Design For Outcomes With Asimov and Dreyfuss
Isaac Asimov and Henry Dreyfuss aren’t such an unlikely pair. I can’t find anything that connects these contemporaries—except a letter from designer, artist, and inventor Benjamin Gurule asking Dreyfuss for an introduction to Asimov—but they were both in the business of imagining the future. In particular, works of both reflect a fascination with how future humans would get around.
Early in Prelude to Foundation, Hari Seldon’s flight from the imperial regime introduces several new or semi-new transportation methods: Fast and near-ubiquitous moving walkways, “air-taxis” that enter mag-lev tubes via jet propulsion, and escalators that are so common characters are later taken aback when they have to climb a staircase manually.
Seldon’s guide, Chetter Hummin, leads him to yet another mode of transport: The gravitic lift. This sci-fi classic—an energy field that causes objects or people to rise without physical contact—pulls Seldon up short. It requires stepping out over empty space, trusting you will rise instead of falling. Hummin explains that this psychologically unacceptable action is part of the reason it isn’t used more widely.
The other reason is cost. The gravitic lift uses more energy than can be justified by the value it provides. It was a vanity project of a past regime, and though the current emperor has no interest in investing further in the technology, the existing lifts continue to run.
In the end, Seldon doesn’t plummet to his death—the Foundation series would be very short if the protagonist died in the first 50 pages of book one—but he’s not exactly eager for a repeat. There are important lessons here for designers, which Henry Dreyfuss makes more explicit in Designing For People.
Ideas Aren’t Good Unless People Will Use Them
If you don’t have user adoption, you don’t have anything. On page 24, Dreyfuss says:
[A designer] operates on the theory that it is better to be right than to be original; therefore he steers a course somewhere between daring and caution. If the merchandise doesn’t sell, the designer has not accomplished his purpose.
The gravitic lift in the Foundation series was both original and ingenious. The trouble was that few people were willing to sacrifice their sense of safety just to get to work.
This makes it bad design, even though it would be nice to never wait for an elevator again. In fact, many of the 80% of features that never get used solve real user problems. They might be poorly marketed, poorly placed, or simply out of sync with how people want to solve their problems. Or—like the gravitic lift, or self-driving cars, or a host of other real or fictional inventions—they may challenge survival instincts that have served humanity well for a long time.
This isn’t to say that self-driving cars will never be common. They probably will be. Rather, in order to become common they will need careful design and rollout. Design can help people to feel safe giving up control to a machine the same way they would a human driver. Intentional rollout helps to normalize the tech while slowly increasing the level of trust asked of users. If the imperial regime of Asimov’s world was willing to invest, these same tools could probably be used to make gravitic lifts broadly acceptable.
To avoid expensive product failures like the gravitic lift, I recommend that next time the Galactic Empire does the following:
User research and competitive analysis: Understanding user needs and the landscape of existing products would have helped to direct their attention toward solutions that wouldn’t be viscerally terrifying.
Prototype testing: A project of this scale would have certainly undergone many rounds of engineering tests. For negligible extra cost, the Empire could have tested an existing prototype with users from the general public. Care must be taken, of course, to listen for emotional cues, not just usability issues.
Pilot testing: Lab tests are invaluable, but nothing compares to real world feedback. Even if feelings of safety can be solved for, simple things like “will this mess up my hair” or “what happens to the drink I spilled in the gravitic lift” could derail adoption.
Designers Must Care About Implementation Effort
Designers who want to have an impact on the world must think about the cost of implementing their work. On page 181, Dreyfuss explains:
No matter how preoccupied the industrial designer is with the details of a new design, he is ever conscious of cost of manufacture and distribution.
In the case of Asimov’s gravitic lifts, the unmanageable cost was disproportionate energy usage. For designers in a digital context, costs usually take the form of development time, server usage, the designer’s own time, and the opportunity cost of not spending those resources on something else.
To keep dev time and server usage under control, designers must collaborate closely with both front end and back end engineers. Even for designers who don’t care that they’re making others’ jobs harder, it’s critical to understand that all designs will bend to the necessities of implementation. If not done proactively, designs will be rearranged less gently to fit a timeline or budget. If designers want a voice in the final outcome, they must give developers a voice in the design process.
In order to be good, design must be practical. As Asimov and Dreyfuss remind us, practical design creates products that can be embraced by users and implemented by the business. How much better to plan for success than to hope for the best.
