Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the relationship between cultural theory and digital design.
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Parkour, or free-running, holds roots in military training and martial arts. It’s original aim is to reach point B from point A as quickly and efficiently as possible, employing gymnastics-like techniques in order to achieve this.
But parkour has become so much more than that. Communities of athletes all over the world continue to evolve and explore the art of parkour, and use it as a creative outlet to find new routes and paths through urban landscapes.
My favourite aspect of parkour, and the reason I bring it up, is because it teaches us a valuable lesson about design:
Imagine a series of skyscrapers. These were designed with a ‘vertical’ mindset - you are meant to travel up and down the skyscraper, but you are very rarely meant to cross, horizontally, between skyscrapers anywhere above the ground level.
Yet this is exactly what many parkour athletes do - some of the most iconic parkour moments are roof jumps, hundreds of feet in the air.
It doesn’t matter how specifically you design something for a certain purpose. You can never entirely know, let alone control, how it will be used.
This principle can also be found in the digital space.
An example I am personally fond of is the subversion of the ‘reaction’ buttons introduced to Facebook a few years ago. The ‘angry’ reaction was most commonly used for humorous purposes, and there was a general culture of choosing a specific reaction almost randomly to someone’s post for comic effect.
We can find a more pronounced example recently on Twitter. A number of users changed their display name on Twitter to their Mastodon handle, so that an application that scrapes Twitter can find all the Mastodon handles of a certain user’s followers, and follow them on Mastodon automatically.
Design and Purpose
Charles Eames defined design as “a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.”
A more than reasonable definition. But I find the relationship between design and purpose an interesting one.
It can be both true at once that an object is designed for a specific purpose, whilst also able to be used for different purposes to the one it was designed for.
However, the latter is discussed far less. Why is this?
When discussing the concept of speculative design and its relationship to purpose, James Auger provides an interesting point:
“By operating outside of normative design contexts, [speculative design] is free from the demands of industry and the market forces that inform the majority of technological trajectories.”
Auger, J. 2014 Living with Robots: A Speculative Design Approach
Speculative design, being a framework for design which explores more abstract and philosophical applications, is only able to free itself from the specificities of purpose by freeing itself from ‘industry and market forces.’
It is design’s connection to the selling and advertising of products which makes its connection to a specific purpose so strong.
Dissolving the Market
In the business world, ‘know your market’ is the one true mantra. Having a specific purpose lets you market a product to a specific demographic, a specific audience.
We can see this clearly in software: there is software for founders of startups to automate emails to potential investors, software to calculate the load balance on a plane for pilots, software for accountants to categorise expenditure. These softwares are evidently prescriptive.
But now, all of a sudden, we have ChatGPT, Bing and Bard.
These applications can automate emails to potential investors, calculate load balance on planes, and categorise expenditure. But it’s one application.
And it’s designed like a chat application - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.
When you load up ChatGPT, you don’t look at the interface and go ‘ah yes, this is for startup founders’ or ‘ah yes, this is for plane pilots.’
When you load up ChatGPT, you just think you’re going to do something with an AI.
In the business world, it has always been so essential to have a clear definition of your market, your demographic breakdown, and tailor your product to this. But these new AI chat apps are dissolving this need.
When you load up ChatGPT, it is on you, the user, to decide what to do with the software. This is a revolutionary concept for digital applications, and digital design.
What will it mean to have a majority of software users who are prepared to engage with software proactively, and find how to best use the software themselves, rather than have a use prescribed to them?
Will design itself change? Can we start to design applications agnostically, embracing a multitude of uses by a multitude of users?
These new AI chats are just one, single example of an agnostically-designed user interface. But I don’t believe AI is the only application for this. I think it has simply opened a door for what we can do with digital design.
By focusing so heavily on solely the original, intended use of an object of design, you ultimately limit its potential.
By designing with the understanding that we can’t know, or control, all the uses of our design, we pave the way for a new generation of digital free-runners.
Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article and beyond…