Attention. Autonomy. An Appetite for Learning.
transcript of the speech is here
A commencement speech I wasn’t supposed to need changed the way I think about designing technology.
I wasn’t graduating.
I wasn’t even a student.
I was there because my son was graduating from the University of Washington’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction + Design program, Cohort 13.
I expected to watch him cross a stage.
I did not expect to leave thinking about what I was going to build next.
But then Jacob Wobbrock spoke.
The Easy Way Down
One of the ideas Wobbrock returned to throughout his commencement address was remarkably simple.
Water flows downhill.
It takes the easiest available route.
People can do the same thing.
We can surrender our attention to whatever happens to appear on the screen. We can allow algorithms to determine what we watch, what we read and eventually perhaps even what we think. We can ask technology to eliminate friction until we have eliminated something else along with it:
the effort required to think.
Wobbrock challenged the graduates to be something different.
Uphill people.
People willing to ponder.
People willing to struggle with a problem.
People willing to read deeply, make something badly, reconsider it, tear it apart and make it again.
People willing to think.
That stayed with me.
Three A’s
Wobbrock offered the graduates three things worth protecting:
ATTENTION
Your attention is valuable.
Spend it deliberately.
There is an entire technological economy engineered around capturing it, measuring it and keeping it. Sometimes the most productive thing we can do is look away from the interface.
Think.
Observe.
Listen.
Get bored.
Boredom leaves an empty space, and interesting things have a habit of growing in empty spaces.
AUTONOMY
Technology should extend human capability without replacing human agency.
That distinction has become particularly important in the age of artificial intelligence.
AI can research.
It can calculate.
It can prototype.
It can write code.
It can challenge an assumption.
It can help turn an idea into something tangible remarkably quickly.
But there is an important difference between asking a machine to help you think and asking it to think instead of you.
Wobbrock described AI as a hammer.
The person holding it remains the architect.
That metaphor has stayed with me.
APPETITE FOR LEARNING
Stay curious.
Not because curiosity will necessarily lead to a promotion, a credential, a company or money.
Learn because there is still something you don’t understand.
Take things apart.
Ask stupid questions.
Follow strange ideas.
Make things that might fail.
Somewhere along the way, learning stopped being something I did for school and became simply how I navigate the world.
I hope I never lose that.
Then Something Unexpected Happened
I started building things.
Or perhaps more accurately, I gave myself permission to seriously pursue ideas I previously might have dismissed.
Some are practical.
Some are experimental.
Some may turn into products.
Others may go absolutely nowhere.
That’s okay.
I’ve explored ways of preserving digital photographs on physical photographic film.
I’ve worked on adapting photographic equipment in ways its original manufacturers never intended.
I’ve designed small tools to solve irritating problems for photographers.
And I’ve begun designing applications around a much larger question:
Can technology help people solve real problems without taking away the thinking, judgment and humanity that make those problems worth solving?
That question has become increasingly important to me.
The Designer Has a Responsibility
This may have been the most important part of Wobbrock’s speech.
He eventually stopped speaking to the graduates as users of technology.
He reminded them that they were its creators.
Designers.
And that changes the equation.
It isn’t enough to protect our own attention and autonomy.
We have to consider what the things we create do to someone else’s.
Does the interface manipulate?
Does it deliberately create dependency?
Does it encourage someone to stop thinking?
Or does it help a person understand something?
Does it return control to them?
Does it help someone make a better decision?
Does it connect someone who has a problem with someone capable of helping?
Does it leave the person with more agency than they had before?
Those are increasingly the questions I want to ask before I build something.
About AI
There is an obvious irony here.
Artificial intelligence has become one of the tools I use while exploring these ideas.
Including this one.
I don’t agree with every prediction about what AI can or cannot eventually create. I suspect the boundary between human and machine creativity will become considerably more complicated than any of us presently understand.
But I agree strongly with Wobbrock’s larger warning.
Don’t surrender the architect.
Use the hammer.
Use an absurdly powerful hammer if one is available.
Learn what it can do.
Experiment with it.
Push it.
But decide what house ought to be built.
And occasionally put the hammer down.
If You’re Stuck
This is ultimately why I wanted this page here.
Maybe you aren’t a designer.
Maybe you don’t write software.
Maybe you don’t know anything about HCI.
Maybe you’ve simply reached one of those strange points in life where you know there is another chapter but you can’t quite see what it is supposed to contain.
I understand that feeling.
Don’t wait for the entire map.
Find something that bothers you.
Find something that fascinates you.
Find something you don’t understand.
Give it your attention.
Protect your autonomy.
Feed your appetite for learning.
Then make something.
It doesn’t have to become a company.
It doesn’t have to change the world.
It doesn’t even have to work.
The first obligation is simply to climb.
Water will always find its way downhill.
Go the other direction.
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