Mark Goetz

I’ve recently started reading Speaker of the Dead by Orson Scott Card in what amounts to “free time” in grad school.  It’s been quite a while since I read Ender’s Game, and I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded of Card’s approach to science fiction.  I really enjoy the fact that in Card’s writing, the focus is not on fantasical descriptions of new societies and technologies, but on believable characters and how they live in their world.  Society goes on about the same as usual – people have their own languages, religions, cultures, and other social niches – but it has been reshaped by the technological advances in the book.  For instance (minor spoiler alert), a character is called to make a journey to a far-distant planet which will take twenty years in “real time”, but thanks to relativistic time dilation, he will barely age at all.  However, he is saddened to leave his sister, now eight months pregnant – by the time he returns, his sister will be in her eighties, and her unborn child will be a full-grown adult. In the novel, space travel is not a perfect technology to solve all ills – it has unintended, and in this case, even painful consequences to those who use it.

What struck me about this mindset is how applicable it is to interaction design. When it comes down to it, a lot of interaction design, especially writing personas and scenarios, is pretty much like writing science fiction.  You dream up new rules of what is possible, and illustrate how people would use the technology you propose.  However, unlike science fiction, interaction design takes place in real life!  Whereas grounding designs within actual human behavior just makes a sci-fi story seem more compelling, it is the difference between a product design that is actually adopted and one that is simply too far-fetched or misguided to catch on.

I think there are a few insights that interaction designers can gain from the ixd-as-scifi perspective:

• Why do people want to use your product? No matter what you design, people are only going to use it if it fulfills a need in their lives.  After all, no one uses Twitter just because it’s Twitter – people use it because they want to communicate with their friends, or their customers.  There’s an underlying need for every product use, and getting at that need will result in a better product.
• What don’t your users like about your product? It’s so easy to get lost in a design that you think it’s perfect, forgetting that products are never perfect.  I think it’s a good exercise to picture what people will dislike about your product; and I don’t just mean “they dislike it when the Internet is down”, I mean what don’t they like about it even when it works as intended.
• What unintended consequences might there be? Technology has a long and spotty history of being introduced without full consideration of the consequences, simply because it is difficult to know of everything to consider.  (Case in point – but Herr Daimler, what if this horseless carriage produces toxic gases that rise into Earth’s atmosphere, thereby trapping more of the Sun’s heat and disrupting the climate of the entire planet?)  I acknowledge that it is basically impossible to predict every single factor that will come into play when a new technology is introduced, considering the mind-bogglingly complex nature of the world and of human behavior, but some estimation of the potential outcomes of a new product is still necessary.

Any other thoughts?