Has our quest for more efficient navigation of our world made us less connected to it? The lessons from satnav maps suggest we might lose our sense of the territory around us. What does this mean for our sense of systems?
I was struck by Andrew Tuck’s weekly column in Monocle a few weeks back in writing about a recent summer travel experience with maps. He writes:
“Well, for knowing where you are, paper maps still rock. To get the lay of the land, see how the terrain has lent names to villages and entertain last-minute detours, a fold-out map beats digital. Digital maps put your car at the centre of the story and pull the focus in so tight that what’s beyond the brough of the hill seems of little consequence. Towns pass to the left and right, all reduced to the same digital flatness. Names of villages are often absent. You can see your moving spot on the road but you are as blinkered as a shire horse when it comes to the bigger picture.”
The idea of putting us at the centre of the map sounds intriguing, but it does little to help us orient to the wider landscape. That’s what modern satnav services like Google Maps, Strava, Alltrails and Apple Maps do: they put us at the centre.
Interestingly, a few weeks later, another Monocle story featured a similar narrative as Elaine Glaser writes as she recounts a recent road trip through England:
When I drive, I consult the road atlas. When I’m out on my bike, I tap on the windows of cabs waiting at red lights and ask for directions. I also ask bus drivers where to get off. These human interactions now feel very countercultural. The disorientation that I felt on my way to Sussex is now what most people experience when they travel – unaware of where they are going and in which direction.
I am mindful of my increasing eccentricity but I believe that not having a sense of where we are is profoundly disempowering.
These two stories contradict the way we’ve been led to consider maps, technology, and their user experiences in recent years. The lessons we can take from this anecdote apply to design, because it’s our approach to design that led us here.
Our Experiences and Our Designs
My entire waking life is spent through the lens of my own experience and location. I know what’s in front of me and around me — there’s little that’s novel about this. Yes, a satnav system can tell me where to go and show me where I am relative to specific things nearby, but a paper map can show where the territory is in relation to not only me but other things. For discovery, I’m with Andrew Tuck: a paper map is the way to go.
Designing with the user (human) at the centre is considered good design practice. This is based on the idea that the individual is the centre of their world and that it is through their perspective that we can best understand their needs and offer solutions. Yet, the paper map shows how this can be problematic.
Human-centred design emerged as a reaction to products and services that didn’t function well and caused as much difficulty as they did solve problems. For generations, many products and services were designed with a very limited range of possible users in mind — a perspective largely shaped by a limited view of humanity (one that was profoundly WEIRD). As designers started asking better questions and engaging in more inclusive, detailed design research, the focus on human-centred design broadened what we did. But it’s still all about individuals, not contexts.
While I want things designed with me in mind, there are times when my understanding of a context serves my needs better.
I think this is why we’re seeing design falter. When the world faces complex, systemic issues like climate disruption, economic and social upheaval, and geopolitical uncertainty, focusing on the individuals or users in a system is problematic. Design is no longer being discussed in boardrooms, cabinet offices, or shop floors as it once was. Where design thinking and innovation were once hot topics, we now see a profound cooling effect partly due to design’s inability to evolve past human-centredness.
Design’s New Maps
Bruce Mau’s insistence that we transition toward life-centredness makes much more sense. But life-centredness has its own limits when it focuses on living objects, not as much on living systems. A move toward design for living systems is what will sustain both design and the humans we seek to design with and for.
But that is a massive reframe of our language, training, and approach to design overall. The equivalent of a paper map and the kind of road-trip journey that these maps invoke is more akin to the complex systems we encounter and shape our lives. No design-oriented understanding of human needs will help us with the kind of forest fires we’re seeing in California, Alberta, or Greece. Adaptation is essential, but we miss the forest when focusing on the (flaming) trees before us. Human-centredness can lead us there.
It’s time to pull out those paper maps and design new ones that show ourselves and our landscapes. Elaine Glaser puts the need for paper maps this way:
Replacing paper maps with phones feels like progress but is it actually a step backwards? If we give up our sense of direction, we forfeit agency and control. We might feel liberated but we lack the freedom to explore what lies between A and B. Worst of all, we lose context. That loss is part of a more general disorientation. Children no longer appear to be taught about countries and capitals. History, for them, is a series of unconnected events; music is a playlist of singles, detached from any discernible movement or era. Digital technology is rendering us both tethered and unmoored. We lose the big picture at our peril.
It may be time to redesign design lest we create ever-improved maps and yield far less insight into our territory.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash and Hendrik Morkel on Unsplash