Podcast appearances and mentions of Stephen P Anderson

In this episode of Infernal Communication, Kyla sits down with Director of Design Strategy at Mural and author Stephen P. Anderson, to get to the heart of the intangible request that infuriates communicators and designers alike: "Make it pretty." They dive into Stephen's article “In Defence of Eye Candy” and discuss the value of “Beauty” as a design concept and what pitfalls professionals make in trying to capture it. Then we go even deeper with Forbes contributor, and disability and beauty advocate Xian Horn. She challenges us to interrogate our monoculture of beauty standards and visual communication, and helps us find more meaning in the request to “Make it pretty”. Do you work in communications? Join us at Staffbase's VOICES Conference in NYC April 26-27th, 2023. Get your ticket at voices.staffbase.com/us and use promocode VOICES-PODCAST-25 for 25% off your ticket.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. This is the second half of a two-part conversation about interaction and embodiment. If you haven't done so already, please listen to part 1 before listening to this episode. Show notes @karlfast on Twitter Karl Fast on LinkedIn Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Bruce Alexander The Rat Park experiments Bill Verplank's diagram of interaction Epigenetics About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Ed by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, avid Cronin, and Christopher Noessel Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian (Bonus: Jorge's book notes) The paperclip maximizer problem Punctuated equilibrium Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Karl, welcome back to the show. Karl: Thanks for having me again! Jorge: Well, I could not help but want to talk with you again, since you mentioned wanting to discuss rats and heroin, and that just sounded too intriguing to me at the tail end of our last conversation. So, why don't we pick right back up there? What do you mean by rats on heroin? Rats and heroin Karl: So in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about drug addiction in various parts of the society, especially in the US, and especially with the Vietnam War. And a lot of veterans — a lot of soldiers who were in Vietnam and who were exposed to heroin were… I think there was some estimate, something like 80 or 90% of all the soldiers who went over to Vietnam had used heroin at some point and had a serious… what we would now classify maybe as an addiction. I'm not sure if that number is correct. But there was this general widespread concern about this and what was going to happen when these people came back. I don't think that this particular study was motivated directly by that, but certainly this was in the air. And so, there was a Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander, and he was concerned about a lot of the studies that had been done around addiction and said, "well, these rats are stuck in like a small, cold cage, often socially isolated from all other rats. If I was in that kind of situation, maybe I'd like to take some heroin too!" So, he designed a study where he had a couple of different groups of rats. One group of rats, they were basically in the sort of normal lab cages that you would have. The other ones were in what are called "Rat Park." And you can actually look this up on Wikipedia. It's called, "The Rat Park Experiments." And they… they were like 200 times larger. There were about a dozen, 15 rats or so in there, both male and female. So, they had a completely different environment in which they were able to run around. They could play, there were all kinds of lovely things. There were things to keep them mentally stimulated. It was kind of like a rat heaven. And in both of these different groups, each of them, the rats were divided up into two different groups. There were rats that were given water to drink, and the other rats had a choice between water and water that was sweetened, but also laced with morphine. What they found basically was that when they were in rat park — in rat heaven — very few of them would consistently go and choose the morphine. But the ones that were in the cages almost always did the morphine. And there were several conclusions about this, but one interpretation was that social isolation was the major factor and that lack of socialization drove a lot of addiction. My understanding is that this is not… this has been criticized in a number of cases. But the broader one, the way that I've always interpreted this study, is that the role of the environment has a huge impact on stuff. And when it came to the veterans, when they came home, a surprisingly small percentage of veterans came back to the US after the war and continued with their heroin addiction. So, there are studies with rats, there are findings with the actual veterans. Embodiment and interaction Karl: And to me, this raises this question that relates to what we were talking about last week. We had this idea of embodiment. And the big idea with embodiment here is that the mind is not the same thing as the brain. Our bodies, our tools, the space around us — how we move and act in the world — this is all part of our cognitive system; that our brain might be in the head, but our mind is embodied. Our mind extends out into the world. So, the systems and the tools, the information we have… all the things that we design that are exterior to the body, those should also be understood as part of the mind. They're not just out there. And that brings us back to the other main thing we talked about last week was this question of interaction. How do we interact with the world? Why do we interact with the world? And we introduced that distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions. And we gave that example of moving the bishop, where you pick up the bishop, and you move it and put your finger on it, but then you move it back. From a traditional perspective, we would say, "oh, you did two moves in the world. You've moved a piece, and then you pressed undo." But there's research, which says, "well, no, no, there's actually real reasons why you would want to do that." And the distinction is what they call pragmatic action and epistemic actions. And the idea of a pragmatic action is you're going to change the world in order to change the world. You want to bring about some change in the world. But an epistemic action is about changing the world to change your understanding of the world. To make thinking easier, or faster, or more reliable. So, we have these different ideas here. We have this idea that the environment plays a role in our mental wellbeing. The environment plays a role in our ability to think. The way we interact with the world is part of how we think, in many cases. And what we talked about was… we went through a number of different examples, but the big idea is this I think has major implications for the things that we design in a world where we have a lot of information. We have rich — increasingly rich — computational tools, powerful computational tools that don't just sit in a desk, that are being embedded into every part of our world. And that can sense and interact and respond back to us in more meaningful and interesting ways. Jorge: You mentioned in our previous conversation the opportunities inherent in the trajectories that we see in technology. Karl: Yeah. So, especially I think with AI, but that's an obvious one, right? Think about it this way: one of the things I argued last time is that we need to have a better conceptual toolkit when we're designing, when we're creating these different things. We need to think about how what we are making is not just out there, but is connected in a meaningful way to what our brains can do. So, we should think about certain definitions — certain words — and try to understand them and develop new concepts for how we talk about this. So, for example, let's start with some basic ones that I've already mentioned: action. I think of action is doing something. It's a thing, done, it's a gesture, it's a movement. And that is distinct from reaction — what happens in response to a situation, an event, to an action. But I use the word interaction to not mean action and then reaction. You can think about it that way in terms of the timeframe, but I tend to think of interaction as the action coupled with the reaction. So, you act in or on the world, that action combined with the response. Think about it as the difference between you can talk about, like, your coffee, and you can talk about the cream, but once you mix the two together, now they're bound together and that's different. So, we can think of them as separately, but we also need to learn to see them as connected together. Now, language can be a little slippery. And I know that in my writing and in my speaking here, I have probably used… I'm sure that I have used the word action when I really meant, by those definitions, interaction. I tend to use them synonymously. I talked about epistemic action. Really, I think it should be epistemic interaction, but it's a bit of a mouthful. But that's an example of definitions. Or another one would be "interactivity." This is a word that gets tossed around kind of loosely and casually, often as a synonym with interaction. I think it's best understood as a quality or attribute of an interaction. Some interactions are easy. Some are interactions are difficult. Sometimes easy is better. Not always, right? In learning, when interaction is too easy and quick — if learning is too easy — then the learning becomes shallow. You need a kind of certain friction. Or another example for interactivity: how difficult is it to articulate your intentions with a system? So, you can talk about a gap between what you intend to do and your ability to articulate it. And can we, through design, close that gap? When do we want to close that gap? So, you might have the same interaction. But the interactivity or certain dimensions of that interactivity could be very different. And there could be good and bad around that. Jorge: This brings to mind Bill Verplank diagram of interaction. I don't know if you're aware of that diagram. Karl: Refresh my memory. Jorge: Well, it's a feedback loop between the world and some actor. And the actor senses the world. Verplank labels it "feel." so, there's this sensing of the world. The actor, through sensing, knows and then does. So that's the other arrow. So, you sense, and you do. And this cycle of sensing and doing amounts to an interaction. And what I'm hearing you say is that… it's not a binary thing, but there's a gradient of interactions. So, some things are more interactive than others. Karl: Yes. And you know so that loop, that idea here… this is where I think embodiment is trying to say, "it's really complicated." It's a lot more complicated. It's a lot more nuanced than we have tended to describe it. You know, you take a class in cognitive psychology, you pick up a lot of different books around how the mind works, and you're going to see — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — a simple loop around perception, cognition, and action. Perception is input, right? Information from the world that is input into the brain. The brain takes that and does computation on that. And then from that, we act on the world. From the embodiment perspective, the simple and wrong way to think about that is that the cognition happens just in the head, right? Perception is input. Action is output. Cognition is what happens in the middle. And what embodiment is trying to say is, no. There is an element where that could be the case, and maybe often is the case. But it's certainly far from the entire story. We need to redraw that picture. Think of it as maybe a first order approximation of how the mind works. Now, we need to think about second and third order effects here. What are the other things that are going on here? And that's what things, like epistemic actions, point to. More broadly, it's very common in design for people to have taken a lot of classes and to have studied aspects of perception. All graphic and visual design, color theory, like layout… you know, all of this is about changing the perceptual inputs. Controlling the perceptual inputs. All the aestheticism that we have is about the perceptual inputs are largely about that. I'm much more interested in the other side of that, the interaction side of that loop. And how that is connected to the things that we create, and trying to unpack this in the light of what the science is telling us about embodiment. Jorge: Would it be fair to say that the emphasis then is on the touch-points between these artifacts that we perceive and the people who are perceiving them? Karl: Yes, and the way that those touch-points happen. And you know, the more I think about this… and I've been thinking about interaction for well over a decade. And you see this notion of interaction in so many different areas, in different fields. Like we just talked about it with the example of rats and heroin and this connection to the environment. Another one from biology is, we have that old idea of the debate between nature or nurture. And most of us today have gone, "oh, well, it's not about nature, it's not about nurture. It's nature and nurture, and some sort of balance between the two." But biologists don't believe that either. Not anymore. What a biologist would say is it's more about how the organism interacts with the environment. Evolution is an interactive process. An example related to that is genetics. In the mid-nineties, we had all this talk and this huge effort to decode the human genome, and the story that was told there was, "well, if we can just decode the human genome, then we'll be able to read the book of life," as though it was just information. And genes were presented to us as a deterministic thing. You have a gene, this tells you how tall you're going to be, this tells you what color your hair is going to be, it can determine intelligence, all of these things. But what we now know is that's really not what's going on. That is part of the story, but it's much more complex than that. And the big area in genetics is epigenetics. Epigenetics is how your behavior and your interaction with the environment shapes the way that the genes express themselves. So, maybe interaction will turn on a particular kind of gene, maybe it won't. It depends on how the environment that you're in really shapes this. This leads us actually back to rats. There are studies that go back to the 1950s about baby rats and how their mothers lick them. There are what are called "high licking mothers" and "low licking mothers." So, some rats get licked a lot when you're a baby, and some mothers will not lick their babies a lot. And they do this to calm the rat down. This changes the epigenetics: changes how the genes — especially around stress — and I believe it's cortisol, but other things — express themselves. So, a rat that gets licked a lot is going to be a much calmer rat. It will not get stressed as much. A rat that is not licked a lot, won't learn to do that. And so, it's genes will express themselves in a different way. And you might think, "well, it's great to be calm, not so great to be anxious." But then we come back to this problem of, well, what kind of environment is the rat in? If a rat is in a dangerous environment, it actually pays off, from an evolutionary perspective, to be anxious because you're going to be more alert to threats. So, you have this really much more complex, interesting trade-off. And interaction, to me, seems to drive all of this. The mother is licking the baby, that's interaction. The rat grows up to be in a particular environment — grows up in one environment, then maybe migrates to a different environment — that connection between the environment is interaction. All of this stuff again and again, we see interaction throughout everything. Think about another example, like programming. We talk about functions. And then we talk about objects. We talk about APIs… this, all the ways that programs interact with each other. We gave an example in our previous conversation about why people talk with their hands and the importance of gestures. It's not just a way of providing extra information to someone else. It also turns out that that physical movement has an inward-facing component that helps smooth our thoughts, or sort of like a cognitive grease. Epistemic actions. There's another example. We had the example of chess, which comes from a study about how people play Tetris. And the thing I'm trying to get at here is: I think interaction is fundamentally under-appreciated. We want to tell a story about the things. The things that we have. The objects, the artifacts, and the story that we want to tell might be about their perceptual qualities, their aesthetic properties, how beautiful something is, or the quality of which it is made. We might talk about its usability. We have various ways in which we talk about the objects. Or, from the cognitive side, we'll talk about what the brain is capable of. And I keep thinking from all the stuff that I see, this question of how we are interacting with those things: how we interact with things, how we interact with the environment, how we interact with other people. All of that seems to be really, really central. And my question has been, how do we come up with a better, richer — and from a design perspective — more useful way of talking about that? Interaction design Jorge: Most folks listening in will have heard of interaction design, and they probably associate it with things like the gestures and motions and… I've heard it described as though interaction deals with time. Whereas other disciplines deal with spatial relationships, interaction deals with time-based relationships. Karl: Well, and I know if you read, say_ About Face_, the interaction design book by Alan Cooper. He defines interaction design in terms of behavior. But for my reading of behavior, I think of it as the way you act or conduct yourself often, especially towards others, or towards things. And it tends to be more of a macro definition. It's a larger scale pattern. So, part of this is also a terminology question and looking at the things that we do at multiple levels. There's a nice paper by Cameron Seddick, who was my dissertation advisor actually many years ago, and he breaks interaction down roughly into, I think, four different levels. He talks about events. So, those are like the smallest-scale thing. This is something that actually changes and happens. An event would be like a click, a drag, pinch, scroll, tap, grab. Those types of things. An interaction is something more like filtering or rearranging or annotating. That is comprised of — depending on how things are designed — one or more different kinds of events. Then from there above that, we have different kinds of tasks. And above that, we have activities. And so at each stage, we get a level of behavior that is broader and more comprehensive, as opposed to being narrower. Activity theory, which is also another area which has strongly connected in many ways to embodiment, has a similar notion that interaction has multiple scales and dimensions. And also that things can move up and down, depending on our conscious level of control and experience. So, the classic example here would be learning to drive a car and especially learning how to drive say a manual transmission. When you first learn, you have to be very clear about, okay, I am pressing the clutch. I am moving the gear shift. But as you get more skilled and experienced with that, that goes from a low-level set of actions to something that's much broader. It's easier and it's more automatic. So, things can shift and change around. Again, we come back to this idea that… well, I'd say there are two reasons why I think interaction is not really as fully appreciated in design circles as it could be. Or maybe not appreciate is the right word… maybe a better phrase would be, talked about it in a way which allows us to fully leverage what interaction can do. And one reason I think for that is that it is complicated. It is nuanced. And I think the other major reason is that we have this idea from cognitive science that is baked in pretty deep about what is this relationship between the world, and perception, and the brain or the mind, and action. And we have tended to have a story from cognitive science, which is pretty simple: the one we talked about earlier, where perception provides information, the brain takes that and converts that information, which would then do mental computation. We call that thinking. And then action does the output. Perception, input. Action, output. And thinking happens in the brain. Embodiment is this big revolution in cognitive science, which is trying to really change that. But so much of the design world is based on traditional cognitive science from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that it's not just a mind acting in the world. It's a mind acting on the world, so that the act of sensing and tweaking the thing that you sense, in interacting with the world, you gain an understanding of the world. And that is part of what cognition is. Is that a fair read on it? Karl: I think so. The reason I talk about it as action and reaction combined, is because things run both ways simultaneously. And that always makes it much harder to grapple with. Barbara Tversky is a longtime researcher at Stanford and wrote a book a couple of years ago, called Mind in Motion, which summarizes her lifetime of research in this area. And it's very much a book about embodiment, and she talks about several laws of cognition. I don't remember all of them, but the first two I think might be illuminative for this conversation. Her first law is that benefits always have costs. There is a cost to thinking just in the head. There is a cost to acting in the world. But when there's a cost, there's also benefits. And when we think about interaction in this richer way of being action and reaction together, how we have this notion of the extended mind, and we think with and through the body and the world around us, what we're talking about is how we're shifting those cost-benefit trade-offs. Where the thinking happens is really important. A classic example here would be when you're, say, multiplying two numbers. Most of us can multiply two times eight in our heads and get 16. But very few of us can multiply 28 times 342 in our heads and get a good answer. So, we have moved the computation out into the world. We could do it on pencil and paper. We could do it with a slide rule. We could do it with an abacus. We could do it with a calculator. We could ask a voice assistant to do it, right? And so, where do we think about that unit of analysis? Do we think that the thinking is happening in the brain? Do we think that we've offloaded it out into the world? Or do we see the two things — what we have in the world, and what we have in our head — as combined, and see that as the cognitive system? "Interactionism" Jorge: You brought up in our last conversation this word "interactionism," which I sense is a call for people who design interactions to be more conscious of what it is that we're doing. And I'm wondering if you could unpack that term for folks. Karl: So, I've been grappling for a word here which describes this notion that we would look at the world through this lens of interaction. We would not see interaction as, "well, I've pulled up whatever my favorite design tool is, and I've got a pallet of widgets on the left-hand side and I can drag and drop, and those are the interactions." How do we begin to start seeing this as much more important? So, interactionism in this sense here is a word, which I…. You know if you look up "ism," it's both a good word and a bad word, right? We all live in isms. We live in capitalism. Or liberalism. Or conservatism. We have lots of different ways around that. But what it really means is a doctrine, a perspective, a philosophy about how we look at things. What we see and the system in which operate. And right now, I think a lot of times in design, we have certain isms that exist. Certainly if you come out of graphic design and visual design, historically, has really been a strong influence for user experience and design more broadly. And there, aestheticism is very strong. Out of other kinds of design, we often have a very strong idea of the object of the thing. Usability engineering, and ergonomics, and human factors gave us a different kind of ism around the usability. UX itself, I think, is an ism, right? It is the experience that matters. And so, information architecture and other areas, have like sort of an information-ism, that we are focused on the information. Or maybe we could use the word structure. So, the structure-ism or structuralism. Each of these words has positives and negatives. Each of them is loaded in different ways and have certain histories. Even the word interactionism has this. If you do a search for interactionism, you'll find that it actually has at least two major meanings historically. One comes out of philosophy, and philosophy of mind, going back all the way to René Descartes, who famously created the idea of mind-body dualism and said that there is the body and then the mind is somewhere else. And we have this mental space, which is not physical space, and that thinking happens… there's this interaction between these two spaces, this mental space and the body and the world. And that is one way that people talk about interactionism. Another one is a perspective in sociology, or it was called micro-sociology, that wants to look at and think about sociology entirely in terms of the interaction between individuals. So, interactionism actually already is a word in at least two major areas. I'm interested in it simply as this perspective or this lens in which we really see this and begin to elevate it to a more prominent role, rather than thinking of it as, "Oh, well, I had an interaction here, and I sprinkled on some interaction there." Or, "This interaction is very usable." Is it just philosophy? Jorge: This is not something that you are going to encounter in a palette of components in a development environment. Karl: Right. Yes. Jorge: It's more of a philosophical take on what it is that we're doing here. Karl: It is a philosophical take, but it's also a philosophical take based on the way that the science of mind has been evolving and the new evidence that we have. So, it's not purely philosophical. Jorge: I say that with the caveat that I think that when a lot of folks hear the word "philosophy," they turn off, right? They think, "well, this is not actionable." But I think of a philosophy as a way of understanding what it is that you're doing in the world. Karl: Yes. And I think that anyone who has paid attention to robotics and artificial intelligence over the last five or six years, has realized that one of the major problems that the field has had has been ignoring philosophy. I mean, artificial intelligence and robotics has really revived philosophy in many ways. But I just don't think it's actually sort of revived it, but it's made like all the people who are doing this philosophy of ethics is super important. Philosophy of mind is super important. I recently read a book by Brian Christian called The Alignment Problem. And it's all about this question of what's known in AI as, how do we align human objectives with robotic objectives? How do we make sure that robots don't go out of control? The infamous paperclip optimizer problem, right? And you can read this book in a number of ways, but one of the most important ones is all of these people in computer science and robotics and AI going, "whoa, philosophy! Really important! Not a waste of time." Deep, deep questions here that have completely changed the way that they have gone thinking about the technology and the assumptions that they have underneath it. Jorge: And what I'm hearing here is that as designers of information systems or interactive systems — if we dare use that label now — we have to develop the awareness that what we're making is not just a collection of things to interact with. In some ways, it is extensions of people's minds. And much like the folks who are working on AI and robotics are taking the time out to think about what they're doing in a broader light, that we should be doing the same. Is that a fair summary of what you're saying here? Karl: Yes, I think so. I would draw an analogy to another idea from biology — actually paleontology — of punctuated equilibrium. There was a question for a long time about how evolution happens and issues and questions with the fossil record because there seemed to be gaps in the fossil record and long periods of basically not much happens. And so, in the late sixties and early seventies, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed a theory… what they called, "punctuated equilibrium." You can think of it as a curve. Think of a chart where you've got an X and Y axis, where you have a rise in an uptick. Time is along the bottom. Rate of evolutionary changes on the Y axis. And you have a rise, and then it tapers off, and it plateaus, and then it goes up again for another period of time. And then we have a period of where it plateaus, and then you have another period of change, and then it plateaus. So, evolutionary change is not a linear line. It's not this sort of straight line up at a steady rate. You have periods of intense change, and then you have periods of relatively little change. And I think that this is one way to look at how design has evolved. We had a period, I would argue, of very intense change through the late 90s and early 2000s with the advent of the web. You know, information architecture comes into its own, usability engineering becomes much more recognized and interaction design becomes a more widely recognized term. And user experience comes up and becomes more or less sort of this much more dominant term. But the early stages really are there, we have this period. And then I would say that we had a long period where… long being relative, I guess, but we had a number of years where things were more stable. Then what happens is we get mobile, right? And especially by say 2010, along with this mobile, I feel like we had large organizations especially, went and said, "you know, all of this work that people in UX do, this is really important, and we're going to stop hiring outside agencies and different groups to come in and consult and do this on a contract basis. We're going to start building UX teams." And we've seen, over the last 10 years, this massive growth in UX as an industry. We have people who go get a degree in graphic design, computer science, or whatever, and then they do a 12-week bootcamp in UX, and now they're a UX designer. We've been growing like this massive number of people in the field, and all of these people have been moving in-house. And so, we have this period of rapid change where we have a growth of the field, and we are having to integrate it into organizations where it's now a really important part of it. And so, when I look at this, we see this period of change. We've seen changes like this through technology. We had the PC revolution, then we had the web. And then we have mobile. Everyone in Silicon Valley is thinking about, well, what's the next iteration of this because this tends to happen in periods of 12 to 15 years. What's the next new major platform? And we can see this coming. We're going to have another period of intense change. And when I look at the trend lines, as opposed to the headlines, you can see some of them that. They seem fairly obvious: more and more information, more embedded computation, not just sitting on a desk or even in your pocket. We have pervasive sensors. We have intelligent response to what human beings are doing. The capacity for a greater and tighter connection between people and the digital world. We have more complex pattern matching. We are having machines now that — with robots and AI — they can do things at a scale that humans cannot do. Or an accuracy or a speed that they cannot do. If we think about these as being separate, out there, aside from human abilities, I think we're going to wind up missing a huge opportunity. I think design is going to be caught flat-footed. The book that Steven and I wrote is an early attempt, from a design perspective, strongly influenced by information architecture, but also coming from distributed cognition, to explore some of these ideas and do it in a way which could be helpful to designers. And so, we break the book up into several sections. We talked about associations. We talk about visual representations. We talk about interaction, and we talk about something called coordination. And then we look towards the future. And in each of these, we explore some of the science. We give lots of examples. But we also try to provide frameworks for people, conceptual tools so that people can look at these different areas and begin this process of building it up. We would not in any way think that this is a be all and end all, but we were consciously trying to provide people with a way to think about the problems that they have now and provide a way to think about them that is going to be more helpful in the future, given these trend lines. Closing Jorge: I already mentioned in the previous episode that it was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I strongly encourage folks to check out the book. And other than that, Karl, where are the best places for folks to follow up with you? Karl: The best place to find me at the present is on Twitter. I'm @karlfast, and that's K-A-R-L-F-A-S-T. I am not super active on Twitter, but if people ping me, I will respond. You can also look me up on LinkedIn. And again, if you message me there, I will respond. Jorge: Thank you so much for being with us and being so generous with your time. Karl: Pleasure to be here. Always nice talking with you.

Karl Fast is an independent scholar, information architect, and futurist. He's the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding alongside Stephen Anderson, who was featured in episode 39 of the show. In this conversation, Karl tells us about what interaction designers can learn from cognitive science. We had a lot to discuss, so this episode is the first of two on the subject. Show notes @karlfast on Twitter Karl Fast on LinkedIn Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Stroop effect The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark HCI Remixed: Essays on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community, edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action by David Kirsch and Paul Maglio (pdf) The Intelligent Use of Space by David Kirsch Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think by Susan Goldin-Meadow Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine by Don Norman The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition by Don Norman Hans Moravec Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Karl, welcome to the show. Karl: Thanks for having me. Jorge: Well, I'm very excited to have you here. For folks who might not know you, would you mind, please, introducing yourself? About Karl Karl: Sure. So, my name is Karl Fast. I am a Canadian by birth and education and sentiment, and I have been working in information architecture and user experience design for about 25 years or so. I like to say now, I create systems for thinking in a world that is just jam-packed with information. And a lot of the questions I have, and the work that I do, are about how do we live well and how do we think well in a world where information is cheap and abundant and pervasive. But the same is also true for computation and the networks and all the different things that we use to bring these together. And we can see trend lines where we've got more technology, we're more dependent on it, it's everywhere. And the ways that we use that technology — the possibilities of it — are simply becoming richer and richer. And you can think back to the early days when we simply had a keyboard and a screen that was one color. And then we added a mouse. And then we had multiple colors. And then we get mobile and all of these types of things. I have worked as a practicing information architect. I have worked in startups, I have worked as a consultant. I have a Ph.D. in information science, and my work was on how to take digital libraries and how to design them so that they are more of a knowledge creation tool rather than just simply a document repository where you have to search and browse. How do we actually create knowledge from digital libraries, and how do we expand that potential? And then, I spent about seven years working as a professor of user experience design at Kent State University. And now I think of myself more as an independent scholar, and I do consulting work and writing. I also think of myself as practicing what I call "information futurism," of a sort — thinking about where information will go in terms of how we can use it as this resource. The last thing I would mention is that about a year ago, I co-published a book with Stephen Anderson. It's called Figure It Out: Getting From Information To Understanding. And some of the stuff I think we're going to talk about today is definitely part of that book. Jorge: Stephen was a guest on the show as well. Your book was one of my favorite reads from last year. It touches on many subjects that I believe more designers should know about. And you mentioned several of them during your introduction there. I'm very curious about the phrase "systems for thinking in a world"... I don't know if you use the word "flooded," but in a world that is inundated with information, right? Information Karl: Yeah, inundated, jam-packed. I think of information in a historical context. You know, in terms of civilization, really, that one way to look at civilization and information is that we have always tried to have more information. We have always developed new technologies for creating information, for recording it, for copying it, for distributing it, for organizing it, for sharing it, et cetera. And we have now — especially over the last 20, 30 years through digital technologies and through the internet — have just exploded the amount of information. And the other way to look at it, though, is we have lowered the cost, right? The cost of creating, publishing, distributing, searching, organizing. All of these types of things have been lowered. But just because we have information doesn't mean we also have understanding. And the cost of understanding still remains, I think in many cases, very high. One of the things that we're interested in in the book and my long-term interest here is: well, how do we change that cost structure around understanding? And I'm using that as a broad term to include things like planning, reasoning, thinking, sense-making, analyzing, decision-making — all of these more cognitively complex activities, which is, you know, more than say, "Oh, I'm just kind of skimming the headlines in the paper," or something like that. Systems for thinking Jorge: When you say systems for thinking, what does that mean? Like, what would a system for thinking be? Karl: Well, part of it is shifting language, as opposed to a formal definition of systems — or shifting our perspective. Many times, I think, if you work in design, you work in user experience, you make products. We tend to think about the application; we think about the device; we think about the website; we think about the content. We think about this thing — this artifact — out there, as opposed to all of the other things that could come into play. In that sense, I think we've often narrowed our views and sometimes often by necessity. But when we look at this long-term trajectory about where our technologies are going, we are going to see more and more opportunities to bleed these things out into the world, to connect to aspects of our physical environment, to connect to other people in richer ways. And we can also see this with augmented reality. We can see it with virtual reality. But we can also see it with artificial intelligence and robots. And what would it mean for a robot not to be just pursuing its own goals but to help pursue our goals as a true cognitive partner that has a physical presence? So these are big, big questions that I think that we need to be asking. And I think that a lot of the work that we do tends to be really focused on, well, I've got a rectangle with a lot of pixels. Jorge: What I hear implicit in what you're saying here is that for us to effectively design and create these systems that you're alluding to, like robots and AI, we have to somehow shift our understanding of the work we're doing beyond these rectangles composed of pixels. Karl: Yes, I think so. We need a broader toolkit. I like to talk about a broader conceptual toolkit. You know, we have a set of concepts that we use all the time when we are doing design when we are making things. But a lot of that language has been built up around a whole certain set of assumptions. So, let me give you an example of this. There's a paper that I was reading a couple of years ago about what researchers are calling mobile cognition. And they start with an observation that, in hindsight, is incredibly obvious. All these psychology studies we have — all these studies that are about how people think and how they work with information and make decisions. Think about all this stuff in, say, Thinking Fast And Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, right? Famous book. Well, basically pretty much every single one of those studies, the person is sitting down. But it turns out that there's a whole bunch of studies about, hey! When people stand up, when they walk around, things change. It actually activates different parts of our brains and opens things up. There's an example of this longstanding thing in psychology called the Stroop test. So this is where you're going to have a list of different names of colors, right? So red, yellow, blue. But sometimes the color is going to match the word, and sometimes it isn't. So, it's got to do two different things, and it's generally used as a measure of cognitive control. Can you focus your attention on the salient information, and can you come up with the correct answer? How many answers can you get correct, and can you do it quickly? Well, it turns out all the studies in the Stroop test, which is a standing thing in psychology, right? They were all done sitting down. So then somebody did a study where they said, "Okay, stand up." And they did better. So much of this, especially when we look at the research that we are building and the conceptual tools that we have, are all based on a set of assumptions that, when you see some of these things, you're like, "Oh, well, that's pretty obvious in hindsight!" But it's so obvious; we've kind of forgotten about it. Jorge: In the book, you talk about a distinction between the... I think you call it a brain-bound view of how the mind works versus a more expansive view. I think you call it the extended view. Is that what you're referring to here? Karl: Yeah. So, there's a famous paper by two philosophers, David Chalmers and Andy Clark. And in the mid-90s, I want to say 1996? They wrote a paper called The Extended Mind. And the idea of The Extended Mind is, well, where does the mind end? That's the question that they're really asking. And what they argue is that through cognitive science over the last 50 years and the rise of cognitive science starting in the late 1950s, come to equate the mind and the brain as the same thing. And they argue that they are not the same thing. That we shouldn't think of that, and to do that as very limiting. We can think the brain certainly ends inside the skull. But the mind, they argue, does not. We can think of the mind as extending out into the world. Now there are weak and strong forms of that argument. In the strong form of that argument, you would say that when you are holding your phone, it is literally part of your mind. In the weak form, you would think of it more as a way for offloading. And there's a lot of debate around this. The extended mind is one idea within this broader notion that I think many listeners have heard of to some extent, which is this embodied cognition or embodiment for short. In the book, we use the word "embodiment" as sort of this broad shorthand, kind of in the way that in design circles, we use UX often as a sort of umbrella term, rather than getting into the nitty-gritty details of the difference between interaction design and information architecture and usability and content strategy, right? Each of those is important, but as a broader catchall, that people who aren't doing the detailed work — it's a label for them. And so, we use embodiment in the book as this broad-encompassing thing because within it, if you dip into the academic literature, you're going to hear: extended mind, distributed cognition, situated action, activity theory, and activism. There's a whole pile of these different ideas. The distinction between the brain-bound model of cognition and the extended-mind model of cognition is terminology that Andy Clark comes up with. He doesn't use it in that paper, but he's explored it in several books. And I believe that actual phrasing comes from a wonderful book he wrote — although it's a heavy book for sure — called Supersizing The Mind. Interactionism Jorge: Circling back to the Stroop test that you were talking about and how the test participants' performance in the test varied depending on whether they were standing or sitting, what that implies for me at least, is a need for greater consciousness about what my body is doing whenever I'm performing any kind of activity — especially a cognitively taxing activity. Is that fair? Karl: I think that's absolutely fair. I would also say that this is important for people who are making things, who are building the tools that we have. We talked a bit earlier about the word "systems." You asked me about that, and I tend to use it in somewhat a loose way to mean that you're not seeing just the app, just the website, just the device; you're seeing the body. You're seeing the physical space in which they are. But more importantly, you're seeing how all of these things are connected together and what connects them together, right? So, you are changing the unit of analysis. In the book, we described this as the "locus of understanding." Where is the locus of understanding? Is it the app? Is it in the brain? Or is it more connected to all of these things? And what is it that connects these things? In the way that I've come to see it, I have come to see interaction as the fundamental thing that connects all of these together. And I've come to believe that we have a relatively weak way of talking about interaction or an understanding of all of the ways that it happens. I don't think this is great terminology, but my current working term for this is "interactionism." It's a bit of a problematic word, which I wouldn't mind getting into if you don't mind. Jorge: Let's do it. But first, to be clear on what you're saying here: Am I right to understand that what you're saying is that interaction in this view is where the locus of understanding resides? Karl: No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say that. That is one thing that one can focus on it, and I don't think we see it very well. And I can give you some examples of why I think interaction is really important. I think it's often a case where we want to change the locus. Sometimes you do want to zoom down and be able to focus just on what's happening on the screen or the app. Sometimes you do want to focus more on what the body is. I tend to think about changing the locus; we need to also go wide. To look at all of those things, which we would normally see as independent and discreet and interaction as kind of this glue that binds them and makes them all function together as a bigger system. Sometimes through things which are explicit, sometimes through things which are implicit or have to be inferred, and if we do that I think we get a new language for what do we see when we're, say, doing a usability study? Or what do we see when we're doing ethnographic work? And how do we interpret that? Jorge: So would a fair reading then be that whenever we are designing for interaction — when we're doing interaction design — we are... Well, first of all, this lays a big responsibility on folks, right? Because somehow you're designing part of the person's cognitive apparatus, so to speak. Pragmatic and epistemic actions Karl: Sure, sure. But I mean, interaction design already talks about designing behavior, right? And you know, that means that you are shaping the things that people do and the ways that they are in the world. But we can also talk about it in terms of just facilitating certain types of interactions. So let's step back a little bit and tell you about a paper that I read. I've got this lovely book called HCI Remixed. Learned about it 15 years ago. And they asked a number of famous people, important scholars and researchers in the world of human-computer interaction about what was the one paper that really changed your thinking. And they didn't print those papers; they just asked everyone to write an essay about that paper and why it changed their thinking. And every time I pick this book up, I think to myself, "well, what's the paper that changed my thinking?" And the answer is really easy. It's the paper called On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action by a guy named David Kirsch, who is a cognitive scientist at UC San Diego and his grad student at the time, Paul Maglio. And this is a study about how people play Tetris, but it's easiest to understand it by thinking about how people play chess. So when people play chess, imagine that you want to move the Bishop. You pick the Bishop up, and you move it into position, but you keep your finger on it. And as you've moved it, you realize, "Uh oh. That's a bad move." So you move it back. From an interaction design perspective, or from HCI, we would say, "Oh, well, you have done two actions on the world. You move the piece. And then you pressed undo." That was, therefore, an inefficient action. It was not worth doing. We would even probably classify it as a mistake. And what Kirsch and Maglio say is, we should not think of all action as being the same. Action gets done for different reasons. And through this study of how people learn to play Tetris, right? They're using chess to illustrate this. They argue for distinction between two different types of actions, at least. So this example, they would talk about what would we call pragmatic action. And a pragmatic action is one in which you are making a change in the world, the point of which is to change the world. Jorge: Moving the Bishop to a different square. Karl: You're moving the Bishop to a different square. So if that moving of the Bishop is pragmatic, then it's an error. But we all know from having learned to play chess that that's not an error, right? And so, they argue that what you're really doing is: you are moving it, in this case, and once you have it in that position, you're like, "it's easier to see." And it is easier to see than to imagine that in your head. So, it's what they call an epistemic action. Epistemic as in epistemology, as in of or relating to how we know. So, epistemic actions are things that we do, changes we bring about in the world that make our mental computation — that make our thinking — easier? That make it faster, or that make it more reliable, to reduce the chance of making a mistake. And once you begin to think about epistemic actions, when you see actions this way, there are so many different examples of it. You see it all over the place. Because if we only had pragmatic actions, what would happen is you would… This is how you would play chess. This is how the ideal person should play chess: they should sit their stock-still and never move. And then, they should make the most physically efficient move possible to pick up a piece and move it into position with as little extraneous movement of the body as possible. Because there's a whole bunch of different things that we do that really can't be accounted for unless we... if everything is a pragmatic action. There are so many things we would say are completely superfluous. For example, consider gesturing with our hands. Why do we talk with our hands? There are some people who have looked at this question. There's a woman named Susan Goldin-Meadow. She published a book about, oh, it was about 15 years ago. It's called Hearing Gesture. And for 25 years basically — or more by this point — she has been asking this question: why do people talk with their hands? And there's a pretty obvious answer to this, right? You're like, "Oh, well, I'm using these gestures because I am creating information for you, the listener." These are things that are helpful. It's extra information, just like talking faster or talking slower or speaking loudly or talking softly. That conveys different information. And that's a good answer. And the research says, "Yep, that is absolutely part of the story." So, why do you talk with your hands when you're on the phone? Or, say, on a podcast? Because people do this. You can't see the other person, but people still make these gestures. So, one answer there — and I think a pretty good one — is, "Oh, well, it's a learned behavior." You're used to being around other people, right? So obviously, these gestures would carry over. Fine. What about someone who is blind? Why do they talk with their hands? Because studies of people who are not sighted — and who are born without sight — show that they also talk with their hands. They will also talk with their hands when they are talking to someone else who is blind. So imagine, right? You've got two people, neither of whom has ever seen a hand. They are talking back and forth. They are using hand gestures, which they know cannot be seen. And when they analyze them and classify them, it turns out that they're using very similar gestures when talking about the same kinds of concepts. There are lots of studies around this, like, say, comparing kids who are sighted and kids who are blind and how they use gestures when they have a reasoning task, and then they have to explain their reasoning to somebody else. And they both use similar kinds of gestures. The conclusion from all of these studies, at a high level, is that, yes, there is a component in which that communication is meant for someone else. That gesture is for the listener. But there is also a component in which that is directed inward. We actually use these gestures to shape and facilitate and kind of grease our internal cognitive mechanism. And you can see this the next time you go to a meeting, and you're called on to speak. Try sitting on your hands and see how well you talk. Nobody likes to do it. And people actually find this to be a struggle. Or go to a conference, right? We're talking towards later on in the COVID pandemic where we're not really at conferences. But you'll go to say a panel discussion, and somebody asks a question, and somebody might fumble, but what's going to happen, I guarantee it. They're going to start moving their hands, and then the words will just tumble out, and it's because the gesture has an internal component to it. That's what the research is pointing to. Jorge: What I hear there is that somehow the gesture is part of our thinking system. Karl: Yes. Jorge: How so? Like how does that work? And I want to go back to the Bishop. It's clear to me what the pragmatic action does in that case, but what does the epistemic action buy me? Maybe I put my fingers on the Bishop, lift it, and hover it over the board. Am I building some kind of more tangible mental model of possible moves? Karl: You are because... Well, what you're doing is you're taking things out of a "brain" space and putting them into a perceptual space, right? You're shifting that board. So you no longer have to see.... well, without that as an epistemic action, with the Bishop, you have to — in your mind — imagine what the board would look like if you move the Bishop into that position. But when you do it in a space, now it becomes a perceptual problem, and you can actually see it. And that is easier for us to do, especially when you're a beginner. You could say here, "well, expert chess players, grandmasters, they don't do that." And this is true. But the reason they don't is that they have practiced really, really hard for many, many years to get really good at it. And studies of chess players have shown that the cultural idea we have of chess as being this indicator of intelligence are really incorrect. What are chess players really, really smart at? They're really smart at playing chess, but that doesn't make them really smart at, say, astrophysics. The point of that is that there is always a point in some domain — no matter how expert you are — there's always some other area where your brain-based cognitive abilities have limitations. We always reach a point... it is... our brain is just simply overwhelmed. Don Norman said it really well, many, many years ago at the lovely book design Things That Make Us Smart. "The power of the unaided human mind is greatly exaggerated." And so one way to look at what we do in design is, like, that statement. We are building things to overcome and extend, augment, and amplify the powers of the human mind. But what embodiment is telling us is that we need to incorporate more things into that picture. And I think that's especially going to be true as our technologies improve and allow us to use more and more of our physical abilities, our interactive abilities, our interactive powers, to amplify that. Learning about embodiment Jorge: Well, it sounds like an area that designers — particularly designers who are working on the sort of digital systems that we run so much of our lives on — need to be aware of. And unfortunately, we're running out of time here. I feel like we might need a second conversation to dig more deeply into this, but where could folks follow up with this subject? Like where can they find out more about it? Karl: If I was to recommend one thing for people to go back to that is very readable as a good starter on this, I actually would point to Don Norman's book Things That Make Us Smart. He talks about these kinds of ideas in that book, and that book is almost 30 years old now. I feel that book has been hugely overshadowed by The Design of Everyday Things. He gives many different examples. He introduces the concept of what's called distributed cognition, which is a subset... What I think of as embodiment. One of the principles of distributed cognition is that cognition is embodied. The Tetris paper is considered to be a major paper within the world of distributed cognition. I would recommend looking at that paper, On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action, by David Kirsch. I don't recommend reading all of it. We talked about just the one example he used in that paper of chess as an analogy for explaining their findings. The focus of the paper is actually on how people play Tetris, and they developed a robotic Tetris player — a program to play Tetris — and compared it to how human beings play Tetris and looked at the differences between those two. And the robotic player was based on a classical, cognitive science model, where it's all based on you perceive, and then you think, and you act. So I think that's a really interesting place to look as well. David Kirsch also has another paper that I think is just fantastic, very readable. It is called The Intelligent Use of Space. And you can easily find this one online as well. And this is a particularly fascinating one because it's published not in a journal of cognition or a journal of design; it is published in a journal of artificial intelligence. It is presented as, I think, a really damning critique of AI and robotics. Because what he points out is that all of this stuff, cognitive science, AI, and also human-computer interaction, and thus UX, has built on classical cognitive science. And classical cognitive science says, "Hey! We perceive information from the world. Then we've got our mind — our brain — which does all this thinking work, the cognitive part. And then action is simply output." And embodiment is like, no, no, no. It's much more complicated than that. Thinking and perception and action and the world are all intertwined in many, many different kinds of ways. It's very much more complicated than that. And so he says, "look, if robotics is based on this idea, like, it doesn't use the space around it as part of the thinking." The first driving robot, there's a guy named Hans Moravec. I think that's his name. And he did some of the early work on robotic vehicles as a paper that he did for his, I think, for his Ph.D. dissertation. The way that he designed the robot, it would look, it would sort of scan the environment and then it would think for like, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes? Okay, so it would scan the environment like, okay, where all the different objects? And then it would think and plan out its movements for 10 or 15 minutes, and then it would move like up to about three feet, and then it would stop, and then it would scan the world again, and then it would move. Well, we don't work that way. Babies don't work that way. Like, no animal works that way. you might think, "Oh, well — that's the early eighties." Like, that's the way that it used to be. But this is still the way it is in robotics. A big project in AI has been how can you get robot arms to assemble a chair, like a chair from Ikea. Can you do it? This is considered to be like the moon landing equivalent in robotics. And so, a paper came out about four years ago that made kind of a splash. It was even on the front page of The New York Times. They went and bought two off-the-shelf robotic arms and then programmed them so that they could assemble a basic Ikea chair. And when you read the paper, it's like, wow, it did it in 20 minutes. A chair! Like, people are going to be out of work. But then you read the paper, and you realize that does not assemble chairs anything like human beings assemble chairs. So, they broke the problem down into three phases. The first phase is scanning the environment. They randomly scatter all the pieces of the chair around onto the surface. And the robot spends three seconds scanning to identify all the different pieces. Then it goes and makes a plan for how it's going to assemble a chair. It sits stock still for about... I think it's like eight or nine minutes just thinking, not moving. And then the next 11 minutes is executing the plan. So it makes this plan. "I'm going to pick this piece up, and then I'm going to rotate this arm, and then I moved the other arm, and I'm going to rotate that, I'm going to grab it over here..." And that's how it works. It's this whole idea of perception, and then cognition is thinking really hard inside the head, and then action is simply the output. This idea is buried really deep. And if we're going to build a future where we have robots as true partners — software AI as true collaborators — and we can begin to see human beings in the full dimensions of our cognitive abilities, right? Until we can do that kind of thing, I think we're always going to be limited as designers. And we know that our technologies are changing quite a bit. We can see all these things on the horizon. So, my question around this idea of interaction is, are we really prepared for that? And I don't think we are. Jorge: Karl, it seems like a great place to wrap it up, even though it's kind of in a question mark. It's a prompt for us to have a second conversation about this. Karl: Yeah. Then we can talk about rats and heroin! Closing Jorge: I like that. That would be interesting. I'm very curious now as to what you mean by that. But in the meantime, where can folks follow up with you? Karl: So, I tend to hide a little bit. I've especially been hiding the last six or seven years. I'm hoping that that is going to change over the next year or so. The main way to follow me probably is on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter; I'm @karlfast. That's K-A-R-L-F-A-S-T. Technically, I have a website, but it's like seven years out of date. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can look me up there and send me a message. I will tend to respond to those two places; it just might take me a couple of weeks because I tend to be very slow. I'm not active on Twitter, really at all. But I will be notified, and I will generally respond. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'm going to include links to all of those ways of getting in touch with you in the show notes, and I'm also going to include links to the papers and the resources that you mentioned above. Thank you so much for being with us today, Karl! Karl: Thank you for having me.

When we think of a designer’s toolkit, a vision of pens, pencils, markers, post-it’s, or software might come to mind. But there’s more to design than just putting pen to paper, or pixels on a screen. There are tools that help designers structure their thinking, create focus, or break free of their biases or constraints of their prior personal experience. These are the kinds of tools we’re going to talk about today. Well, not just the tools, but a community built around learning, experimenting, and sharing experiences with these tools. This is part two of my conversation with Stephen P. Anderson, creator of The Mighty Minds Club. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our world is filled with information. It’s all around us. It’s everything we see, feel, hear, smell, touch, and taste. But how do we transform myriad discrete bits of information into something we can use - something meaningful. That’s what we’re going to explore in in this episode with Stephen P. Anderson, the co-author of Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, and founder of the Mighty Minds Club. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Wendel is the author of Designing for Behavior Change, Founder of the Action Design Network, and head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar. We talk about behavioral problem solving, his new book, ethics and behavior design, and his toolkit for anyone who wants to apply behavioral science now. Show Host: Dawan Stanford Show Summary Stephen began working with behavioral science during his years at HelloWallet. He was seeking to create products that were more attuned to the mindset of, and challenges experienced by, its customers. Stephen believes that behavioral science needs to be used not just to better understand our limitations and challenges, but also to help us discover and build the tools and solutions we need to overcome those limitations. One of Stephen’s goals has been to simplify aspects of behavioral science so that more people can use it in their work. His new book, Designing for Behavior Change, and companion workbook offers readers tools and processes that are accessible, practical, and easy to use. Stephen also offers his thoughts and advice on how behavioral science can help us rethink how we live, work, and succeed in the current COVID-19 health crisis environment, and how this time is one of tremendous opportunity when it comes to forming new life habits, not just on an individual scale, but on a societal one as well.   Listen in to learn more about: How behavioral science is used in the creation of products and services Ethical questions and challenges that arise in the behavioral science and behavior design fields The synergy between behavioral science and design The new edition of Stephen’s book, Designing for Behavior Change Stephen’s new tool, the Decide Framework Action versus outcome and defining the problem space   Our Guest’s Bio   Dr. Wendel is a behavioral scientist who studies financial behavior and how digital products can help individuals manage their money more effectively. He serves as Head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar, where he leads a team of behavioral scientists and practitioners to conduct original research on saving and investment behavior. Stephen has authored three books on applied behavioral science (Designing for Behavior Change, Improving Employee Benefits, and Spiritual Design) and he founded the non-profit Action Design Network: educating the public on how to apply behavioral research to product development with monthly events in fifteen cities. He has two wonderful kids, who don’t care about behavioral science at all.   Show Highlights   [02:27] Stephen’s introduction to behavioral science and behavior design. [03:35] How Stephen helps others understand behavioral design and how to apply it. [04:42] Stephen’s book is a synthesis of what’s being done and the tools being used across the behavioral science and design communities. [05:47] Stephen discusses his writing process for Designing for Behavior Change. [06:17] A new section of the book offers real-world examples of behavioral science teams and work. [06:50] The book offers a guide for those wanting to enter the field. [06:56] Stephen talks about expanding the book’s ethics section. [07:49] Stephen built the Decide Framework for the book, synthesizing best practices from behavioral science teams around the world. [08:36] The way behavioral science ethics have evolved, and how Stephen approaches the ethical challenges inherent in the work. [09:56] A few real-world examples of abuses of behavioral science and behavior design. [10:50] Behavioral science can be manipulative. [12:27] Using behavioral science to better ourselves and to set the ethical tone in our work. [14:01] Stephen discusses purposefully writing about the ethical challenges in order to give them more visibility in the behavioral science field. [15:16] How Milton Glaser’s Road to Hell is applicable to behavioral science. [16:40] More about the Decide Framework and how to use it. [20:13] The importance of clearly defining the problem before beginning to look for solutions. [21:20] The difference between focusing on the action versus the outcome. [22:41] The need to explore all of the potential implications and consequences of what it is you want to accomplish. [24:55] How to use the companion workbook/toolkit for Designing for Behavior Change. [27:01] Stephen’s advice to higher education educators wanting to use this toolkit in the current health crisis. [30:02] Stephen talks about how the Decide Framework can help those who work in the fields of healthcare and public health. [32:15] Where to find out more about Stephen’s work. [33:33] Resources Stephen recommends for those wanting to learn more about behavioral science. [35:29] How thoughtful design and behavioral science complement one another.     Links   Behavioral Technology – get your copy of the workbook (it’s free!) His Twitter His LinkedIn Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics, by Stephen Wendel Action Design Network Think Better with Steve Wendel Turning Intention to Action  Milton Glaser Milton Glaser’s Road to Hell in 12 Steps Behavioral Economics Behavioral Design Hub Book Recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman Books Recommendation: Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, by Wendy Wood Book Recommendation: More Than Good Intentions: Improving the Ways the World's Poor Borrow, Save, Farm, Learn, and Stay Healthy, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel Book Recommendation: The Last Mile: Creating Social and Economic Value from Behavioral Insights, by Dilip Soman Book Recommendation: Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences by Stephen P. Anderson     Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like   Design for Good + Gut Checks + Seeing Power with George Aye — DT101 E50   Behavioral Design X Service Design with Anne van Lieren — DT101 E40   Behavioral Science + Behavior Change Design + Social Impact with Dustin DiTommaso — DT101 E28   ________________   Thank you for listening to the show and looking at the show notes. Send your questions, suggestions, and guest ideas to Dawan and the Fluid Hive team. Cheers ~ Dawan   Free Download — Design Driven Innovation: Avoid Innovation Traps with These 9 Steps   Innovation Smart Start Webinar — Take your innovation projects from frantic to focused!

Steve Wendel is the author of Designing for Behavior Change, Founder of the Action Design Network, and head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar. We talk about behavioral problem solving, his new book, ethics and behavior design, and his toolkit for anyone who wants to apply behavioral science now. Show Host: Dawan Stanford Show Summary Stephen began working with behavioral science during his years at HelloWallet. He was seeking to create products that were more attuned to the mindset of, and challenges experienced by, its customers. Stephen believes that behavioral science needs to be used not just to better understand our limitations and challenges, but also to help us discover and build the tools and solutions we need to overcome those limitations. One of Stephen's goals has been to simplify aspects of behavioral science so that more people can use it in their work. His new book, Designing for Behavior Change, and companion workbook offers readers tools and processes that are accessible, practical, and easy to use. Stephen also offers his thoughts and advice on how behavioral science can help us rethink how we live, work, and succeed in the current COVID-19 health crisis environment, and how this time is one of tremendous opportunity when it comes to forming new life habits, not just on an individual scale, but on a societal one as well.   Listen in to learn more about: How behavioral science is used in the creation of products and services Ethical questions and challenges that arise in the behavioral science and behavior design fields The synergy between behavioral science and design The new edition of Stephen's book, Designing for Behavior Change Stephen's new tool, the Decide Framework Action versus outcome and defining the problem space   Our Guest's Bio   Dr. Wendel is a behavioral scientist who studies financial behavior and how digital products can help individuals manage their money more effectively. He serves as Head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar, where he leads a team of behavioral scientists and practitioners to conduct original research on saving and investment behavior. Stephen has authored three books on applied behavioral science (Designing for Behavior Change, Improving Employee Benefits, and Spiritual Design) and he founded the non-profit Action Design Network: educating the public on how to apply behavioral research to product development with monthly events in fifteen cities. He has two wonderful kids, who don't care about behavioral science at all.   Show Highlights   [02:27] Stephen's introduction to behavioral science and behavior design. [03:35] How Stephen helps others understand behavioral design and how to apply it. [04:42] Stephen's book is a synthesis of what's being done and the tools being used across the behavioral science and design communities. [05:47] Stephen discusses his writing process for Designing for Behavior Change. [06:17] A new section of the book offers real-world examples of behavioral science teams and work. [06:50] The book offers a guide for those wanting to enter the field. [06:56] Stephen talks about expanding the book's ethics section. [07:49] Stephen built the Decide Framework for the book, synthesizing best practices from behavioral science teams around the world. [08:36] The way behavioral science ethics have evolved, and how Stephen approaches the ethical challenges inherent in the work. [09:56] A few real-world examples of abuses of behavioral science and behavior design. [10:50] Behavioral science can be manipulative. [12:27] Using behavioral science to better ourselves and to set the ethical tone in our work. [14:01] Stephen discusses purposefully writing about the ethical challenges in order to give them more visibility in the behavioral science field. [15:16] How Milton Glaser's Road to Hell is applicable to behavioral science. [16:40] More about the Decide Framework and how to use it. [20:13] The importance of clearly defining the problem before beginning to look for solutions. [21:20] The difference between focusing on the action versus the outcome. [22:41] The need to explore all of the potential implications and consequences of what it is you want to accomplish. [24:55] How to use the companion workbook/toolkit for Designing for Behavior Change. [27:01] Stephen's advice to higher education educators wanting to use this toolkit in the current health crisis. [30:02] Stephen talks about how the Decide Framework can help those who work in the fields of healthcare and public health. [32:15] Where to find out more about Stephen's work. [33:33] Resources Stephen recommends for those wanting to learn more about behavioral science. [35:29] How thoughtful design and behavioral science complement one another.     Links   Behavioral Technology – get your copy of the workbook (it's free!) His Twitter His LinkedIn Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics, by Stephen Wendel Action Design Network Think Better with Steve Wendel Turning Intention to Action  Milton Glaser Milton Glaser's Road to Hell in 12 Steps Behavioral Economics Behavioral Design Hub Book Recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman Books Recommendation: Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, by Wendy Wood Book Recommendation: More Than Good Intentions: Improving the Ways the World's Poor Borrow, Save, Farm, Learn, and Stay Healthy, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel Book Recommendation: The Last Mile: Creating Social and Economic Value from Behavioral Insights, by Dilip Soman Book Recommendation: Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences by Stephen P. Anderson     Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like   Design for Good + Gut Checks + Seeing Power with George Aye — DT101 E50   Behavioral Design X Service Design with Anne van Lieren — DT101 E40   Behavioral Science + Behavior Change Design + Social Impact with Dustin DiTommaso — DT101 E28   ________________   Thank you for listening to the show and looking at the show notes. Send your questions, suggestions, and guest ideas to Dawan and the Fluid Hive team. Cheers ~ Dawan   Free Download — Design Driven Innovation: Avoid Innovation Traps with These 9 Steps   Innovation Smart Start Webinar — Take your innovation projects from frantic to focused!

My guest today is Stephen P. Anderson. Stephen is a design leader who is focused on workforce learning and organizational development. He and Karl Fast recently published Figure it Out, a new book about how we can transform information to increase understanding. This is also the subject of our conversation; I hope you find it valuable. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 39   Show notes Stephen P. Anderson @stephenanderson on Twitter The Mighty Minds Club Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding, by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences, by Stephen P. Anderson Mental Notes card deck by Stephen P. Anderson From Paths to Sandboxes by Stephen P. Anderson Scrabble The Information Architecture Conference Mural Miro Karl Fast Google Maps Business model canvas Polarity mapping Photo of the Dragon spacecraft cockpit The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford (PDF) Hey.com Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Stephen, welcome to the show. Stephen: Great to be here Jorge! Jorge: Well, it's fantastic having you. For folks who might not know you, can you please introduce yourself? About Stephen Stephen: Yeah. My name is Stephen P. Anderson. I'm founder of The Mighty Minds Club and my second book, Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding was just published in May. I think a lot of folks are, some folks may know me from kind of the design world, the design circuit, where I've been doing design work for the last, oh, 20 years or so. I started talking publicly and sharing ideas about 10 years ago. But what a lot of people don't know is that I've kind of transitioned in the past couple of years in what I do as a designer. And so, a lot of what I'm doing now is more workshops, facilitation. I'm really interested in workforce learning and organizational development. And I even wrote a post earlier this year on how I, as a designer, feel like this is the natural progression of all that I'm doing as a designer, interested in changing the world and making it a better place. Jorge: And what is your background? How did you get into design? Stephen: So, interesting story. I was actually a high school English teacher, a high school English and Gifted and Talented, for the first three years out of college, always had an interest in, I would say graphic design. And in fact, as a teacher, I would make these handouts where I've been… this is back in the days of photocopiers and things, and kind of desktop publishing was just emerging, but I would cut out things from clip art or magazines, you know, take them through these handouts. I would line-break back in Word the end of every sentence to wrap around images. And, you know, making album covers for friends and bands and things probably where the interest in graphic design started. And then there was a series of odd jobs I had after teaching and through that, I started doing logo design, got hooked up with a dot com startup, and they were my first formal job as a designer. And this was in, I want to say '98? And, so I moved back to Dallas to join the startup. It grew very quickly. I learned a lot. And then over the next 15 years or so, you know, learned that it's not just how things look it's about usability and oh, by the way, it's not just about usability, we've got to think about – I didn't know the phrase at the time – but information architecture, how these objects and relationships map to each other. I became bored with a lot of the tactical stuff and became interested more in strategy and business topics, became more interested in human behavior and psychology, and why won't people do the things we want them to do? Why won't people would click on the things that we want them to click? And so that led to my first book in around 2010 or so, which is called Seductive Interaction Design. And also, around the same time I self-published The Mental Notes Card Deck, which a lot of people know me for as well. So again, very much a focus on human behavior. So that was about 10 years ago. And over that time, one shift I've gone through was marked by probably a seminal talk for me, “From Paths to Sandboxes,” where I started shifting my thinking from shaping the path that I want people to follow to creating the sandbox or the conditions where people play and learn. And so, my mindset shifted from that of a transaction and getting something I want, to how do I create the conditions for us to learn and work together? And I think that ethos and that idea has affected everything I've done since. And in many ways, the new book, even though it's about working with information as a resource, there's that ethos or that idea behind it, which is how do we pause, slow down, and figure things out individually, but also collectively. Cognitive environments Jorge: An image from the book that comes to mind as you describe the creation of sandboxes is the cockpit of an airliner as – let me see if I understood it correctly – but it's almost like the cockpit of an airliner as a thinking environment. Is that a fair take on that? Stephen: Yeah, I think one of the fundamental ideas – and we have a whole chapter, the second chapter that lays the foundation for this – is that cognition or thinking is distributed. And what we mean by that is we have this traditional idea, whether we label it as such or not, is that we have this idea that thinking happens in the brain, right? We do this computation in the brain and then we tell our body what to do. But I think if we pause and slow down, we know that this really isn't the case. So, if we think about why we've rearranged Scrabble tiles, for example – which I think is an example we mentioned in the book – if we did all our thinking in the brain, we wouldn't need to do that, right? But by rearranging these tiles, we see more possibilities. We bring thinking into… or thinking is in the environment around us. So, with the cockpit example, what we're talking about is it's a distributed system of cognitive resources. So, it's not only the pilot, it's also the copilot. It's also the controls in front of them. It's the air traffic controller tower. You know, they're reaching out to… it's this whole system of cognitive resources they're required to do the job of taking and landing a plane. And that's one of the examples we use to say, you know, thinking doesn't just happen in our brains, or it's not a solitary activity. And to bring this home, in a workshop where we do this, I ask everyone a simple math problem. Like, you know, what's seven plus nine? Right? And everyone just answers. And I would say, okay, in that case, you could say thinking happened “in the brain.” But I would actually argue if you went back to early childhood, it didn't happen in the brain when you learn seven and nine and these concepts; you probably were interacting with physical, tangible objects. But here in the moment, it's an association you have, you just activated that association. So, seven plus nine equals the answer, right? And then I say, okay, great. Now I want you to do another problem. 357 times 58. And instinctively either people will reach for a calculator on their phones or they start using the paper in front of them. And I say, okay, pause. Notice how you brought thinking into the world, and you're using these tools to think. So now these tools are part of your thinking and your cognitive environment. That's, that's the point we want to make. Jorge: The way I'm understanding it is that the traditional way of thinking about it is that thinking happens in the bit of meat between the ears, but the way that you're talking about it, it really is something that happens in conjunction with the… the entity that is doing the thinking is thinking in conjunction with the environment. It's almost like the environment is part of the thinking apparatus. Stephen: Correct. Yeah. It's becoming aware of the role of the body and the environment and others in that environment and how thinking happens in those cases. Now, if it's a super simple problem that may be very local and it may just be you in front of your notebook, right? Which is one extension of that. But if it's a particularly complicated problem… the example I like to bring up is think of workshops, right? Where we have these sticky notes, we have whiteboards, we have all these things that facilitate us working together and becoming more of a – I don't know, hive-mind is not the right word because we're not thinking the same – but if facilitates the dialogue that we can all have and ways we can exchange information and exchange ideas. And I think a lot of people don't think of the sticky notes as part of the cognitive environment. But when you start looking at it that way, then you become aware: well, what does it mean to have different colored sticky notes? Or how will it the affect our conversation to ask people to use Sharpie markers instead of pens on the sticky notes, and how will that affect visibility when things are on the wall? And you start to think about designing that learning and that learning-construction environment in a way that leads to fruitful outcomes. Collaborating remotely Jorge: I've previously referred to the space where workshops happen and the pile of sticky notes as a shared cognitive space, where we're… like you said, it's not necessarily that we're creating a hive-mind, but we are creating this receptacle where our minds can function together more effectively in some way because we are creating shared references in the environment. And I'm wondering, given that for the past three months we have not been able to be in these shared cognitive spaces, if you have found major differences and or ways of doing this effectively when working remotely? Stephen: Oh gosh, absolutely. I'm having to retool a lot of things like workshops I've done for years, I'm having to rethink. So I had one scheduled for the IA Conference earlier this year, and there was that moment where I had to decide, am I going to bring this online you know, using tools like Mural or Miro or other things, or am I going to pull the plug and, you know, just for context, that workshop, I do things where I do like live body polling. So I'll have everyone like line up along the wall on the scale, right? We have had this sort of, almost like a board game I've made the people play with at their tables, so it's very tangible. It's physical. People are moving things around. So, it's, it goes well beyond just the moving stickies. Like I use the physical space in these workshops. And so, I had to pause and say, okay, can this translate online? And if so, do I have enough time to do so? I ended up pulling the plug just because with the amount of time allowed, I was like, okay, there is a significant restructure that would be required to explore this material in a comparable way to what we do in the workshop. That said, I've been stepping back and taking time and thinking about how to do that with the same workshop material, and I'm kind of excited. I wouldn't say it's… it might be better. Actually, I think it will be better in some ways. I think “different” is probably a better word, but I'm moving towards something where we'll meet for a couple of times a week for several weeks, 90 minutes each time. And as I'm thinking about this, that shift from, you know, a physical all-day in-person workshop to now something that happens over say a month period and small chunks, allows time between sessions, for reflection and questions, which we know from learning theory is a big part of how we learn when you have a chance to reflect on things and think about it and come back again. There's a chance to assign questions for reflection or homework or things. So, I'm actually excited about the shift to that. So, there are certainly a lot of things lost in the shift to online and distributed. But there are some opportunities for new things. I think that's the catch, where instead of just trying to replicate or bring what you did online, in a physical format, stepping back and saying, okay, what are the advantages or disadvantages of going all digital and distributed and remote? And really catering to this differentiated medium and playing to its strengths and avoiding the weaknesses. And that's hard. I think a lot of people just want to say, okay, can I replicate what I did in-person online? And I don't know, I think you're seeing mixed results there. Outsourcing understanding Jorge: Yeah, I can relate to that. I was facilitating a workshop just yesterday and we were using Miro, which tries to replicate a whiteboard with sticky notes. And the workshop participants had put virtual sticky notes on the “wall” – I'm doing air quotes, as I say, sticky notes on wall, right? – in advance. And facilitating a workshop with sticky notes on the wall is something that I've done many, many, many times in my life and I'm very comfortable with and I can do very quickly. And it's not the same to be able to grab a physical sticky note and move it around than it is to point and click at something with a mouse. There was a little bit of friction there in going through that. And with that in mind, I wanted to ask you about a passage in the book. And this is an aside in one of the chapters… I'm going to quote now, you say I, and you clarify that it… because we haven't mentioned this, but this book is co-authored with our friend Karl Fast. Stephen: Correct. Jorge: But this snippet is something you wrote because it actually calls it out. It says, “I, Stephen, worry that we've conflated making things user-centered with always making things easy. And in the process, we risk dumbing down people. There's a kind of bad friction that should be removed from all interactions, but there's also the good kind of friction that gets us into a flow state and leads to understanding.” I'm very curious about that. I'm hoping you will expand on that a little bit here. Stephen: Oh, gosh, I think you had the privilege of being one of the early readers and I think I had a whole lot more on this that we ended up cutting just because of… we wanted to, we made the point, right? And I didn't need to repeat examples. But yeah, that's something that concerns me, something I feel strongly about. And again, my bias is towards education and I would love to see the entire world up-leveled in terms of our understanding our own cognitive abilities. So, anything that… or in most cases, things that don't challenge us or don't teach us along the way I tend to be critical or at least hesitant about. I can't remember which example made it to the book. But I think I use maps and finding a parking space. And I held up two examples, and one was a designer who has done a makeover on those confusing… the confusing parking signs, that's the one in the book. And so, you know, think of the parking signs and the downtown area that are confusing. And we have to pause and say, okay, what's this actually saying? Can I park here right now? And that's, that's usually the task or the question at hand. And you know, depending on how complex it is, the sign, you know, there's a bit of a mental wrangling we have to do and we stop and we figure it out because the information is there, it's just… it's not presented in a way that's easily understood. So, a designer is taken to redesign that into something so it looks more like a calendar with green and red boxes and, you know, shading for accessibility reasons. And you can glance, you can say, okay, I know it's 2:23 right now, I see where I am in this map, and I know right away I can park here, or I can't park here. It's very clear. So, the understanding has been made clear. Then there's another example, which, I admire for the cleverness: it's where you can just point your mobile app at the original confusing street sign and through the magic of machine learning and AI it'll translate and say, yes, you can park here or no, you can't. And so, they're both really great solutions to the idea. But I pause and say, okay, one of them, you learn about the pattern. You see, okay, there's this one time I can't park here on the weekends, but the rest of the time, I'm good. So, you start to learn in the process. And it's a super tiny example, but it's an easy one to hold up this contrast. So, there's that with the other one where you're just depending on the machine to tell you yes, you can. And no, you can't, there's no understanding. You get the information you need to make the decision in the moment, which may be all you care about, right? But if we pause and reflect on these, one of those you learn from, and the other you don't. And so that's an example, and you can make a value judgment and say, I would never need to learn whether I can park there. But then I translate it to other areas. And I say, okay, well think about maps and driving around. A lot of us just rely on… you know, actually there are two views within something like Google Maps. We can just have the turn-by-turn view, which is always oriented to where I'm at now and just says, “turn left, turn, right.” And we could drive in the same city for a year and never form a mental model of the city and the map. And so, we're entirely dependent then on the technology because we haven't figured our own way out. So that's one solution, or we could switch to the other view in Google maps, and actually it's the one where we see ourselves in context of the map, the dot moving around. And that gives us a better sense of orientation: North, South, East, West, where we're at at all times. And so, the contrast I would highlight there is one helps you develop a mental model or our cognitive understanding of the space or the other… the other doesn't. It just gives you what you need and keeps you going. And so, then you've magnified it out. Then you get much more complex and critical issues. Like, you know, I have a parent who has been diagnosed with cancer, what are my options? Right? Or, I need to buy a new car, what are my options? How do I make sense of it? And suddenly we find ourselves in the same boat where we can ask the machine and the machine says, you should buy this car for, you know, $16K from this place, in fact, I can contact them for you. But there's a lot of trust now, and we have not done any of the understanding or processing ourselves. And that's where I get concerned is how much are we okay with outsourcing the process of understanding and figuring things out for ourselves. And again, you don't need to figure all things out at all times. Sometimes we can just get the easy answer and that's fine. But I think there are a lot of areas where we are starting to outsource that understanding, and perhaps we shouldn't. Jorge: If I'm understanding this correctly, then a distinction in understanding something versus not understanding something is the degree to which you have… after an interaction, you have a model of the thing that you're interacting with that maybe allows you to extrapolate, make decisions, move forward in ways that maybe weren't designed into the system or that are explicitly accounted for. It's the difference between following directions and having a model that lets you generate the directions by yourself. Stephen: Exactly. And it may be in that moment, just following directions is all you need, but there may be other cases where you need more than that, and you don't have that foundation to begin with. And to use another, again, analogy, another gaming example… I was thinking about chess and the role that the chess board plays in our understanding of the possibilities and the game. And you know, we all are used to play [by] moving chess pieces on a chess board, presumably. But if I said, okay, we're going to play chess, but we're going to do it via text message. So, now you have to like talk about the pieces and where they're moving the removal of that physical spatial representation would make it that much more difficult to remember where players are, because you'd be scrolling through prior, text messages and written text summaries of moves and plays, which would just be insane to keep up with. But you could also argue even having the text message representation is a record, right? So, you can at least see it and reflect on it. You could imagine removing that altogether and not having it. So, the point being when we start thinking about chess as a cognitive activity, the role that the map plays is to hold all sorts of meanings and also help us see patterns we wouldn't otherwise see. And so, they go back to our traveling around, driving around town example. It may be that I'm fine just following directions from place to place, but there are going to be occasions where if I have that good mental map of my options, I can improvise or take a backroad or do other things that I think are natural. And again, we may decide that's not an area I need to understand, it's not the value, and that's fine, but let's take the principles then to something like a cognitive map, like you see with the business model canvas or things like polarity mapping, where these are canvases and tools, maps of a different kind game boards of different kind that are meant to facilitate dialogue. In those cases, I've found these tools to be invaluable for getting people to talk about really complex topics. Far superior to you said, and I said, and they said, you know, these simplistic, reductionist arguments we often fall into, particularly on things like Twitter, right? Where people are having what should be very nuanced conversations, but we're having to resort to very binary, simple, distinctions. Back to user interface design Jorge: A few weeks ago, my kids and I watched the launch of the rocket. Stephen: Oh yeah! Exciting! Jorge: Yeah, which was really exciting, right? And I remember one of the things that stood out to us in watching that live, were the shots from inside the cockpit of the spacecraft, the Dragon spacecraft. And it didn't look like the cockpits of the 1960s and 1970s and even 1980s, you know, the space shuttle, right? Which are really complex, with these assortments of controls and dials and so on. And I'm returning here to the example of the cockpit as a cognitive environment. The Dragon spacecraft cockpit is a series of touchscreens, so it's like a glass cockpit, where everything is software and it's up for display. And I'm wondering… That seems to me like a good stand-in for the path that so many of our interactions have taken in the last couple of decades where everything is becoming dematerialized and we're experiencing information more and more through screens, basically. And I'm wondering, the degree to which that impairs our ability to form models, when everything is up for grabs and everything is fluid on these screens. Stephen: Yeah. So that's a tricky one, because we get into the ergonomics of the database structure, and the physicality of things. So, I'm going to keep my comments very narrow. I do think with interfaces like the one you're mentioning, you're seeing just more of the increasing abstraction from how things actually function behind the scenes. And I think that abstraction, I mean, that's what we do or have done for years as designers is to make things easier for the user by abstracting how things actually work. The challenge there though then is when things don't fit the user mental model and the user has no idea of what's going on. Like, if things break down, you know, will the astronauts be able to do some repair in the moment or is this… is the abstraction so much so that that's not possible anymore as it was, you know, in decades past, would be a concern. But bringing it back to everyday user interface design, we know we all encounter error messages and things every day and a good half of them, because of the industry we work in, we know what's going on or we have a sense of, “Oh, that's how they architect it.” So, annoying pet peeve of mine, the dropdown menu button that only has one option than it. And I'm like, why, why, why did you have a dropdown with one option? This is silly, right? But if you understand how things were built and more of an engineering mindset, and there could be more, it was the easiest way to build that suite. We kind of understand a bit about the system and how it works and in doing so we can either be more forgiving or we can figure out work arounds because we understand a little bit that of that layer. So, the philosophical question there then is when is abstraction good and when is it harmful? And then what context might it be helpful to understand how a thing actually works? I would say for those who practice design, particularly UI design, this is why it's really good to understand a little bit about how things are being built and the language used by a lot of engineers and developers so we can be better at being that interface between, you know what our users, our customers, people need to do and how things actually run and function in the backend. Jorge: Are there pointers, heuristics, guidelines that help people decide how much abstraction is too much? Stephen: Oh gosh, I think it's entirely contextual. And again, are we talking about user interface guidelines? Are we talking about bringing people together to make a business decision? You know, I think it would depend on the context. Jorge: Well, these days, there's a lot of overlap between those, right? Like, given that we're interacting mostly through software, especially during this lockdown. like we were saying earlier, even workshops, which we would have done in physical space before, now having to happen in these abstractions of those environments. And to your point earlier, it doesn't serve as well to try to mirror what happened in one environment in this other one. I remember reading this book – and I know that you like games, which is why I'm going to bring up this example – but a book that was very influential to me early on, it's called The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford. This is about early video game design, like late 1970s, early 1980s. And he talks about the folly of trying to replicate sports in the video game format or board games in a video game screen, because these are different… they're different media in a way, right? And they don't have the tacticality that you get in a board game is going to be completely lost on a glass tablet, right? Stephen: Yeah. Thinking about this in a different area… so just a week or two ago, hey.com, the new mail client or mail service from, from Basecamp launched. And it's funny because before they launched and had the information, I had arrived – this was just like a couple of weeks ago – I was doing research for something to collect all the newsletters I subscribe to. And I started thinking about the IA of email and it occurred to me, you know, I'm using email for at least three, maybe more things. So, one is the conversations, like you and I had the dialogue back and forth to set this podcast up, right? So that's one type of interaction. Then I am using email in a very passive way to read these newsletters that come in and there are different types of newsletters and different types of things, right? So, we could further split that, but it's very passive, right? I'm not meant to respond to those. And so, in that sense, it's more like a podcast service or a magazine or something else, not a chat or a conversation mechanism. And then there are things like transactions, like sign me up for new account, paying your bills where you know, you file of your records. Well, that ended up being the information architecture that hey.com is using. And what follows then is how you design that passive reading experience is very different from how you design the conversation experience. And it was one of those things that I think we've just grown so accustomed to email and email has been used as a workhorse for so many things that we haven't paused to say, wow, should I design the interaction of this type of media or content or this interaction differently from this one? And we know that, but we just haven't pointed out that at you know, something that's just been under our noses this entire time. So, I thought that was interesting just in terms of designing for thinking about the context of these interactions and how we design differently. Jorge: I've been following that as well, the release of that new take on email and it strikes me as a kind of stepping back and rethinking what this is about and how we interact with email, what we use it for. And I read your book as an invitation to do that in many realms, not just email, but it does strike me as something that deals with how we interact with and understand the world in general. Is that a fair take? Stephen: I'm jumping up and down clapping right now. Yes! That, I think that was the biggest thing is, because we're not writing a “how to” book to fix a known problem. We're trying to – Karl and I – are trying to raise awareness of these information or understanding, I think we call them “problems of understanding” that we live in every day. And so, we all get amazed when we see someone you know, design a better prescription pill bottle, right? Or just do a better sign make-over and fix these things. I opened with an example of a redesigned medical chart to help manage my son's diabetes and people go, “ooh,” and “ahh” over this. But I think the first thing is just becoming aware of these things as problems of understanding in the first place. And so, I think that's, we try to kind of double down on that in the opening chapter, which is we have all of these problems of understanding. Terms of service, like signing these things. They could be designed in a better way, such that they're more understandable. And so that's… that was really the first step. And then once you become aware that, okay, there are many cases where I'm given the information, but I don't know how to get understanding, whether it's for others or for myself, what do I do? And that's really the rest of the book is how to work with information as a resource. And whether that's activating these prior associations, like we talked about with the math problem earlier, whether that's bringing thoughts, ideas into the world and making them tangible, physical, whether it's interacting with them, a combination or coordination of all of those things. Like that's where our book wanted to go was raise awareness of this information or are these understanding problem challenges that we have and then what you can do about it. What anyone could do about it. Which was also hard, because it's not a book specifically for designers or it is for everyone who designs, which of course is anyone who arranges clothes in their closet or sorts their pantry, right? We're all designing when we do that. And so, it's, how do you translate those skills that we already do in these other areas of our life to things that are more conceptual and abstract in nature, which is often where the divide or the gap is. Closing Jorge: That strikes me as a great summary of what the book is about and a good place for us to wrap up our conversation. So, where can folks follow up with you? Stephen: I think this point, normally I would direct them to my personal site, but these days I'm pouring all my energy into The Mighty Minds Club. So, I think going to themightymindsclub.com, and you can sign up for only $2, right? Which is… it's a beta right now, but that's the best way to stay in touch. Otherwise, you know, I'm on Twitter, @StephenAnderson and other places, but I'm trying to send everyone there. And you know, this time, next year it will be a paid service and things, but right now I'm just trying to get a lot of people in the door and playing with some of these tools and things. And in many ways, everything I write about in the book, everything Karl and I write about the book, is laying the foundation for what I'm doing next. And so, for example, going back to an earlier question, you asked about heuristics and things. One of the things I'm trying to collect are what are the specific tested, really useful tools that are out there to help with all these different scenarios, and different challenges that we have. And so, I pitch it as – The Mighty Minds Club – as a method, you know, that's the tool part, a “method of the month” club, to help people and product teams work through difficult situations. And the difficult situation could be that, you know, that conflict and that disagreement, like we want to do more research, they just want to ship stuff out the door, right? It could be that. It could be more of an interpersonal nature, like the real issue isn't knowing what to do or the right thing. We all know it, we're just not, for whatever reasons. So, what's the bias, what's the fear, what's going on personally, that's keeping us from doing that. So, let's, let's dig into a tool or two that helps us confront that. I think right now there's a lot of fear and uncertainty about the future. And so, I'm launching with a tool from Foresight Strategies around how to create scenarios for possible futures. And even there, there's not one good tool. There are dozens of tools. And so, the one I'm doubling down on is the tool that helps us explore the most divergent from the most varying options, which I think is a good, good thing to launch with. And then you can actually walk through that door of different scenarios and say, okay, everything gets better. Everything collapses, everything… you know, we go through a major transformation, whatever it may be, we can walk through and explore what that future might look like, whether it's six months or six years, or, you know, 20 years from now. And so I figured that was a great tool to launch with, but that would be my answer to your heuristics is like, eh, I don't know the heuristics for so many contexts but a better answer, then “it depends,” is I think there are good tools, canvases, card decks, tool kits, playbooks out there for specific problems. And so, if we can bring all those under one roof and share and talk about those that's, that's what I'm trying to do there. Jorge: Well, I've signed up and I am so excited for the club and to keep learning from you. Thank you so much for being with us today. Stephen: Thank you Jorge!

Many years in the works, Figure It Out is coming out in May 2020! In this episode, authors Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast discuss the complex world of information (think incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations) we are faced with, and the ways in which information can be transformed into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. Stephen also shares a personal anecdote about part of the inspiration for the book. Get your copy: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/figure-it-out/ Mentioned in the episode… Stephen’s latest project: The Mighty Minds Club. Learn more and subscribe: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/the-mighty-minds-club Karl’s recommended reads: Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson https://www.amazon.com/Smarter-Than-You-Think-Technology/dp/1594204454 and Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Hartford https://www.amazon.com/Messy-Power-Disorder-Transform-Lives-ebook/dp/B01BD1SU2E/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1587498076&sr=1-1 Stephen’s interesting people to check out: Nicky Case and her “explorable explanations” https://ncase.me/; Bret Victor and real time feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor

If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content.

Speaker: Stephen Anderson Love creative problem solving, but need something more practical— something specific to User Experience? Stephen P. Anderson will share with you the exercises he uses to solve the REAL problems. You'll flex your critical thinking muscle through a series of jump starter activities. Even better, attendees may be encouraged to participate, if not embarrass themselves in front of a room full of their peers as they challenge themselves to see past the first, obvious—and often incorrect—answers, and start to flip problems on their heads to see solutions from a different view.

Yes, business applications can be made fun and gamelike. No, points, levels and badges are not the way to create sustained interest. While many sites have added superficial gaming elements to make interactions more engaging, the companies that "get it" have a better understanding of the psychology behind motivation. They know how to design sites that keep people coming back again and again. So what are the secrets? What actually motivates people online? How do you create sustained interest in your product or service? Speaker Stephen P. Anderson will share common patterns from game design, learning theories, and neuroscience to reveal what motivates-and demotivates-people over the long haul. Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He recently published the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design. Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops to help businesses design fun, playful and effective online experiences. He’s currently writing a book about “seductive interactions” that will be published by New Riders in 2011. Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephenanderson Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).