Living in San Francisco, I'm surrounded by design inspiration from architecture and museums to amazing natural scenery, not to mention the crazy costumes locals love to show off every chance they get. Last week, however I was delighted to be exposed to an even wider range of inspiration 10,000 miles away at Design Indaba 2011 in Cape Town. What makes this conference unique is the breadth of design that it celebrates - visual design, architecture, interaction design, jewelry design, fashion design, social design and more. The common thread of creative problem solving shared by all revealed a wide range of ideas about how design makes it better - whether "it" is the right shape and color to communicate the message or the best way to honor patient dignity or sustainable, affordable use of materials. Here's a few thoughts on design participants shared:

“Design is an interesting tool to study human behavior.” Luke Pearson “Where common sense is common practice” Kiran Bir Sethi, (also the tagline for the Riverside Learning Center) “It’s the art of mind tickling” Hat-Trick

Michael Bierut kicked off the event by challenging delegates to think about how creativity and design can impact the future and a number of speakers showed inspiring examples of how design can make the world a better place. I was forced to play close attention to them as there was no wifi available at the conference center, (I was told it was down, and they were working on it) reminding me I was no longer in the always-online Bay Area.

The first day's highlight was Francis Kéré, leaping into the audience and using his quirky humor to explain how he involved communities in his native Burkina Faso to help build “breathing” school buildings. Applying the proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” he developed and adapted local traditions and techniques to construct robust, self-cooling school buildings. His message about understanding your audience and their needs, getting them involved in the process and sourcing local materials and expertise, was met with a standing ovation.

Another architectural treat was Dror Benshetrit unveiling the versatile structural support system QuaDror. He came across the design while playing with forms in his Manhattan studio and began seeing great potential for providing relief housing among other things. It was wonderful seeing such a beautiful and simple solution that could be used to solve the huge housing needs across the world, but also within South Africa, even a few kilometers from the conference center.

In contrast to Mike Kruzeniski's recent lament about minimal attention to visual design at IxDA '11 (although our own Nick Myers did represent the practice), the Cape Town conference showcased practicitioners such as Michael Wolff, Dana Arnett of VSA, Richard Hart, the British firm Hat Trick, the inimitable Alberto Alessi and his ovation-worthy overview of the Italian design tradition, and Oded Ezer engaging everyone in his off-the-wall obsession with typography.

In between presentations showcasing beautiful design were excellent examples of how design delivers more than profit. The British Design Council showcased “Design Bugs Out” which produced easy-to-clean hospital equipment and “Design for Patient Dignity” addressing privacy and dignity issues in hospital settings. For these and other examples, emphasis was on research and going out and looking through fresh “design eyes” as David Kester said.

Fashion designer Carla Fernadez approached the creation of her label Taller Flora with fresh eyes and, like Francis Kéré, harnessed local traditions and expertise to create a business supporting fair trade and practicing environmental policies for sustainable practices in the fashion industry. She began by taking time to understand the rich history of Mexican clothing. “I told myself that if I want to teach, I first have to learn.”

Laduma Ngxokolo provides similar opportunities to Eastern cape mohair farmers, who are benefiting from having a guaranteed outlet for their product via his Xhosa-inspired knitwear. His objective to preserve his culture and use local materials resulted in award winning designs. It was good to see a South African designer standing shoulder to shoulder with international icons, eliciting spontaneous applause with his work.

Going from knitwear to software, Mark Shuttleworth encouraged the audience to think big as he walked us through the visual and interaction design update for the Ubuntu open source platform. He showed off what he called “the two harmonious, interconnected, rhyming, counterpoint, visual language systems” needed to give voice to the company and support individual freedom and creativity within the open source community. He also talked about the design work done on notification bubbles that cannot be acted on, to reduce the sense of added work for users and showed off other interface improvements to be released in the coming weeks.

The program was rounded out with a good smattering of entrepreneurs (and a surprising number of ex-accountants) who had achieved success establishing design as a core role in companies. One of the ex-accountants was Robert Wong, Executive Creative Director at Google’s Creative Lab. He shared his personal formula for creative success: S! = Em + Cr (Surprise equals Empathy and Creativity), declared that “whoever wakes up with the most motivation wins” and, after showcasing some great work, ended by telling everyone to “Do epic sh*t!”

The wide range of projects and ideas presented, showing so many ways in which we can make a difference through design, was hugely inspiring. Michael Wolff said it best: “The enemy of all ideas is in fact the idea you are currently with.” He explained, saying sometimes if you have an idea, you become afraid you may never have another one, so you hang onto it like grim death. The best thing to do is to be free to throw ideas away to make sure there is space for new ones. I hope to be back next year to visit table mountain and participate in the growth of design in South Africa.

Image source Coda

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Photo by Delcio G.P.Filho.

The big apple. Many say it’s the greatest city in the world. Whether or not you agree, there’s no denying it’s an incredibly dense place with an overwhelming amount of people and things to do. Not only are there over 40 million tourists annually, jostling to see the sights and get a taste of the cultural capital but there are also over 8 million people living here ? struggling to manage the tasks of daily living amongst all the tourists. That’s a lot of people with very different goals. How do they all figure it out?

(For those of you not in New York, you might want to consider pressing play for some mood music.)

The usability of cities

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks and am struck by how some cities are easier to use than others. Since I’m in the business of interfaces I’ve been thinking about it in those terms. Just like software, smaller cities with few features are generally (but not always) fairly easy to use. Once you have a large, complex city with many features ? like NYC ? it gets much more challenging to maintain that ease of use.

New York City is an incredibly powerful interface with multiple entry points and endless features. One might say it has feature bloat. It overloads the senses and it’s not always easy to navigate and understand, yet people learn to use it effectively and often grow to love it.

In that way it’s like Adobe Photoshop - optimized for expert users, perfect for their needs once they have taken the time to learn how it works, but very intimidating to novice users. Over 40 million of tourists enter the city each year and have to navigate the New York City ‘interface.’ How do they figure it out?

Navigating New York

From a physical standpoint New York is pretty easy to navigate. The basic grid structure is consistent, except for the villages, and numbered streets helps one stay oriented.

There are many ways to get around: the metro, cabs, buses, bicycles and your own two feet. For the most part these are all pretty easy to use, but there are a few codes that can be confusing to figure out at first - for example you can’t just hail any old cab. Well you can, but only a select few will stop. The trick is to know what the various lighting configurations of the taxi sign mean: no light mean the taxi already has a fare; just the middle light means it’s available; if both the side lights are on too, then the cab driver is off duty.

The system doesn’t break if you’re unaware of this code but it can go more smoothly if you know which cabs to wave at and it’s not so frustrating when you know why four cabs speed past you before one stops. This lighting code may be documented somewhere, but who ever reads the user manual anyway? Like many of my favorite product features, the only reason I know about it is because someone told me. That’s how I discovered my most frequently used Web browser shortcuts - F5 to refresh the page, and F6 to place the cursor in the address bar. Similarly, they’re not critical to basic usage but they make me more efficient and improve my experience.

Getting around NYC is not too difficult, even for first timers. There are lots of wayfinding cues and breadcrumbs to keep you on track and indicate where you are.

It’ll be easy to get there, once you figure out where to go. And that is where the NYC interface can get complicated - especially for power users.

New York for newbies

An interface optimized for novice users is very different from one designed to meet the needs of power users. The interesting thing about NYC is has to offer both, overlaid with one another. The goals of first time visitors are typically very different from residents’ goals. They don’t need to work out the logistics of daily life like shopping for groceries in a city where it’s not practical to own a car. Tourists are typically more interested in seeing the major sights and enjoying some quintessentially New York experiences - like eating a hot dog from a street car, catching a show on Broadway or maybe passing by the David Letterman studio (especially in light of the current scandal.)

Since these are popular features typically used by novices, they have been made accessible with ‘big friendly buttons’ ? your hotel maps or a quick “what to do in NYC” search on Google will provide details on where and how to do these things. Even the iPhone map of NYC highlights the Letterman studio as a tourist attraction.

The various aspects of the NYC interface work well together -highlighting features that new users care about and making them easy to find and use. The only problem then is to deal with all the other newbies trying to do the same things, resulting in long wait times and unavailability of certain features.

The New York power users: Daily tasks and discernment

Interfaces that optimize for power users are often very complicated; with so many features and capabilities that almost none of them are readily discoverable or intuitive, but once you learn to use them it’s a smooth and efficient experience.

Expert users in the city tend to know their way around pretty well, but since NYC is so big, they specialize in a particular area. Not unlike the way users of an incredibly complex program may specialize in a particular area. They have a working knowledge of the other areas, but stick to using the one they know best. For example, my friends who live in TriBeCa are a fountain of knowledge about anything below 14th street but once I go above that they can’t help me.

Residents' goals and tasks are very different from tourists. They avoid highly populated tourist areas, favoring things that are off the beaten path. They value the hidden features, wanting to discover something new and special -just like the super geeks looking for the tricks that developers hid away somewhere: a secret way to do something cool and special. And it’s most satisfying if they’re among the first to find it.

If you need something to eat you don’t have to go far in NYC. You can’t walk half a block without stumbling on at least two restaurants and one hotdog cart. The challenge comes when you want to be more discerning about it. In order to filter through the obvious options and get to something good you have to do some work. There are tools to help you along, for example the New York Times, Time Out, NYCgo, Yelp and many more - all serving as guides to help people discover which restaurant has the best food, or atmosphere, or prices. The problem is,once something starts to get a lot of positive reviews, the crowds aren’t far behind, and accessibility and quality often decline. What people really need is access to an expert to help them.

One common pattern I’ve noticed doing design research is that a common way for people to learn a complex interface is to work closely with someone who already knows it. This is very true for New York. The quintessential New York conversation tends to revolve around where to find the best “insert food item or service here.” Everyone is trying to learn the best tricks to make the interface work for them. It’s kind of like listening to gaming geeks talk about how they navigated a level of the latest “it” game.

Gaming NYC

The NYC interface really is most like a gaming interface which makes sense, since life is not just about achieving goals and performing tasks, it’s about having frivolous fun, being surprised and following ridiculous dreams. That is where the NYC interface performs best. It’s full of challenges, surprises and delights as you navigate through it as you attend to the day-to-day.

One I came upon recently is the High line park.

About a year ago I posted “designing time to think” encouraging us to consider how we can create pauses and moments for refection in our interfaces and this is a perfect example. It’s an old freight rail line converted into a raised natural park. The design was led by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. In a city that is so dense that people are cars are now vertically stacked it makes sense to vertically layer natural spaces and pauses into this interface.

Where I’m left in my ponderings is that as an interface NYC is multi-layered, and like most games you have to start at the first level. Once you’ve seen the major sites and gotten a sense for the basic layout, then you progress to the next level - searching for attractions that are off the beaten path, although you may not get very far unless you plug into the community and enlist people’s help to find the cool features. As for becoming a true expert, it will take years of experience. It’s this challenge that attracts that special breed of people to make it their home and become true New Yorkers.

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I bought some concert tickets online a few days ago. For once I was online and ready as the tickets were going on sale at 10am.

09:58am ? I clicked through a maze of links to finally arrive at a page where it seemed like I’d be able to buy tickets.

09:59am ? I continually refreshed the page until a “buy tickets” button appeared.

10:00am ? Once it finally showed up I clicked the big friendly button and was taken to a page that required even more clicking around before eventually presenting me with an “add to cart” button. Pressing it presented me with this dialog:

10:01 ? I filled in the form as quickly as possible and clicked “join now.” Then I got this error message:

Paaaaaardon me?!?

I stared at my computer screen for a minute sorta wishing it had a face so I could punch it.

10:02am ? As I sat there feeling frustrated, and a little insulted, all the good tickets were being snapped up by people with one word last names like Smith and Baker. Then I had to decide whether to hyphenate my last name or remove the space, trying to anticipate the consequences of the decision for will-call or credit card payments.

10:05am ? I finally purchased my 2 tickets, using an improvised last name. (I can no longer recall what solution I had to use to make it work.) Though I managed to get tickets I was very indignant after being told that my last name was unacceptable. Can you imagine going down to the box office to buy tickets and having the guy behind the counter tell you that he cannot accept your name? That seems absurd! (unless of course you’re shopping from the soup nazi) Yet we encounter rude and insulting behavior from interfaces all the time.

Software has replaced people in so many of our daily transactions, from buying concert tickets to shoes and groceries. Computers bring obvious improvements to the table: they can provide instant comparisons, full feature lists and recommend similar items more easily than a person could. In fact computers could make this a fantastic experience by providing a very quick, very flexible way of choosing the right seat at the right price if they didn’t just focus on just automating the analog transaction, but that’s a whole other blog post. Even in this context of database transactions it's time software started learning some manners and stopped hurling insults whenever we ask it to do something difficult.

If the request is truly impossible, at the very least inform me politely, and tell me what I need to do to make it work. For example, "We're terribly sorry but our system is unable to deal with spaces in names. If you could please remove it we'll sign you right up." That’s probably a bit wordy, but better than "we cannot accept your name" without telling me why, or what I can do to make it acceptable. The best case is for the software to deal with whatever my last name happens to be, fixing the problem for me so that I don’t have to know or care that it’s database can’t accept spaces.

If we want our products to be liked, we need to design them to behave in the same manner as a likeable person.¹ Our software should be polite, but more than that it needs to be considerate and take into account our needs and goals.

¹ Cooper, Reimann & Cronin. About Face 3. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2007 249-285

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inviteme.to is an early stage startup that allows people to coordinate offline social activities with their friends. Founder Andrew Hoag, tired of organizing the "goat rodeo" preceding any event with his friends, found a niche desperately in need of attention, and decided to do something about it. He approached Cooper in April 2008 to work on the design and user interaction for his web-based product.

The people behind inviteme.to

Andrew: We got started 8 months ago and have two full time people and a couple of contractors and outside staff helping us. As for background, I come from the business side, working in enterprise, security and software for 7 years. Most recently I’ve been advising consumer internet startups before launching inviteme.to. My technical co-founder is a developer that came from a large travel site, Sidestep, which you may have heard of. For now it’s just the two of us working full time with a bunch of people helping us out.

Engaging an outside design firm

Andrew: inviteme.to is focused on a consumer demographic and I knew from my experience with companies I’ve worked with previously how important the interaction and interface is. When I looked at other companies who had similar objectives: helping people plan and organize things, I realized it’s a complex interaction and communication problem. I knew that I needed some help. Although I’ve designed interfaces before and I feel like I have a decent sense of how a product should work, there are subtleties that I believe only an expert can provide. It was very helpful to have people with trained professional experience in the area available to consult with as we built the product.

I’d heard about Cooper before engaging with them. I was fortunate that a friend was a creative director at Macromedia and was very heavily involved in UI design and consulting, so he’d recommended Cooper to me. Then I met one of the designers at a social event and that was what led me to the firm. In another a small world story, it turned out that one of the Cooper directors I met with had gone to a rival college, so we were able to throw tomatoes at each other and talk about the days of growing up and going to college in Minnesota. After all that it seemed like a good fit.

Early start-up struggles

Andrew: When I came into Cooper I had an idea of the problem I wanted to solve and wasn’t quite sure how to communicate our solution to the user. I was confident I could design something that I would use, but wasn’t sure how that would apply to the common man; and how that would work across people with different backgrounds, viewpoints, and needs when they approached the product. I have a certain personality type, but manifesting that into an interaction and a user interface would have been a mistake I think because it would have been a very narrow view of the world. It was preferable to take a broader perspective on how people would use the product, making sure that Cooper could help us lay that out.

What it came down to was: “here’s what I want to do” and needing to turn that into “here’s how it should look,” and “here’s how people can use it.”

Ways to use design output

Andrew: We’ve gone through a few iterations of the product, like any young start up at our stage. It always seems we are a different company from what we were 3 months before, but all along we have been able to use the initial work done by Cooper. There were actually two parts to it.

1. First was the research Cooper did with regards to preferences, goals and utility. This primary research was very valuable to us, and helped us speak intelligently about the product beyond a research sample of one. I found it really added credibility to the problem that we were trying to solve and how we were solving it.
2. Second was the actual work product around the design. We used the images Cooper delivered in presentations and to create a tour through the product both of which got a very positive reaction. We also used the design in a video that helped us win an award from Facebook. This was a great outcome.

I believe the reaction was so positive because we had what people understood to be complicated problem and Cooper was able to distill it down into something simple and very clearly actionable. And then of course we started to build product underneath it, which is where it should end up.

We started with an initial version of the product and have since revamped it, but what’s interesting is that we’ve been able to keep the same philosophy, the same direction and scenarios as we move forward. My goal with using Cooper early on was for them to do foundational work that gave us a very firm starting point on which we could build and that is how I viewed the investment. It was very clear from our requirements that this work was to be extensible, rather than trying to go too deep in any particular area. I wanted to ensure we built a firm foundation and so far it’s worked out that way and I’ve been very happy.

The ongoing relationship with Cooper

Andrew: It’s been great because we’ve evolved the product and have had differing needs, but all along we have been able to go back to that initial work and use it for whatever problem we were trying to solve, bringing in Cooper very strategically. It’s very helpful for us to know we’ve got a resource that has context and can give us some guidance. I look at it as bringing in expertise, not so much around the product, but around how to manifest these product ideas in ways that appeal to users from a visual and interaction standpoint.

The right time to engage design

Andrew: It depends on the start up and the space they’re in. I decided very early on that we needed to prioritize the consumer side of the product. Ultimately the money spent on Cooper and using an external design firm saved us time on the development side. When I talk about this with other entrepreneurs and CEOs, I characterize it as a zero-sum game. My developer and I discussed this very early on - he was thrilled to not have to make choices and experiment and iterate with placement and layout and such things, and instead be handed a functioning interface so he could just write code underneath it. Some companies are able to get initial customer traction and then find they need to scale the business. That presents its own set of problems, but overall the earlier the better, although a lot of it depends on your particular customer requirements and product lifecycle. For us, the beginning was just the right time.

The risk of engaging outside firms

Emma: I’ve heard some people at startups say they wouldn’t use an external interaction design firm because they feel the design is so closely tied to the core concept of the product. How would you respond to that?

Andrew: That’s an interesting point because I got some questions on that very issue when I was discussing the relationship with Cooper with a couple of advisors. Their initial reaction was “You should never outsource design.” After talking with them and figuring out what their concerns were, I now spend time differentiating between the product vision and the manifestation or implementation of that product vision. It goes back to the comment I made earlier about our product vision being consistent.

As a company we’ve driven towards that vision and have a very clear idea of the problem we are trying to solve. I think where we’ve been successful with Cooper is articulating the vision in appropriate language and presentation that isn’t my forte. I think in terms of features and functions, and having Cooper there to translate that and act as our tower of Babel when it comes to making this thing work has been super helpful. I certainly understand why there’s some concern and if you get into the subtleties of it, the company absolutely needs to hold the vision for its product and how that relates to its market. For a company like ours, where we are just two people, it’s not feasible for us to have a full time designer on board and you have to be able to use the best of breed resources - Cooper as a form of an interaction mercenary is the way I like to think about it.

Advice for early stage start-ups thinking about design

Andrew: As I mentioned earlier, I believe there’s some utility in bringing design in early in the process, and as it turns out one of my friends, who also started a company, did the same thing. As we compared notes, the results were equally positive. He used a different design firm, but we both were able to recognize the value in engaging with experts early in the process. I think for me it was money well spent because I’m still earning the benefit of that investment today. When I add a new feature - I can go back to the initial work done and look at how Cooper set things up and review the fundamentals and the research that we put together. I have a framework within to fit our work 6, 12 or 18 months down the road and I think that’s really valuable because you get to amortize the investment over a much longer period.

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I was busy with production work last week, and in the background I listened to the Google TechTalk by David Levy, "No time to think." In spite of the title (and my partial attention), it really got me thinking. Levy suggests that we are in an information environmental crisis, that we need silence and sanctuary for creative reflection and engagement. He explains that Nobel Laureate Barbara McKlintock was able to see further and deeper into genetics than anyone had before because she took the time to look and to hear what the material had to say to her. At Harvard, students asked her "where does one get the time to look and think?" They argued that the pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance.

This is a pressure we can all relate to. I struggle to find the time to think deep thoughts. Every time I try, I interrupt myself to check my email or text messages, or track the latest news headlines. Randall Munroe over at xkcd.com seems to have the same problem. It seems that my attention span is inversely proportional to the number of "productivity" tools and toys I have. As much as I love it, my iPhone has been the worst thing I could have done for my ability to focus.

These days we rarely focus clearly on one thing at a time, multi-tasking from the moment we read the paper on the bus with headphones and coffee en route to work, until we get home and check email in front of the TV while eating dinner. We are constantly interacting with technology devices and information.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, As We May Think, expressed the hope that more powerful tools will automate the routine aspects of information processing, and would thereby leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But as Levy points out, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less time to think, not more. Levy asks where in our culture we are making time to think, since thinking takes time.

At the end of the talk an interesting comment came from fellow who observed that, in contrast to Sweden, San Francisco has very few public benches where one can just sit down and observe what is. One has to keep moving, and according to the laws if you stay in one place too long, you may be considered to be "loitering." In our culture, there are few opportunities to be calm and sit down in a public space, unless one is consuming something at a coffee shop or a café. This is something that has been built into the culture and the architecture. We need to rediscover the places that will encourage this kind of thinking and reflection - not only in our physical but also in our digital spaces. Creative thought can't be rushed, but it can be nurtured.

So how can we nurture creative thought?

Much of the work we do at Cooper involves designing tools to increase productivity and efficiency; to help people to do more, faster, and keep them moving. But are we in danger of making things too fast and efficient, preventing people from spending enough time with the information they need to consider carefully? There are things that computers are really good at — memory work and calculations, for example. There are also things that they are really bad at — cognitive work, subjective decisions and judgment calls. The latter should be left to people, and as designers we need to ensure they have the right information, as well as the time, to come to a thoughtful decision or judgment.

For example, when designing software for tax professionals, we should ensure that the preparer is enabled to spend most of their time interpreting tax laws, rather than filling in line items one by one. Make the easy stuff easy — let computers do what computers are good at — and allow preparers to focus on what they are good at, and what they actually enjoy about their jobs.

Designing with time

We use scenarios to tell stories of ideal experiences for our users. Any storyteller will tell you that timing is an important part of telling a good story and as designers we need to think carefully about time as a design element — it's just as important as color, type and layout. Dan Boyarski has been thinking about time as a design element for many years. He has been teaching his students to use time for emphasis, clarity or to create new meaning. You can see some examples of the work from his classes here.

Most of these pieces are experimental and entertaining, based on poetry or film dialogs, but the principles at work can be applied to designing enterprise software too. Rather than just making everything faster and more efficient, we need to think about how to get people to focus on the important stuff, without letting minor tasks and busy-work get in the way. We need to design environments where people have the time and space to focus on important decisions. One way to do this is through progressive disclosure; only revealing information when it's relevant to the decision at hand. Other ways to achieve this would involve presenting information in the right sequence, or placing related information in close proximity to help people to see the big picture. All of this is in service of nurturing the balance between ratio (searching and re-searching, abstracting refining and concluding) and intellectus (thinking; reflection; assimilation and contemplation) — which is Levy's concluding slide of the talk.

Photo from Flickr by timparkinson.

It's really important to take the time to look and to think. Let's think about how we can design metaphorical benches in our products to encourage people to stop and reflect where necessary.

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I’ve been reading Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect and thinking a lot about system design as a result. In his words, the book “is a call for a three-part analysis of human action by trying to understand what the individual actors bring to any setting, what situational forces bring out of those actors, and how system forces create and maintain situations.” It’s a rather sobering piece of work, especially as a designer who earns a living designing interactions and systems. The author challenges the common tendency to attribute human failings to an individual’s inner nature, disposition, personality traits, and character and demonstrates how situational and systemic factors seduce ordinarily good people to commit evil acts.

A large part of the book is dedicated to detailed case study of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, tracking the transformation of happy healthy college students playing randomly assigned the role of prisoner or guard in a mock prison.

Stanford Prison Experiment guard in uniform, from lucifereffect.org.

The experiment was terminated early because of the astounding and terrifying impact it had on the participants. The students assigned to the guard role became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. It was clear from notes and diary entries before, during, and after the experiment that the situational and systemic forces resulted in the students doing things they could never have imagined when outside those force fields.The experimental design for this study is wrapped in a dramaturgical narrative, with roles, costumes, props, and stage settings all carefully crafted to create a situation and system that felt authentic so that the psychological effects of being in a prison could be observed. All these elements worked together to deindividualize and dehumanize the prisoners. In the book Zimbardo concludes that dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil, and the goodness of Everyman and of Everywoman can be transformed and overwhelmed by the accumulation of small forces of evil.

This experiment was explicitly designed to dehumanize, and it was frighteningly effective, but consider for a moment the countless systems that you deal with daily that are (hopefully) unintentionally dehumanizing - from dealing with your healthcare insurance provider, to working in enterprise software. I dealt with this first hand recently when I managed to incur a small cut and ended up in the emergency room one evening for a small but deep cut. I was amazed at how undignified and dehumanizing the whole experience was. Once I had been plucked from the waiting room and processed, I was taken back to sit on a bed where nurses and doctors alike walked past me for over 2 hours without acknowledging my presence.

While I was waiting I got to thinking about what situational and systemic forces may be at work to make healthcare professionals complicit in creating such a dehumanizing experience for the very patients they have sworn oaths to help and care for. How had these systems been put in place? And was any thought given to the experience of the doctors?

Designing for good

We seem to have found ourselves in a situation where we take for granted that individuals continue to struggle to maintain their dignity, autonomy, and morality against the situational power of a mercilessly unjust authority figure or an indifferent, hostile system. As designers, we must ask ourselves we can avoid designing hostile systems? in his essay Human dignity and human rights: thoughts on the principles of human-centered design, Richard Buchanan suggests that we must do this by practicing human-centered design and returning to first principles that "design is fundamentally grounded in human dignity and human rights."

Practicing human-centered design goes further than conducting usability tests and solving tactical issues. It means taking a step back and considering the broader implications of your work. It means thinking carefully about what human dignity means and how your work impacts the people that come into contact with it. Much of the work we design shapes the structures and systems that provide a framework for our culture. Let's work to ensure it's a culture that upholds the dignity of all the people in it.

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