, number one. Find yourself working in other avenues because of that and that often leads trying to forget how to get stakeholders within the company to collaborate differently. Therees a whole bunch of areas in which that same philosophy is trying to get t same fundamental values. I think designers a good holding up a mirror to it and sometimes bring that feedback to the top of the deck where it has drifted down under a pile of spreadsheets or somethingng else is where we can sometimes sp those dynamics. But its not easy and is not obvious. On the flip side i think you see where were all exasperated by the way in which the information that we interact with, the way we interact with each other is routed on these very specific little rabbit trails in terms of the can of connections that we seem to be replicating all over the world. I dont know. I dont know theres an easy answer for it. I think the booook is trying to kind of show where some of these changes have reached a breaking point. The military, but is not necessarily a complete answer. There are questions that this sort of design approach our kind running against are really limiting the ability to drive the more fundamental change. I would say a follow up on this of is admitting that you have a problem. Any other questions . I have a question about [inaudible] [inaudible question] thats a hard question. One thing i would point out is sorry. Repeat the question. So the question is, in the context of designers potential being asked to make from decisions about whether or not to work on the think theyre working on such as for example, real id which now takes an unprecedented layer of biometric information and puts it into Government Systems that may or may not be open to attack, right . The question is how do you proceed as as a designer in the world in which the things you work on have moral implications you have to deal with everyday . The only answer that is to have clarity and conscus is about with the downstream effects of what you creating might be. If im sitting there imagi what its like to be a designer on the real id system you would ask the question of is this data safe . Can it be misused . Canopy hacked or misappropriated in some way and making sure that those avenues are being at least considered so you can be in that decisions that of saying this is a problem, this is a problem for our business, and raising that consciousness and ultimately of those things are not answered in any meaningful way like look, we are so lucky enough to live in a dedemocracy with free press, jut barely, you know, making public those decisions that are being made can like, whats not working . We have a world in which like so of the feedback loops still works, thanks to partially the amplifying effect of social media. I which is that sometimes we use an analogy between the ethical between a doctor like hippocratic oath, for design can people been talked about for a long time. The site is a collaborative thing. I design emerges in many decisions. Its not single surgical decision. Its not a single diagnosis. We can look at the ethical issues around design and how its emerging around a system like that, but as individual designers were not the doctor. We dont have that authority. Thats good because i dont know we are ready for it but it also meanans that model is a little t different. I can give you a concrete example, ain, because we havent talked about id systems but they are pretty interesting layer of kind of infrastructure that starting to emerge in places you might not imagine. Again, going back to experts in indi what we able to do there was we cant change a system but what we were able to do was show in addition to meet at the convenience emerges whos been excluded and why. We were able to create the stories and profiles right first how those people were being included, everything from transgender people to people fr religious minorities. This information is being used either detrimeal or it can capture them. Second, designing how can you redress the information. On the one hand, that would not have been brought to light if we had encased in a processed reveal it. We have done National Scale surveyss with the same kind of piece of work and that stuff gets lost in the bigger number. Thats the first thing is we cant find the behaviors and needs and find a way to tell that story that otherwise wouldnt unfold and that will give you a little better about the role we play. The second thingng is a society you can make a choice. Thats something that i have done and the team that worked for me but its hard. Its hard to sort of figure out, when i first staed working design i was paid 19,000 a year. It was not a good ideaa to go into this at the time. Certainly my parents were not thrilled about it so now we have a whole industry of people who are paid very well. Thats changed a lot, i think, how people look about what their expertise is and how important it is to them, and also kind of the expectations they have for what the role is. Thats not a simple answer. I think the end of the day we make ethical choice as users what we opt in and out of as well, and how can designers or how design, not necessarily designers, make those choices more viable for people, more apparent. Its getting harder to opt out of these things as i feel like we need kind of a movement but the movement is a designer ethics come ethics more broadly. There are a few cases when youre actually catching it o on designing product where you know the consequence will be bad. I think the profile, the like button design was opposite. Those guys out the bring something so positive. Its the recall. You want it to recall button on the like button and youre not able to do it. What would you say the ski of Interaction Design [inaudible] i mean, that is very much the question was whats the role of users of people for building crating products. More and more this field for design has tried to shift that dynamic i the workhat w do. I stirred every much like Henry Dreyfuss going out and sitting on a tractor to learn how to better design that,r to have his design team pump gas. The goal is to try and figure out how to create an approach design in which youre not just going out and trying to learn from somebody, but that person is involved in shaping the product from the beginning. And not just from the beginning in terms of the form it takes but ways to shape and change how it is used over time. That very much is a lossy i think that a lot its a big idea behind user centered design. Such is going and find people in front of the bring them into the creative process. I think theres an entire industry of how to bring the user into this dialogue and creating something in the book the phrase i give this is industrialize empathy. Like that is one of the major developments in the world o of business of technology thats happed in the last 30 years which is like trying to understand people at some meaningful scale. These processes are not perfect. Peoples to get them wrong but its remarkable how different the world is now than what it was in recent history. Like to give one example from the book, the edsel, made one of the biggest product failures in the entire history of car design. Started off as a purported miracle of use and market research, but it turns out what they were not understand was you can put a bunch of things and from people and they will say yes, but when you put almost things together such as, idaho, like a speedometer inside the steering wheel, it turns out when you mash all those things together people dont want it. This is a shortcoming in understand whohe user is and what they would want in the real world. Its so much of the Way Technology has unfolded in the last 30 years, to answer prprecisely the problem, which s how do i undererstand the thing that people really want to get explicitly say . Thats a bit of what the story of the book is about is how to get at that, those unmet latent needs as opposed to the explicit thinks it will tell you about. That edsel creation was famously parodied in the simpsons bit where homer asked for a foreign that plays like a crotchet that allows him to restrain his kids in the backseat and all these kind of things nobody wants to buy because the car is 90,000, right . This idea that people do one thing but they want another is like a core to what, a coredea of what the design is about. Theres something people consider what an something they cant say what of the things they cant say or maybe the more important ones. There was a question writer. [inaudible question] the question just to repeat for cspan, the question here was we have a recall process are most products but we dont have recall process on things that a change society such as the like button. Use bright spots or potential ways to create such accountability in the process of Product Design . Thats a hard question. Robert, you wan to start . Ill say this. For a long time i think designers have an operative with the delusion that software so flexible that it does need a recall button. I think what we see is actually software encode, so much valalue come so many values in the way we organize the world that it becomes much harder to undo. We live in in a will in which e pace of the physical products that we choose to use and dispose of in some cases is much, much faster. Over the weekend i woke up sunday morning, personal share, in my mail icon on my phone had just broken0,000 unread emails. I know, thats exciting, good milestone for everybody but bua realize ive been on gmail since we worked together, 2004 when it came out and gmail has changed a bit but still like fundamentalist we are living with the stuff a lot longer than we used to. I think its a very different mindset that i think we went into the world of creating software and tools, the people we are crating for used these things also knew how to use them and change the papers more about plicating and changing over time than it was about trying to recall anything. Theyre much more complete experiences because theyre a little song inside and so, i feel like there is probably a nativism opportunities here. I dont know. Much more so than a recall opportunity that i can think of. But i, you know, i would love to think theres a way at least to, you know, sort of go bk and create the space for designers and reflect on what were the consequences five or 10 years on because i dont think that that dialog happened. Y,t spot that i point to is that companies that make things and the ent users have never been closer mostly because of the smartphone thats essentially put Something Like an Insurance Company accountable to you in the app that they makeke. And things likeocial media created feedback loops of accountability that never existed before. As much as we bemoan social media a lot of those companies are more accountable to their users than ever before. If you dont know what im talking about, next time youre delayed on a flight and next tweet at the airline annoying you, not giving your a you a flight that you want to get ouout on, they respond. And the uber app and they listen. The numbers on the uber were insane and they netted millionss of deletions. Therees a world that could hae never happened except for the same world that created all of these problems and those feedback loops, i think are something to be highlighted and to be used by the people in that power, with that power to vote with their feet. Any other questions . One here. How do you think they played a role in talking about regulation, looking at privacy laws right now. [inaudible] Like Companies dont recall out of their hearts, its because of a violation, any rule on regulation or designers . Im terrified by the prospect of regulation in the United States repeat the question. Sorry. The question is what role do you see regulation playing in making i guess Better Technology in the world and is that potentially an avenue to empowering people t the previous question that was asked and the thing i was going 0 to say, im terrified of the current governance that we have being able it understand the issues at hand, but i think whats interested, i watched the story unfold the european ion is leading on this and making these International Companies adapt to them is like the most constrained market with the most savvy regulators, right . So i dont think necessarily the regulation is going to come to the United States, unfortunately, but that stuff is having an effect, altugh in the case of i could go down a wonky rabbit hole around gdpr and all of these different regulations and sometimes they aree amissing the mark, but at the same time these things are like putting values in that were not t there before like the whole idea that any mainstream candidate would be proposing like a privacy law for technology and these kinds of things. Theyre live issues. I have doubts that our senate and congress can get the nuances right, but nonetheless, the signal that goes out to every other government thats in the wherewithal and they have potential to act in ripples acrossecause its all connected. [inaudible] now that terrible, terrible. [inaudible] terrible. You know, thats a good example. Bad gdpr implementation. Im sorry, you were going to Say Something . Yeah, who remembers browsers and cookies . Creating a browseser. The thing im upset with rigigh now is recourse. Its less that the government knows what data should and shouldnt be collected. D. Its the fact that people have so little recourse to change how their dataa is being used and captured and the right user friendly tools for that. I think theres a huge opportunity both on the policy side to, you know, policy makers make decisions based on information thats two years old, typically, because its whats happened already and then they pass laws and wait five years to figure out w what happened. To me the two big opportunities, the tools for recourse are easy and flexible and a minimum standard of quality for recourse and coming back to india, you know, how do you make s sure that those are tested and proven to be effective with excluded a marshalized groups and howo you bring user friendly process to the regulatory process so this can be learned and lived through as opposed to position where theyre really not qualified to have the make the choices they have. Those are the two areas i would look for some progress and i think if you can get the recourse thing to happen better and you can kind of build more of a crowd sourcee shared understandining so we can all tell everyone how to do this and tell our kids how to do this. I think you could actually do more than probably mandate around the sort of data collecti itself. If the question was about, do you cacan you suggest regulations that would maybe change the entire discourse the way that theyre happening now, i can name two off the top of my bat off the top of my head that you as a user should be able to own your data and take it with you wherever you go and revoke privileges to it. That one potential avenue. I think it has not a snowballs chance of hell of passing in the United States. And thenen another, number t tw thing that you cou do is say, you are owed an accounting of how your data has been monetized. Which is also something that would be very hard to do here, but its absolutely posossible n other g governments this day. I just was thinking about regional attitudes towards design changes. You mentioned that the european regulators are taking the lead on regulations. Does that mean europeans want to tend to move more slowly. I just came backk from japan, nobody was in [inaudible] invented a lot o of monumental design shifts over the last 50 or 100 years. I guess the question to what extent does the culture of the society which is doing the design have an impact on how the lolongevity [indible] constructive contribution. So the question was how much does the local culture inform, i guess, the end productct o user friendly design. How much does it change the assumptions,s, which is a hard question that i could probably spend an entire book answering again. But it is interesting that if you ask that question ill flip that question around, why wasnt the id invented or ipod or iphone invented in japan . Why wasnt any social networking invented in europe and i would say the answers to the question are pretty nuanced, but have a lot to do with the cultures and the needs that those culture found most intuitive, right . In the case of japan, they have they happened to have a topdown view of technology and engineering and Product Development that doesnt lend itself well to really like inventions and innovavation, right . In the case of europe, like they did not see the need to share their lives with strangers. This was not seen as like a valuable outcome, right . And in both of those cases what they did, those communities made different things. And whats i think, really interesting thats happening right now is that these things that originatedd in america are now being made to try to like readapt to those values and mores of those others and thats forcing the companies to change these products to adapt locally if they want to like keep the trust of the u users locall and those the way that debate is being waged, i donten how its i dont know how its going to turn out. Theres a cynical way the european technology, the only reason theyre going off the u. S. Companies they want their local companies to compete in the markets and theyre trying to make it harder. These are cynical reasons ive heard from tech insiders. My response is let them have it. Lets see what a social Networking Company like born from europe would come out. Spotify tried, they failed to make that into a social networking product. Well see. I mean, there is a real nice chapter on tomomorrow of your observations on china in the book, or a chapter that highlights, you know, how a culture is absorbing the technology and dystopian things going on and different ways of using chat and other environments that are fundamentally, you know, alien to the way those have developed here. I think part of what was interesting in history that put that on surface, its easy to immediates a very american story of selfdetermination, of progress, of the kind of celebration of the individual and individuals choice. Its easy to read a lot of wha has happened and history in the book around that very selfdetermini selfdetermining idea and i think thats something i kept reflecting on as we were looking for a broader cultural. And in individual, if you talk to individuals, theres research there and they would much rather trust their data with and its led too a Building Platform at a state level with downside that we would never accept in this country. The i. D. Systems and app on top of them. The whole kind of bent of a lot of the Civil Society efforts there is toee the government as needing to own and build this kind of sort of these kind of capabilities and to sort of lay the foundation for how people can interact and share information. And its easy, you know, to look at the governorment, the current Indian Government and look at the google or facebook and amamazon and be skeptical. I think its a fascinating question and i do think its helpful for me at least on a personal level to step outside of the cultural bubble of not just the u. S. And europe to see how things are playing out differently in different places. You know, even just the idea of a user, you know, we talk to and work with families and communities in africa and asia and its a funny idea. Theyre part of a family and they make decisions collaboratively and theyre part of a community and breaking it down to that unit is often in and o of itself not so obvious. Maybe one more question . And then we can all have a drink. Ooh. Competition. [laughter] why dont we start with you. Okay. Sorry, we can break afterwards, im happy to go ahead. Final question. I was wondering if i your research you discovered any insights to the fact that users [inaudible]. Is there any insight you got into [inaudible] so the question is, in the user friendly world where algorithms essentially craft what we see and mold themselves to our preferences, did we come across any research around what the effect of that is on the human psyche. I can say there wasnt anything quantitative, but this is a major thing in the book and things i would say is the following, in the world where the algorithms purport to know who you are, they never get it right. They cant know the fullness of who you are and what you value and care about and all of these things and one of the purposes of writing the book, is to sasa, look, this is bad. Some sense, right, we have all of these things that purport to know us. The algorithms are like black boxes that dont know what the dont know, right . And that to me is like a major shortcoming where the user frndlyld has some point the designers have given up. We need the algorithms to take over because we have no idea what the exaly preference after user might have. They have ceded that control to technology and its been far too selfaggrandizing what it can predict. I think a new generation is much more consciousbout this and is innoculating itself against the bias in ways that previous generations do not and ill just give you one example, there are studies down about the effects of social networks on Mental Wellbeing of adolescents and children and the generation that came of age when the iphone was just being introduced saw these downside effects of anxiety and depression. Whats interesting the generation after that that grew up with nothing, but phones in their lives, that effect goes away. Somehow theyre innoculating themselves against these ills. Theyre figuring out a way to live with this technology in a way that a previous geneneratio just three years, four years, five years removed is not. All i can say theres maybe hope were smarter than we think we are. Ill just close with another hopeful optimist note. No matter what we do, i think human the variety of human bavior and human imagination is it always going to be a few steps ahead and one of the great things and the privileges of being a designer and getting to kind of get very deeply into peoples lives and to figure out how together to rethink the products and the things they interact with, theyre always surprising and you a always fin things that are outside of what you predicted and that information and way of seeing is newly valuable to a lot of companies and organizations and institutions and thats the pleasure and excitement that when you find somhing that opens the door to help people see whatever we thought were the prompts of why people made certain decisions or what people are doing for their health or for, you know, their family for education, theres always going thats just outside that frame and design and being a designer, one of the most fulfilling thing about it is figure out how to have that box. And figure out how to you translate that into an idea, a solution thats not just going to help that business, but thats going to change whats possible for that person so they can constantly statay one step ahead. Thats the optimist. Thank you guys so much for coming. [applaus [applause] youre watching book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers