The Built World

I remember being very young and hearing a news story about a woman who suffered brain damage after riding a new roller coaster in Japan. When I looked it up recently, I was pretty troubled to find that accidents happen on roller coasters with a frequency that actually makes it hard to pinpoint just which story I came across in 1997 or 1998.

Photo by Ilnur Kalimullin on Unsplash

I think it was this one: https://www.wired.com/2000/01/can-coasters-cause-clots/

I remember the story made me unavoidably aware of the designed-ness of the world around me, the humans standing just behind their creations, full of flaws and oversights and blind spots. I started wondering about cars, about buildings, about bridges, about roads. The whole built world was subject to failure, and everything is built! It cannot be avoided or escaped. Suddenly, everything was a roller coaster I was already strapped into, and I wasn't sure I trusted people enough to strap myself into their constructions and let go.

It only got worse as I got older: the metal skyscrapers that get so hot in the sun that they melt the windshields of cars, concrete that dissolves over decades exposed to saltwater, wooden sculptures that sicken employees exposed to the dust it creates. The unfathomable responsibility to account for all the unintended factors in designing and maintaining your work in the world can make a maker want to hide in a hole before she hurts someone.

I so enjoy creating, the freedom of it, the immense pleasure of seeing an idea become reality. But there is always that weight of responsibility, too, the worry about everything I could not have accounted for. Designers have the ability to help humans fly, but that power comes at a price we are only recently starting to discuss in terms of ethics and caution. To compound the anxiety, abstaining from creating does not allow you to exist outside the system; we are all working together to co-create and populate and utilize and redefine our world together, in real time, the ultimate MMORPG, and refusing to act can cause harm as well.

This is (some of) the current thinking behind User Experience Design, that good design does not just take into account the creation of the product, the intention, but also how people actually use that product, and how it continues to exist in the world, the on-going, ever compounding set of results that we all must contend with over time. It's considering your audience, not only to persuade them, but to truly design for (or better yet, with) them, not only the them that's deciding what to buy, but also the them that's using what they bought or found or were given, and increasingly, the them that inherited the consequences of it, are forced to live next to it, or with some broken or diminished version of it.