Lüssilogix

There are systems that require constant signalling. Attendance. Visibility. Responsiveness. The performance of engagement. They reward those who can tolerate noise and punish those who think better in silence.

I have never been good at noise.

Not because I lack opinions, but because most environments confuse volume with value. Meetings that exist to prove they happened. Conversations that circle without moving. Platforms designed to flatten nuance into slogans. After a while, you realise that participation is not neutral. It costs something.

I used to assume the cost was laziness on my part. Or fragility. Or a personal failing I needed to correct.

It took time to see that the cost was structural.

Some systems are optimised for extraction. Attention, energy, goodwill. They work best when you stay slightly dissatisfied and permanently available. They collapse when someone steps out and thinks for themselves.

Stepping out is not dramatic. It is rarely announced. It often looks like avoidance. Or arrogance. Or disengagement.

In reality, it is sometimes the most responsible move available.

Distance changes resolution. When you are inside a system, everything feels urgent. When you step back, patterns appear. Incentives become visible. You start to see who benefits from things staying exactly as they are.

This is usually the moment people urge you to come back.

Not because you are needed, but because your absence is inconvenient.

I have learned to pay attention to that moment. The pressure to re-enter. To explain. To justify. To reassure others that your withdrawal is temporary and harmless.

Often, it is neither.

Opting out creates a different kind of obligation. One that is quieter and harder to perform. You have to decide what actually deserves your attention when nothing is demanding it.

That turns out to be the real work.

I am still figuring out what I am willing to re-enter, and on what terms. Some structures deserve repair. Others only function if no one questions them too closely.

This space exists for that questioning.

Not as a manifesto. Not as a solution.

Just as a place to think without being watched too closely.

Throughout the apartment, a calming creamy foundation sets the scene and allows each of the displayed elements to have their own space, without the need to compete. Layers of olive green, peach, salmon and turmeric are the focus and through their own earth tones create a unique connection to nature and the owner’s partial roots in the Middle East. Like the stories each item harbours, materiality has been selected to capture patina over time and to allow that expression of time to occur within the space as well.

1. Form Is Just As Valuable As Function

We don’t think of glasses as medical assistive devices, but that’s what they were–at least until the 1960s or so, when designers got their hands on them. Through the force of design, glasses become instruments of self-expression rather than stigmatized objects that connote that the wearer is different. Many of today’s assistive devices look as medical, hard, and uninviting as the eyeglasses of centuries past. The emotional impact of these devices can be the difference between the user feeling empowered or feeling ashamed. That’s according to the designer Keira Gwynn. “Aesthetics have become just as important as function itself,” she said. Take hearing aids, for example. Many of them are flesh-colored so they’re less obvious to onlookers. During her talk, designer, lawyer, and advocate Elise Roy spoke about how she always wore a beige hearing aid when she was younger because she wanted to appear as though she was just your average kid. But now she opts for bright colors like red and neon green. “I’ve come to realize is that different is the new normal,” she says. “Different, even if it seems like a limitation, is what makes us thrive, what makes us valuable.” Products–particularly products that are targeted at disabled people–need not look particularly medical, nor should they necessarily “blend in.” Giving people an array of choice that allows them to wear something that expresses their personality is a vital element of inclusive design.

2. Design For The Extreme User–And Make The Average User Superhuman

It’s a myth deeply ingrained in our society that there’s an average or “normal” person. The idea dates back to the 1800s, when the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet attempted to find the numerical average for a host of body measurements, like the chest circumference of soldiers, as well as the average stature, the average weight, the average age of marriage, and even the average of death for humans. This attempt to calculate how an ideal human looks and acts ended up codified in design as the “average user.” Except that Quetelet’s theory, which was aimed at bringing order to human society and creating a metric against which each individual can be measured, doesn’t work. Roy illustrated why using an example from the 1940s, when U.S. Air Force fighter jet cockpits were typically designed to fit the “average” man. Yet pilots commonly lost control of their planes, leading to frequent plane crashes. In an attempt to find out if the design of the cockpits had something to do with the crashes, researchers took the measurements of just over 4,000 pilots–and found that not a single one fit within the average measurements for the entire group. The planes were redesigned to fit the extremes instead, and the crashes stopped. “In design, again and again, we see that looking to the average does not produce cutting-edge innovations,” Roy said. “Instead we should be looking to extremes. What gets forgotten is that people with disabilities are great examples of extreme users. We experience the world in such a different way. They are a gold mine for helping us to think differently.” For Kat Holmes, the founder of a firm that helps companies build equitable digital experiences (and who formerly led inclusive design at Microsoft), the illusion of the average user is one of designers’ biggest biases. “There’s this myth that endures to this day that shows up in design and engineering: the 80/20 rule. You design for the middle of that curve, and we’ll get to the 20% later,” she says. “What if there was no such thing as a normal human being? If there’s no normal, there’s no edge cases–just diverse people changing from one moment to the next.” So what happens if you do design for the extreme user? Even people who are abled become superhuman. “We are learning how to create ability in the absence of natural human ability,” Roy says. “The typewriter, audiobooks, the remote control were originally designed for people with disabilities, but they’re loved by everyone because they created the super-abilities we all want.” Who doesn’t want to change the channel without leaving the couch, or read and drive at the same time?

3. Inclusive Design Gives People Independence

When she was working for the famed product designer Raymond Loewy, the designer Patricia Moore saw her grandparents unable to do the things they needed to do, like dressing themselves, brushing their teeth, or opening the refrigerator door. “There was nothing wrong with my grandma,” Moore says. “She wasn’t broken. But the tools we gave her were inadequate.” Her statement perfectly captures that mismatch between someone’s ability and their environment. While her coworkers thought her outrage over the issue was unworthy of their time and attention, Loewy, who was in his 80s at the time, thought differently–and pushed Moore toward the field that has become her specialty. Moore, a renowned gerontologist and designer who has spent years traveling around the U.S. disguised as an 80-year-old woman to understand the challenges that elderly people face, believes that inclusive design is first and foremost about giving people independence. That’s something we all crave, from the early moment in your life when your mother is tying your shoe and you yearn to do it yourself, to the moment decades later when you struggle to put on your shoes and wish you didn’t need to ask for help. “What all of us know and wish and hope and dream [is] that by design we’re taken into account and by design we’re given the autonomy and the independence we deserve and desire,” Moore says. She points to countless examples of everyday people making the environment around them work, even when it isn’t designed to be accessible for them–and sometimes even when it is. She met one elderly woman in particular who would climb 100 stairs every day, step by step, supported by her cane, to get to her temple to pray. Moore met this woman’s daughter, who in frustration told her that she could easily drive her mother up the ramp right to the temple’s door. But Moore had a different interpretation: “She is living the life she desires, she is hanging on to the last threads of capacity and independence and ability,” she says. “And that is what we must design.” Moore’s insight that designing for inclusivity is fundamentally about designing for independence is coupled with another sobering truth–we will all be disabled at some point, whether by age or by a chance accident (that includes Moore, who was hit by a car last year). Even when you pass in and out of moments of disability, whether with a broken leg or a nasty bout of the flu, feeling independent is still crucial. That’s why she believes in designing products, services, and spaces so they’re more accessible to the elderly. “When you design for the greatest generation you design for all generations,” Moore says. “When you recognize it’s the life span we should be designing for and not any one silo, you recognize we all have questions and we’re trying to figure out where to go. Then you have your design brief and then you can begin.”

1. Good Design Is Transparent

User-friendly design has been the dominant paradigm in human-computer interaction for decades, and for good reason: It reduces complex code into a simple language anyone can understand. But today, amid a string of high-profile data breaches and opaque algorithms that threaten the very bedrock of democracy, consumers have grown wary of slick interfaces that hide their inner workings. Good design should be transparent enough to empower users–to help them make informed decisions about their privacy, their browsing habits, and more–without overwhelming them.

2. Good Design Considers Broad Consequences

Another problem with user-friendly design: In focusing on the immediate needs of users, it often fails to consider long-term consequences. Take Facebook’s echo chamber, Airbnb’s deleterious impact on affordable housing, or the smartphone, which is literally changing people’s brains and has spawned an entire generation of teenage automatons. Good design chases more than clicks. It’s mindful of potential impact–whether economic, social, cultural, or environmental–and it’s mindful of that impact over time. There’s one simple test, according to Rob Girling and Emilia Palaveeva of the design consultancy Artefact: “Don’t just ask ‘how might we?'” they write, invoking a common term of art in design thinking. “Ask, ‘At what cost?'”

3. Good Design Is Slow

For the past 20 years, tech has embraced a “move fast and break things” mantra. That was fine when software had a relatively small impact on the world. But today, it shapes nearly every aspect of our lives, from what we read to whom we date to how we spend money–and it’s largely optimized to benefit corporations, not users. The stakes have changed, the methods haven’t. Good design takes time. It favors long-term solutions over quick fixes. As Basecamp designer Jonas Downey puts it: “Now it’s time to slow down and take stock of what’s broken.”

4. Good Design Is Honest

This is one of Rams’s tenets, but it bears repeating at a time when dark patterns abound and corporations treat UX like a weapon. Uber is the most flagrant example. The company built its business on a seamless front-end user experience (hail a ride, without ever pulling out your wallet!) while playing puppet master with both users and drivers. The company’s fall from grace–culminating in CEO Travis Kalanick’s ousting last year–underscores the shortsightedness of this approach. Good design “does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is,” Rams writes. “It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”

5. We Good Design Is Political

“If you work in software or design… you also work in politics.” That was British designer Richard Pope writing at the end of 2016 after the surprise election of Donald Trump, but the point remains relevant more than a year later: Politics is about the distribution of power, and few things distribute power more broadly and rapidly in the 21st century than code and design. Facebook’s role in shaping the outcome of the presidential election is one obvious example. But you can find subtler examples all over the place, from ads targeting men for higher paying jobs to predictive policing software that indicts black people more than white people. Good design is upfront about its potential to shape the political landscape.

6. Good Design Is Mindful Of Systems

Systems thinking is a lofty term for a relatively simple idea: Everything is connected, and designers and developers should strategize accordingly.  Systems thinking has taken on even greater import over the past few years, as the world becomes more complex and intertwined. Consider that we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a year, more than 90% of which was created in just the past two years. Today, nearly half of all adults own a smartphone; by 2020, that figure is expected to climb to 80%. Good design, then, is no longer about solving discrete problems: It’s about considering the sum of the parts. “The challenge is to rise above the distraction of the details and widen your field of vision,” writes Foundation Capital partner Steve Vassallo. “Try to see the whole world at once and make sense of it. It’s a heady challenge, but you either design the system or you get designed by the system.”

7. Good Design Is Good Writing

In his “2017 Design in Tech Report,” author John Maeda anointed writing as design’s newest unicorn skill. It’s easy to see why. With the rise of chatbots and conversational UI, writing is often the primary interface through which users interact with a product or service. (Siri’s dad jokes had to be written by someone.) But even designers who don’t work on interface copy should be able to articulate themselves clearly. The better their writing, the better their chances of selling an idea.

8. Good Design Is Multifaceted

The days of brands peddling a single identity are gone. The Emotional Intelligence Agency, a U.K.-based branding firm, analyzed the brands that more than 5,000 people said they sought out. The results were surprisingly consistent. Top brands, from Victoria’s Secret to Taco Bell, had four seemingly disparate traits: humor, usefulness, beauty, and inspiration. The takeaway? In an increasingly complex retail landscape, brands must adopt multifaceted personalities to connect emotionally with consumers.

9. Good Design Takes Risks

Ideo studied more than 100 companies in an attempt to quantify innovation and came away with six key insights. Among them? Challenging the status quo has real business benefits. According to the study, chances of a failed product launch decreased by 16.67% when people felt comfortable acting with autonomy.

10. Good Design Is For People–And Machines

Historically, computers have been designed for human users. But as machines grow smarter and artificial intelligence takes root in people’s daily lives, designers will have to build for a new type of user: the human-machine hybrid. So suggests Normative CEO Matthew Milan, who argues that hybrids can do more than any person or computer could accomplish alone, like navigate traffic or compete in super-powered chess games. Looking ahead, good design will help people trust a system–even when they know they don’t have much agency within it.