Society is full of paradoxes, and as you learn and grow, it’s difficult to know when to listen and when not. While we are constantly fed messages about self improvement and idealized goals, we simultaneously see that no matter how far we get, there are always more messages telling us that we’re not there yet, not “__” enough. Though we are a society constantly obsessed with running and “moving forward,” we rarely share a clear understanding of where exactly we’re going. Try as we might, it becomes clear that overcoming one hurdle just leads to a dozen more. No matter how much we may find ourselves setting and striving for goals in life, we ultimately find that there just is no end. There will always be people influencing you to do more and be more, to move to the next level, to reach some peak, and just when you think you’ve figured something out, there’s something new telling you that you’re still not there yet. And the reason why is simple: there is no such thing as “there.”

Evolution, the history of the universe and every natural thing around us is constantly showing us the truth that there is no ultimate stability, no ultimate perfection, just constant movement. And in this movement, there are cycles: things coming back around over and over, each time a little differently (reconvergence points). So if we’re always pushing ourselves to run to some hypothetical finish line, we’ll never truly reach it and thus never truly rest and enjoy our existence. While I agree with the notion that life is a constant journey of self discovery, I find it immensely necessary to ensure that every so often, when we feel the need, for however long we want, we take time to rest, to stop trying to seek answers and just be and enjoy ourselves as we exist right now. You’ll always learn more about yourself as you experience new things, but perhaps the most critical thing you can learn is just enough self confidence to, at times, say “stop,” ignore all other noise coming in, even from the most supporting of friends, and just revel in the here and now for a while. It may just be that that’s when you learn the most.

Finding yourself is a difficult process, though far less of one without the constraints society sets forth. It’s also immensely personal; only you have the most data points on yourself to know what’s true and what’s not. The tools we need to look within, however, are already in us: it’s the same process we use to design things, to solve problems, to innovate and to tell stories, a process which requires the most disciplined of scrutiny and honesty, of openness and imagination, of care and empathy. It requires us to look at ourselves without judgement, without fear, with complete love and possibility, all with a “friendly curiosity” and discover our core essences that govern how we move about and respond to our environment. To do this on your own, consistently amid a variety of contexts but without the influence of outside voices, is perhaps the greatest and most important accomplishment of your lifetime.

Before the “invention” of society, of community, living organisms had no self-awareness or individualism. That part of ourselves arose because we started working together in the first place. Recognizing yourself in another is the first basic step to self-awareness and trust, and over time we grew both our need for belonging and for our own self esteem. But because self esteem is derived by how we view ourselves and how we are viewed in the context of other people, it is all too easy to get wrapped up in the idea that a strong identity is the key to our happiness. Unfortunately, however, this notion inevitably proves false, for identity is just the tangible layer between who you really are inside and how you are seen. It is how you see yourself when you look in the mirror, how you define yourself by what you do, what you say, what you surround yourself with, and how others perceive you (which of course depends more on their own identity struggles than how you really appear to them).

So though we cry, we hurt, we struggle, ever consumed with answering the question “who am I?,” the short answer is, we aren’t anything but our own awarenesses. And if you don’t have that, then you really aren’t much of anything. The very absence of identity ends up being the strongest one.

For the majority of my life, I’ve had trouble defining my identity, which may explain why I took so keenly to social technology. Though I didn’t know it, I was lost for a long time, constantly feeling that I was never in the “right” place or amidst the “right” circumstances. I had envisioned a certain life for myself, a certain set of friends, job, family, lifestyle and I continually tried to create it wherever I went. Starting this blog at the beginning of 2010, I thought I was finally taking charge of myself and making the reality I wanted. I had a great new job with great new people, I had a great new house with great new housemates, I had parties, I was writing, I was dating, I had decorated my room and I was working on rewarding projects. I was settling in and everything felt “stable.” But it was a shell.

As is usually the case when we define ourselves by purely external elements, things slowly begin to fade and I soon fell out of love with many and most aspects of my situation. It wasn’t as ideal as I thought it was and, after spending some time wandering around Europe without a shred of connection to my regular life, I reached a point in which I was no longer attached to this life I thought I had and wanted. After taking personal therapy seriously for almost two years, I had come to see more clearly seeing the patterns I had been following and finally decided to do something different. Carefully crafting an identity appeared to be the wrong approach to find happiness, and I wondered how much more to my identity I had been long holding onto. So instead of looking for it again somewhere else in what would most likely prove to be exactly the same situation as before, I attempted to shed everything I thought I was, everything I thought I was supposed to be, and everything by which I was defining myself – including writing on this blog – slowly but surely stripping away the layers down to my very lonely, very fearful, raw and hurt inner core that had nothing external to lean on for support. Perhaps a scary notion to some, but I did this using the very same techniques on myself that I had been using for design for many years: I removed all distraction and started exploring within, slowly and slowly questioning more and simplifying until I could reach the core essence of who I was at heart. No more roommates, no more familiar city or friends, no more job, no more possessions, no more “stability,” just me.

Now I find myself in an interesting place: I have very few if any ties to anything external. After what has felt like another lifetime of personal exploration, I pretty much gave up everything I thought I was and decided midway through last year to stop for a bit, and revel in my journey thus far. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know who I am right now, how I love and what I need. And though I hear myself and others continually pushing me to change further, I am, at this moment, choosing to be at rest, attempting to embrace the existence of who I am right now and the floatiness that comes with the lack of certainty in goals.

This position of mine, standing still and resting, is often equated by others to being stagnant, unproductive and “flatlined,” thus quickly looked upon with confusion or disdain. But I find this “resting” point to be a different kind of movement, one whose guiding waves come from the new contexts I’ve been placing myself in, psychological and environmental, and where the direction I take comes purely by how I feel in those contexts, not what I think I should do. We tend to think of this “floating” as a scary notion, and indeed I do too, because we have been conditioned to follow rules, be cautious, plan ahead and know where we are going. And, as with most things in our societally-created life, it isn’t so common to go against the “norm” and detach ourselves from a standard way of living. But we must remember that, like everything produced en masse, the norm is a median, a baseline, a straight line with an idealized, albeit nonexistent, destination.

Throughout history, our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos.-Timothy Leary

In this swirling chaos of the natural world and the even more chaotic waves created by a society of people each struggling to make their own way, we exist peacefully, ever breathing, ever swirling, ever pulsing. And if we can each understand our own waveform and work to find that frequency at which we vibrate in our prime, then we need not define ourselves or worry where we are going, nor do we need to tense up with change or seek it out. No, instead we discover that we are in fact not little beings in some ocean of chaos after all; we are the ocean.

Like pretty much everything in this natural world, there are two extremes, two sides to every story, two ends of a spectrum. Up / down, hot / cold, crest / trough, yes / no, etc. When it comes to people and understanding our fears, we can view ourselves in a seemingly endless number of spectrums: introverted / extroverted, laid back / uptight, mental / physical, etc. But ultimately what these come down to is the internal conflict caused by the difference between how our physical bodies work and how our minds work thereafter.

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everbody’s nobody.” -Rustin Cole

In the above wonderful quote from HBO’s True Detective, Matthew McConaughy’s character Rustin Cole explains the effect our own self-awareness has on ourselves and the world around us. Indeed, it is our mentalities that drive both our need for self-esteem and our fears of uncertainty, motivating us in ways much unlike any other creature on this planet. Our actions also fall on a spectrum of two extremes: selfish and selfless. And it’s precisely this spectrum that defines what we call “the human condition.” Basically it’s that while we can accomplish amazing feats as individuals, we all live among and need other people and have, built-in, a part of us somewhere that will make us want to sacrifice ourselves for their sake. That’s pretty much the opposite of evolution’s survival instinct. Finding the right balance is tricky because it’s subjective to each person, based on an infinite number of “decisions” made in your life because of your environment mixed with your sensations mixed with your perceptions. You don’t want to give yourself away to others because you will inevitably be taken advantage of, yet you don’t want to be too selfish or else you’ll hurt other people and ultimately be alone. The happy medium ultimately just comes down to your own self love, and life is a matter of learning where that point is.

The mind is powerful, but it’s mostly unaware. It evolved to protect and control the body, to see the bigger picture and solve problems. But though its potential is massive (and throughout history we’ve heard dozens of stories illustrating as such), it doesn’t start out knowing things, most importantly itself. It has to be taught how to understand itself and look within. Until it does, it’s likely to be afraid when it comes to personal matters. While the body’s ultimate fear is a lack in safety, and thus believably “death,” the mind’s is in uncertainty, in doubt. We never quite know if what we perceive to be reality is in fact reality or just our imagination. And if that uncertainty is directed inward on ourselves, it can be extremely difficult for our bodies to feel safe.

The trick to overcoming this formidable mental obstacle is to question yourself and learn to understand your mind, how it works and how it perceives things into those fears. It’s as though you must step back and develop a meta awareness: an awareness of your own awareness. If the mind takes care of the body, then the meta spirit must take care of the mind. If you can find it, the part of you that can see yourself both mentally and physically in your environment, it is far easier to come to love yourself for having those fears and simply acknowledge them as a part of you. There’s a reason why storytelling and character development have resonated with us in everything we’ve seen and read; when we can look at something from one level out and see its surrounding context, it is more likely that we will understand, empathize and accept.

Suddenly, when you know the reasons why you do what you do, everything feels more certain, you feel more connected to the world around you, and you find yourself constantly reminded that you’re part of something bigger, a remix of everything and everyone else. Loving yourself is not overconfidence or arrogance; it’s elegant, just enough to know and feel that you’re worthwhile, if even just to enjoy the basic yet essential existence of breathing.

Oh, breathing. I don’t do it enough and it’s likely you don’t either. I’m cerebral; I have a very fast mind. I think fast, work fast, play piano fast, finish assignments fast, solve problems fast, talk fast, write code fast, travel fast, etc. I’m probably the most impatient person I know. When I was younger before my lung collapsed, I could run decently fast too, despite my allergies and asthma. In fact, growing up with that, I was never even able to breathe that well in the first place. After the lung trauma, however, I lost of a lot of my connection to my body. In its place, my mind took over. Now I hunch over and double cross my legs to write and draw on a tiny, glowing screen for hours a time. While breathing helps us re-center, calm ourselves, be present, a fast mind doesn’t want to be present. Always onto the next thing, that becomes its reality. As such, I’ve perceived slowing down as uncertain, unsafe, and scary. So of course breathing for me is not preferred, nor is running, eating and drinking (which I lovingly refer to collectively as “BREAD”). In fact, all of the things which keep our bodies healthy have just seemed too darn slow to me. And so I’ve avoided them, in favor of running fast in my mind.

We all find ways to avoid the parts of ourselves that seem scary or uncertain, for the same reasons we avoid other things in life. What if? What if? Our imagination is strong. It’s our ability to essentially create our own “safe” realities in our minds, down to the detail, and then to feel it and believe it. Evolutionarily, this is a useful ability: if two people are walking through the forest, both hear a rustling in the bushes, but one perceives it to be a tiger and the other doesn’t, which one lives if it is? Ah, but if it isn’t, which one is happier?

Stress comes from anxiety which comes from worrying about the future, about what could be. When we talk about living presently, we’re trying to tell ourselves to stop thinking about the “what if” and start enjoying the here and now. But this proves all too hard for many people because their minds keep them worrying; they have not yet turned that process inward on themselves in order to feel love instead. So maybe we shouldn’t try to get out of our heads at all. Maybe we should just start asking harder questions, let our imaginations create unsafe realities and explore them. What then?

The mind’s job is to find patterns and draw conclusions. It’s capable of “seeing” much more than there is in front of you physically precisely because of its ability to pattern match. It takes external stimuli in pieces, puts them together to form something recognizable and connects them to memory and thus to feeling. Categorize, identify, define. Of course so many people talk about life as a “gray area:” we all have minds, and thus we all think on a much bigger picture by default. But looking very closely, as would a scientist, a designer, an architect, an engineer, it becomes clearer and clearer to discern the smaller and smaller pieces, each which are far more black and white the smaller you get.

Over time, as your awareness grows and you discover more of these black and white pieces, you’ll likely start seeing much more depth in yourself, more interest in things outside of you, and why so many of our societal clichés are, in fact, spot on. You’ll have more questions because the questions are fun, and every discovery you make about yourself and the word around you can excite you to no end. Ignorance is bliss, but so is full awareness, if you can manage it.

“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live inside the world, trying not to bash in the walls too much, have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life, and it can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” - Steve Jobs

Our young minds first learn more about our surroundings than they do about us; they’re very impressionable. And in an environment which is heavily if not completely influenced by society, it’s easy for us to “learn” things that just really aren’t true. Because our perceptions can often be wrong, it’s that much more critical to understand exactly why we are perceiving something the way we are due to our own bias created by biological needs and our experiences getting those met. Only then can we effectively separate what’s fake from what’s real, certain and safe. It sure takes a lot of energy and effort, but it is possible.

By the summer of last year, 2013, after spending many cold months alone in a dark, empty apartment, not eating, not drinking, not moving, just thinking, I came to find the self love I was seeking. Through the use of marijuana, mental tools I learned from therapy and lots of note-taking and sketching, I was able to create reality entirely within my own head. Focused on thoughts or some architecture / design problem, I ceased to exist in my physical body other than to breathe. In some cases, I barely did even that. I could work for an entire day without eating or drinking anything. That’s a meditative state too, to be full mind and no body. And it was perhaps during my week at Burning Man amid all these new feelings that I hit on perhaps the most important epiphany of all the ones I’ve had in the last several years: that I can exist presently, I can feel connected to everything, and it’s okay to slow down and be fully in the body. When I understand myself, I’m no longer afraid of future bad things and how I will cope, for I know I have the tools (also known as confidence) to figure it out as long as I remember this love. In the meantime, slowing down won’t make the safety I feel from living in my mind go away; it’ll still be there whenever I go back to it.

Since truly understanding and feeling that truth, and most importantly since believing in it, I’ve finally been able to “make the switch” and start to slow down immensely and enjoy the here and now. I’m still far from where I’d like to be, but with even just the newfound awareness let alone action upon it, I know I’m lightyears ahead of where I was just over a year ago.

But I don’t like setting goals, and this isn’t one. It’s commonplace for us as individuals and as a society to define “goals” and “endpoints,” as though we’re running on straight lines from A to B. Yet we see all around us that nothing is actually linear, perhaps not even time. Why, even the flat surfaces on which we stand curve slowly in the distance, only to wrap around and eventually return to us. Were things to diverge endlessly, nothing would exist. It’s precisely the fact that everything comes back together again that makes everything what it is. So then, the very ideal of finding a straight line, of desiring an ending point, is physically flawed, for nothing in our universe has given us an indication that anything natural works this way. In fact, the only real “ending” points we have are just new starting points over and over again.

Being truly self-aware comes from recognizing this pattern of reconvergence in your life. The more you come to know and trust yourself, the more you will see similar things happening again and again, almost with no effort, and the more you will realize that certainty is everywhere, and there’s no need to fear. I would argue then that this goal of self-actualization doesn’t ever stabilize fully in the mind or fully in the body, nor even fully in both together. Instead, like everything else, it’s a waveform cyclical movement, a pendulum swinging back and forth between the mind and body. And, like an eager child on a swingset, we owe it to ourselves to pump and push and keep ourselves moving and expanding.

And why wouldn’t life be such a waveform? Anything living moves on its own in some way, shape or form. Perhaps even death isn’t a total standstill. As I’ve seen, living full mind is almost the death of the body. And living full body might be almost the death of the mind. Either way, both remove us from some kind of reality, giving rise to another kind. So after that, who even knows? Maybe “death” is actually just another reconvergence point, leading to birth and life all over again somewhere else in some other way.

No matter how much we glean from each other and the world around us, our real answers, solutions and truths lie within each of us. And so we must be clearer, more open, more honest and more disciplined with ourselves to understand who we are and why we are as we are to make any significant and sustainable progress as individuals and as a species.

We are all bound by constraints on how much we may come to understand, but it’s not these limits that define us. It’s how we look past them and love.

Those who do not intrinsically feel special or a strong sense of self-worth often look to others who appear to be special in some way, hoping that perhaps their inclusion in that group will subsequently make them special too. In most of these situations, however, those who appear to be important or powerful tend to not actually feel confident deep within; rather, they’ve figured out how to “play the system” and have built their entire lives on that premise. But such a foundation is shaky, for its building blocks are solely based on the perception of others. One wrong move is all it takes for everything to come crashing down.

Of course, this may seem a no-brainer, but the reality is that the feeling of self-worth comes from within, even though it has been so deeply routed in our biology the need to look to others for support and reassurance. But remember, that societal need was formed mostly from our need to protect ourselves from a harsh environment, one that no longer exists because of what society has built over time. Indeed, the threat of bears is not the main concern it once might have been. For many of us who live in a first world, so much of our fundamental physiological and safety needs are taken care of with excess that we are left almost bored and unsure what else to do with our time.

Happy dogs, cats or even human babies – given they are well nourished and kept safe – will do nothing other than play with one another. This is the fundamental love that comes from our communal adaptation; it is the biological change we have consequently made, allowing us to empathize with others and care for them. This is what it really means to love.

Why then, with all our basic needs taken care of, do we not just lay around and love one another? Is it our supposed intrinsic interest in domination and power? Indeed, history will show that all fearsome, powerful leaders of the past were, at the core, quite fearful of life, of death, of the Gods, of uncertainty. And yet, everyone has died, as we do. No one, no matter how powerful, lives forever. But they can change the way people behave, and we have been left so many lasting legacies that are rarely questioned or challenged. A deeper study of history evinces why things became as they are, and understanding of that narrative enables us to look at our situations with much more awareness and to question whether or not things need to be as they are now.

When we do look deeper, I believe we find that much of societal norms are in fact not the reality, but rather the culmination of thousands of years of the wrong people being in charge (wrong meaning fearful and not loving). And hence, when many complain that “life is complex” or that things are “a gray area” I have to disagree, for the reality is that while life in society is complex and life in society is a gray area because of all our collective fears over time, life in the universe is actually quite simple: to connect with yourself everything around you, to be included in anything and everything, to love and be loved. We have this ability within each of us, and how we love… that’s what makes us special.

Whatever kind of design you do – product design, interaction design, industrial design, graphic design, architectural design, social design – to be effective, the first place to start is the root of it all: design.

A binary fractal tree, starting at a single root and continually branching into two extremes. The number of leaves (endpoints) is 2^h where h = height of the tree. Thus, each branch grows the number of outcomes exponentially.

Design is the fulfillment of a need the environment elicits. I define it this way not just because it’s the most clear, but because it’s also the most natural. No matter where you go or what you do, you are always in some kind of environment which not only gives rise to the problems that need solving but also dictate the constraints.

But before you go putting pen to paper or pointer to Photoshop canvas, we need to start at the beginning: before computers, before paper, even before people, before the earth. Let’s look at our macro-environment: the universe in which we exist – or at least try to continue to. Yes, that is our primary need as living beings: simply the continuation of our existence. The very fact that you are reading this right now is because literally billions of years of evolution has lead you to this moment and provided you the ability to not only identify the dots on the screen but to categorize and define them.

Until I can transcribe this in full, here’s a recent video from a talk I gave on Social Design at IDEO in NYC.

Every effective story is comprised of little details, all of which are crucial to the gestalt of the bigger picture. The creation of this perfection requires the utmost discipline, for if the whole story is to be focused, then so too must all the micro-stories be. Unfortunately for us, architecting such a system is extremely complicated. Driven by our somewhat unpredictable, complicated and fragile emotions, it’s not easy for us to be objective, maintain focus and articulate our thoughts, even when we do know just what we want to convey. Even this article, for example, is not nearly as clear as what I have in my head, despite the structuring and restructuring I’ve done to get it to where it is now.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this problem – I’ve talked with some friends who’ve helped me focus my thoughts. As I’ve written previously, social design works because it fills the gap between identity and community, helping one person connect with others. It does this by facilitating conversation. But it’s the storytelling in that conversation that really helps us communicate effectively. We tell stories to illustrate who we are, what we feel and what we want everyone to understand. It works because, as social beings, we relate to and empathize with each other through our experiences.

Storytelling has been used as a teaching method for thousands of years, yet despite its ubiquity, we are still unable to help each other tell our own stories. History shows us that we have continually struggled for the freedom of expression, the very thing which acknowledges our individualism. But now, many of us live in a modern world that not only allows this freedom, but encourages it to a fault. Storytelling requires focus, and we’re falling short.

Social technology aims to mimic real society, but real society may not be the best role model. These days, we’re allowed so many choices for so many things that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on what’s really important. Psychological research posits that we are the unhappiest generation yet, not because of some chemical imbalance, but simply because we are overwhelmed with the number of options we have, more paralyzed to make choices and more unhappy with our decisions. In many ways, it was easier to exist hundreds of years ago because we felt we needed less. The truth is, we need just as little now as we did then – we’re just distracted.

The same is true for communication. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the multitude of other social services, anything that might be thoughtful or meaningful gets lost among the dribble. Conversation is more boring or entertaining than it is helpful. At this point, even if someone can articulate some profound thoughts, do we even notice? Can we even hear it anymore?

Having the freedom of expression simply means that we have an outlet for all the emotions we are filled with and a community to listen. Naturally, our friends make up that community now, because they understand us, are quick to validate what we say and are forgiving when we aren’t clear on our thoughts. Outside that trusted group, however, communication isn’t working well. When you give everyone in the world an outlet for their emotions and make it public, you get what we have now: a chaotic collection of thoughts ranging from the most profound to the most dull, from the most humdrum to the most enraging. Furthermore, we see a spectrum of communal results, from new relationships and reunited families to murders, hate groups, riots and political strife. And you get it all louder and stronger because this is the first time people from all over the world can interact in the same rooms.

Despite the ubiquity of Internet communication, we don’t really understand each other any better. We tend to keep to our friends, maintain surface-level chatter and become lazier in our communication. In order for social technology to really help us, we must learn to be more thoughtful, understand and express ourselves better and to help others do the same. Undoubtedly we will find that when we can do this, we are, in fact, all on the same page: driven by the same causes, fearful of the same fears and hopeful of the same hopes. We are simply different versions of the same story.

“Society is commonly too cheap,” said Thoreau in Solitude (Walden), written in the 1800s. “We meet at very short intervals, not having the time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals, three times a day, and manage to give each other only another taste of the same, old moldy cheese that we are.” Even 150 years ago we tended towards the meaningless palaver, of which we only have more today. So as we embrace this new age, let’s strive to make our storytelling richer, more economical and more meaningful, exploring how it can help better us on the whole. It’s not about us as individuals, nor even our children – it’s about that greater story of humanity and how we pushed it forward.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I had never heard of the Strand Book Store in NYC until earlier this year when I was walking around with a friend and she pointed it out to me. She apparently goes all the time and told me I’d like it. And I did. I even bought a new book from an author I like.

With technology today, we can get answers to anything factual right away. I could have looked up on my phone for bookstores in New York just as I could have looked up how to get to the store and if they carry books by this author. But the value of social is when I don’t even know I’m looking for anything at all.

In these cases and when we are faced with more subjective questions such as, “Where’s a good Italian restaurant?” or “What movie should I see?” or “Where’s a great museum nearby?” we turn to a community of people to help us out. These decisions are emotional, and who better to understand than other people?

Communities can be very useful, almost like a buffer between us and the world. In the wild, they’re an evolutionary defense mechanism against danger: a larger group is more powerful than an individual and the individual can look to the group for social cues on what to do. For us as people, having a community is more of an emotional attachment: we define it by the close people we surround ourselves with—our friends and family. We know them, we like them, they know us and they like us. We share thoughts, feelings, experiences and we turn to them for love and support throughout our lives because we trust them.

And though we have all kinds of relationships in our lives—with coworkers, neighbors or brands, long-lasting or short-lived, formal or intimate—it’s with our strongest ties that our trust lies. And this is the foundation of why Social Design works—because of this trust.

So when my close friend in New York tells me about a place I should visit, I trust her opinion and that she knows me well. And when our experience matches recommendations we get—that is, when we actually enjoy ourselves and learn something new—we not only feel special and thankful for the experience, but we also feel prompted to talk about it and tell our friends about it as well. We do this because we’re expressing ourselves by sharing the things we like and we want our communities to hear.

Trust is built through these conversations and everyday, hundreds of millions of people are having these interactions on Facebook and other social platforms, sharing thoughts, feelings, places they’ve visited, articles they’ve read, movies they’ve watched, and on and on. Social Design aims to harness this conversation, enhance it and build more of these serendipitous and valuable social experiences for everyone.

The Three Elements of Social Design

If we break Social Design down into tactical core elements, we see clearly how it’s comprised of three very distinct components: identity, conversation and community. Put another way: ourselves, other people and the conversations we have with them.

I like to diagram this using concentric circles, with identity in the center, conversation in the middle and community on the outside. The reason for this is because conversation really serves as the glue between identity and community. Conversation is how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from it.

If we were to design a social product with this in mind, one idea might be to start from the center and work our way out. That is, allow people to create an identity, let them talk about it and build a community over time. This isn’t a bad idea at all – in fact, it’s how Facebook and a number of other social networks began.

When Facebook emerged in 2004, it was a simple site allowing college students to create and edit profiles of themselves. The editing was addictive; people kept logging in to see what had changed in friends’ profiles and to change things themselves. And, over time, this became a conversation—a timeline of life—and people built a strong identity and community of friends and family from it.

But now that this is in place – and used heavily by hundreds of millions of people everyday – it makes much more strategic (even practical) sense for social design to take the reverse approach and work from the outside in. That is, to utilize the existing community, define new kinds of conversation and let people continue to build their identities further.

A more iconic representation of the three elements of Social Design: Identity, Conversation and Community. Conversation is the glue between the identity and the community, binding the two together.

Utilizing Community

Facebook profiles have become people’s identities. They’ve spent countless hours curating them – adding friends, posting pictures, commenting on friends’ updates. This is their de facto representation of themselves, and they don’t want to recreate it from scratch every time they start a new product or service.

So rather than create an experience that starts with building a new identity, we should utilize what we can from what’s already on Facebook and build on top of it. Connect users to their friends when they sign up to a new service. Social apps aren’t social without other people and bringing a user’s friends automatically brings the established trust in a community. Use profile information to recommend content – people already know what they like and that’s why it’s on their profiles.

Rotten Tomatoes, for example, with the addition of Instant Personalization, shows users movies that their friends like as well as movies they might like based on the movies they already like, as listed in their profile.

Get the baseline in place so all that needs attention is the conversation – what they talk about and how they do so.

Building Conversation

Conversation builds trust. In fact, any real-time interactions associated with emotion build these strong bonds. It could be anything from sitting together and talking to dancing, protesting, jumping out of a plane, etc. Conversation is simply a generic term I’m using to describe the interactions between the self and the community and the stronger the associated emotion, the stronger the bond.

This is inherently a back-and-forth and therefore is comprised of two different experiences that play off each other. Generically, we can describe these as listening and speaking.

Listening

A listening experience is hypothetically if you were go to a restaurant you’ve never been to before and choose what to eat based on the recommendation of others. You’re essentially listening to the community’s thoughts and previous actions and using these to inform your decisions.

We already see this in many places online. People on Yelp, for example, can make comments on restaurants such as, “Try the hot chocolate.” And on YouTube, you can see ratings for each video that help you determine which ones to watch, since you probably don’t want to watch the bad ones. They say, “Watch this one; others liked it.” On many e-commerce sites such as Amazon, we see the same thing: reviews from people to help our decision-making.

But there’s a big problem here: we don’t always know these people. And they don’t know us. So how do they know what we like? How can we trust them to give a good rating? We can’t. There’s no established trust.

So what Facebook has done is remodel this same paradigm but scope it around your friends. Social plugins, for example, let people “like” things all over the Internet and then surface this activity to their friends. And because you see what your friends and trusted circle like, you’re more likely to care.

Again, because the value of “social” is when we don’t know what we want and we’re not really looking, showing activity spread throughout the experience constantly inundates us with potential conversation points and things of interest. We learn by watching others. It’s social encouragement and a form of mimicry if anything: if we see someone else we trust doing something, we’re likely to do the same.

Spotify, for example, shows a feed of all the songs that users are sharing and adding to their playlists. It’s a personalized way for users to browse some of the latest and most popular songs.

When you connect with your Facebook account to Huffington Post, you see an activity feed of all the articles your friends have been reading lately.

Speaking

The other half of the conversation—and perhaps the most important part—is the speaking and the sharing. People have to engage in the first place, and will do so when they have the right motivation. The good news is that if people are sharing with people they trust, they are more likely to share more often and be open and honest.

Facebook has a number of ways for users to engage, including a number of options in the publisher (status, links, photos, etc.) and multiple ways to provide input and feedback (likes, comments, answers to questions, wall posts, etc.). And all of this activity is surfaced to users’ friends constantly through various distribution channels. We can’t help but listen.

The more contributions that are made to the system, the more activity exists to listen to and engage with. And likewise, the more activity there is to engage with, the more contributions can be made to the system. And this creates a positive feedback loop—a “virtuous cycle of sharing” as we call it—that grows exponentially. This is really the sweet spot: conversation fueling more conversation.

To summarize, a great social experience depends on conversation between the community and the self. And this is based tactically in three main elements:

1. Utilizing personal information and connections to build a personalized experience
2. Showing conversations, social context and activity everywhere
3. Making it really easy to talk, share, give feedback and engage

Curating Identity

The beauty of Social Design is that it plays to the most powerful form of motivation: the self, the identity. We share and interact with others because we want to, because we learn more about ourselves and because we feel better when we feel heard.

Social Design is actually central to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I believe. After our physiological needs of food and water, and after our basic safety needs, we have a very interesting duality between needing love and belonging and our own sense of self-esteem. It stands to reason, given the diagram, that we base much of our own self-esteem in how the community sees us and how accepted we are. In other words, the community helps drive our identity. And it’s when we have that feeling of belonging and love that we can build our self-esteem and reach our full potential.

The experiences I mention already exist in the real world today; we’re not really trying to invent anything “new” here. But the Internet is becoming part of the real world and a reflection of it, a means by which we can communicate with one another more efficiently. With people at the center of the Web, more and more experiences that naturally happen in the real world are starting to happen online. With this in mind, as we design, we should take into account existing social truths, thinking carefully about the identities and respective communities we affect and building the best conversation tools for them.

Ultimately the value of social is bigger than anything material. It’s a way for us to close the gap between the self and the community, just as we’ve closed the gap between our other needs. We don’t have have to worry about food nor spend our lives hunting like other animals. Our ability to trust each other and work together as a species has built a safer environment in which to live. But individually, we do still worry about our futures, finding love, feeling heard, and knowing ourselves. Social Design starts us along this path.

For more information, check out the Facebook Social Design guidelines I wrote.

Like this article? You may also like these:

• One for All and All In One – How Simple Should Social Interfaces Really Be?
• Brand Devolution – A Logo Change Changes Our Trust

No one loves you. No one can. For what you deem as “real” is simply your own perception of the stimuli in the world around you. That perception of the senses leads to body changes that make you feel a certain way. But emotion is really nothing more than purely a reaction to and an awareness of your environment. This unfortunately means that everything you experience is fundamentally subjective and personal to you, no matter how objective it may seem on the outside.

There is no such thing as “being loved” – only feeling it. That is, “love” is not something given; it’s something received, an ability to perceive your environment in a way that makes it meaningful and comforting to you. Much of it is instinctual, ingrained from millions of years of evolution. But much of it is experience, for though we are born with the same basic needs, our instincts are put to the test in our first formative years as we figure out how to get those needs met in a tumultuous and confusing time. The love that you get as a child, from your parents, your friends and your surroundings, tends to define how you’re able to perceive it throughout the rest of your life (although this may be mostly unconscious).

I discovered some time ago that the meaning of life is simply “to love and be loved” but I use the term “love” in a way that is not commonly defined by society. It is not from a spouse or a sibling, a lover or a friend, nor is it even the intense craving of chocolate that causes you to buy every bag of candy at the end of the cereal aisle. “To love” is simply to be at peace with yourself and the world around you and to exude that energy as you journey through it. “To be loved,” is difficult, for it requires you to actually notice the beauty in your surroundings and take it personally. We so often get wrapped up in the idea that in order to be loved, we must be loved by other people, yet we are drastically limiting our scope. We can be loved by anything we perceive to be as such: a warm, sunny day, a piece of music, a bowl of ripe strawberries, a small gathering of friends for dinner… but because life is made to be more complicated than it needs to be, we are easily distracted and unable to see these moments for what they are.

We tend to strive for this “perfection” of love we have in our minds: some place, time, state of mind, group of people, career, etc. that puts us at ease, calms our anxiety and helps us make peace with the world and its instability. But there is no ultimate perfection; only moments of it. And being loved is learning how to appreciate them.

I’ve written before about how difficult it is to communicate who you are to people. Everyone is different, everyone hears things differently and everyone expects different things. Thus, it’s not surprising that we have difficulty communicating with everyone. The same is true of brands, except they need to communicate with everyone. So, as a company, if your voice isn’t providing the right messaging – or worse, if your brand isn’t fitting in – then you’d think it’s time for a change.

When companies change their logos, you have to figure that something prompted the redesign, something wrong within the soul of the business. But changing logos is more of a marketing thing; it’s a lot harder to change the core value.

You can usually find out a great deal about company logos if you just do a bit of research. Learning about the time period the logo was made – the political environment, the current state of affairs, etc. – and putting all the pieces together, you can get a much deeper understanding of what is going on here.

Take mayonnaise, for example. It first became popular in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. But ask someone from the west coast to name the brand of mayonnaise they use and then ask someone who grew up east and they’ll say different things. That’s because while Helmann’s mayonnaise was the staple brand on the east coast, Best Foods Inc. introduced and grew its mayonnaise business in the west. And although in the 1930s, Best Foods acquired Helmanns, to this day, they maintain the branding of Best Foods west of the Mississippi and Helmann’s east of it.

It’s the same brand, the same product, heck even the visuals of each logo are the same! But the marketing is different. And that’s because marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

Because the brand is at the heart, it’s important that the marketing clearly speaks to you, the user. And if the marketing is ineffectively communicating the brand, it’s time to change something. Often times, old logos convey only one area of focus but as companies expand, their brand may cover others as well. When the Sci Fi network, for example, started struggling as a science-fiction, typically male-oriented TV channel, they felt a good way to stay afloat was to expand. Now they offer social components, applications and a bunch of new programming that appeal to a broader audience. As such, they needed to redo their logo to be less about science fiction only. The new “SyFy” accomplishes this, losing its unique and overt galactic/spacey style – not to mention the obvious reference to science fiction – in favor of one that’s more generic, universal and a bit amorphous.

Sci Fi’s transition to SyFy

But simply changing the SyFy logo isn’t going to change the fact that their brand is clearly struggling as a small, targeted, “old-media” network (just like many other Hollywood / TV brands). The real success will be if they can figure out how to give people what they really want in a new world of technology that provides users with virtually anything they want whenever they want it.

Broadening a brand isn’t uncommon. Along the same lines as SyFy is Walmart, whose original logo design, a tad on the cliché and cheesy side, focused on cheapness and targeted low-income families. But lately, Walmart has started to sell higher quality items, more variety and targets more of the middle class. As such, their logo revision is more elegant, modern and extra curvy to convey a sense of friendliness. The logo graphic may remind you of an asterisk or otherwise, but maybe that’s a good thing (especially when you consider that asterisks can denote “mark as important”).

Walmart’s new friendly, modernized logo

Now let’s move to Gap, a global company which owns a variety of clothing lines, including Banana Republic – the upscale, high quality branch (that, incidentally used to be branded as tropical / Caribbean fashion) – as well as Old Navy. But when Gap first started as a small basic clothing line in the end of the 1960s, it was new, hip, stylish, clean and fun. And its logo represented that brand presence.

The original Gap logo from 1969

But these days, with the advent of many popular hip/stylish clothing lines, people tend see the Gap more as generic, poorly-made clothing. It’s not generic that’s bad – American Apparel is all about making generic clothing super cool. Although their clothes are well-made, they’re not really anything particularly special and its logo reflects that brand: basic, black, Helvetica. But just because Gap adapts a similar logo style doesn’t mean that its core essence as a brand has actually modernized and become more hip. The products and the experience have to show it.

The new Gap logo, very American Apparel.

I suppose we’ll see what happens, but in the meantime, the design of the Gap logo isn’t very effective. Among its poorer qualities is the black text over a blue square (that isn’t even fully saturated, the blue running like a bad dye job). What does this mean? What does its color and placement mean? And perhaps most importantly, how does this logo look in black and white, especially when it’s going to be woven into a clothing label that allows only one thread color, not to mention a resolution of only 72 dpi?

I should note that designs should never rely on color to help convey meaning. Rather, the color should just serve to enhance the structure or shapes that already exist. The only exception to this rule is when color is used to discriminate between sub-brands, which Gap has a chance to do here, potentially. Because sub-brands are geared towards a specific context and/or audience, they are aspects of marketing, the voice of the brand. Here, it’s okay to change the aesthetic, in the same way you might change what you say or what you wear depending on who you’re hanging out with. It doesn’t change who you are or what you believe in fundamentally, but it does help you be more effective at communicating with different people.

Good examples of this can be seen in the Huffington Post, USA Today, FedEx, Adobe and even milk. Milk is among the few food products where you accept its genericness. After all, the hugely popular “Got Milk” campaign isn’t about any specific brand of milk. Milk is milk. But there are different kinds of milk and for years, colors have been used to separate them out: red is whole milk, blue is fat free, etc.

Lucerne milk uses simple packaging with vibrant colors to differentiate the milk varieties.

The many different sub-brands of Fedex, separated by variations of color in their logos.

But while we accept milk as a generic food item, we don’t do the same with other staples. Take orange juice, for example. All orange juice isn’t the same; it depends on where the oranges are from, how they’re processed and when they were grown, among other things. Because of these unique characteristics, branding is much more important to distinguish one orange juice from the next.

Tropicana first emerged in the 1950s, back when it was especially difficult in mainstream society to have really good, fresh juice all the time. The founder developed flash pasteurization and it was the first time consumers could have the fresh taste of oranges from non-concentrated juice. It was new, exciting, exotic. And, as such, its logo reflected that. Giving the Tropicana wording an almost clichéd, decorative font made it stand out more and make a name for itself.

But when Tropicana recently modernized its logo and branding, there was an immense public outcry – so much so, in fact, that it is among the few redesigned logos to be recalled.

Although there were some good decisions in the Tropicana rebranding (such as picking a font that may be more universally understandable than its previous faux-Americana-tropical one), modernizing it just made it look more generic and basic. No one wanted generic orange juice; they wanted Tropicana. It lost its unique personality and with that, its trust from its customers.

Tropicana’s generic new design

A sudden branding redesign to a company you trust is like pulling out the rug from under you. It’s shocking, unexpected, uncertain. A logo and a brand implicitly tell a story and give an experience. Gap used to have a story and experience. They’ve changed the logo, but have they changed the experience? A logo change is simply just tricking people to think the whole company is different. If it really is, then great, but most brands have a hard time changing, just as most people have a hard time changing. Lest we forget, a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

Marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

So why are we so big on trust? Why is the branding so important? And why do we tend to hate redesigns? It’s because it gives us a consistency, a constant to grab onto. And the more consistent a design, the better we understand it and the more we build expectation and come to trust it. As humans, our strongest emotional responses map to behavioral patterns learned before we could even form memories. The first few years of our lives are the most formative and we learn a slew of severe life lessons during this time, perhaps most importantly discovering that the world is made of things that can always change. Inherently craving stability, we learn to look for things that are constant and latch on as we develop heuristics to help us grow. We strongly desire a sense of place, of security, of safety in things we come to trust. It’s the second most basic tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right after food and shelter.

Just as you have experiences in life that affect your learning and perceptions, so too do you have them with brands. And if you want to form a bond through these experiences you have repeatedly, then they should be consistent and expected because trust is involved.

Even if you think some of these logo redesigns are better, the bottom line is that every one of them is really just a change in marketing, with many of these companies trying to be something they’re not [yet]. A logo and a design make a promise to its users of upholding an implicit experience and story. And when a company’s brand is undergoing a state of flux, the worst thing they can do is put out a bad logo that makes a promise they can’t actually keep.

Artists engage in the manipulation of a particular medium to produce an aesthetic and personal response. Art is valued for its originality and ability to express an idea. Some people get it, some don’t, and that’s okay. Design, on the other hand, must solve a specific problem relative to a particular user or task, and is evaluated simply by how effective it is at solving that problem. If it doesn’t work, then it failed—period.

Everything in nature is the way it is by design; evolution has no aesthetic or personal opinion. Like art, some people find bugs to be quite beautiful while others cringe at the sight of them. But like them or not, their design is the way it is because of their environment and the obstacles they face trying to survive. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you think; it has to work, or they die.

Design is inherently an objective process, yet when it comes to designing for people, we tend to cloud this truth. As emotional beings, our judgment is often greatly affected by how we feel, and how we feel is often unpredictable, uncertain, and complicated. Therefore, we can’t design for emotion; everyone experiences it differently. But we can design for the fundamental psychological underpinnings and biological traits that influence perception. When we do that, we find design to be much simpler. All we must do is define a core concept—a problem to solve—and make logical, subsequent decisions off it, maintaining focus and keeping in mind the psychology of how we learn and remember things.

How We Learn

Instinctually, we construct myriad mental models of concepts in the world, creating expectations of how objects work, which we learn more over time through our experiences. We’re naturally inclined to believe, for example, that round things are softer than square things, that blue is colder than orange, and that simpler things are, in general, more approachable.

Consider a person who’s never seen a mobile phone before presented with both an iPhone and a Blackberry. Then consider the range of first moves they can make with each product. By probability alone, there’s a higher chance that the person turns the iPhone on faster than the Blackberry. With less buttons and less clutter, the iPhone is much easier to approach and engage with, and that is its first, and perhaps most important, step to success.

In a battle of popular micro-blogging sites, Tumblr and Posterous take very different approaches to their landing pages. Posterous, a Silicon Valley tech company, showcases how it works and what people say about it. On the other hand, Tumblr, a New York design company, simply presents users with a big signup form and one line of text: “The easiest way to blog.” By focusing users’ attention and presenting them with few options, the product is far more approachable. As such, despite Posterous’s powerful functionality, Tumblr has won out in the size of its user base.

Users’ entire experience with a new product is a continual series of new experiences, making the approachability of those experiences key as they learn new facets and features of the product. But there’s a second, more powerful step to engagement: familiarity.

Recognition is among the most powerful forms of memory recall, so it’s no wonder that familiarity is a strong factor in good design. Because we carry with us all kinds of assumptions and schemas from our innate biology and prior experiences, we don’t approach products as a blank slate. The more a product can tap into users’ existing expectations, the easier it will be for them to learn its new features. Many basic calculator software applications, for example, mimic the look of a real calculator, even though a virtual calculator probably makes more sense as a simple textbox that parses expressions.

A product with a familiar interface gives users a tremendous leg up in the learning process, and meeting their expectations builds a valuable trusting relationship that greatly enhances the product’s quality and credibility.

How We Remember

This continual cycle of approachability and recognizability can be described as learnability—that is, how easy a product is to learn. Because this is a crucial component of a product’s success, more complex products will often put new users through a tutorial-like workflow to get them acquainted with the various features and facets. But this approach suggests that the product has an inherently flawed architecture. If the basic blueprint is not intuitive such that users have to be guided through it, the learning process becomes less internalized and less memorable; they are learning to rely on what you tell them, not what they experience.

Workflows designed with a focus on initial learnability can do more serious damage to a product’s usability in the long run. One of the most challenging aspects to selling a design to stakeholders is convincing them that its usability—the speed and efficiency of task completion—is more important than the initial gut reaction, which is all you get from a meeting. Stakeholders often like to see certain elements front and center from the beginning, never mind that those elements may become trivial—or worse, distracting —in the rest of the workflow. If a product doesn’t have a logical architecture from the start, users will lose their way.

In 2007, Microsoft revamped its suite of Office products with “The Ribbon,” a new interface that organizes related commands into a set of tabs. Years of research and iteration lead to this design, which was intended to optimize the user workflow. In PowerPoint (a product on which I briefly worked), research showed that the typical user workflow consisted primarily of creating a new slide, adding text, formatting that text, adding shapes, and formatting those shapes. As a result, the “Home” tab in The Ribbon includes all these apparently related actions together, with other tabs having names and action sets based on other workflows: “Design,” “Slideshow,” “Insert,” “Review,” and a contextual tab depending on what tool the user has selected.

The different toolbar structures for Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote

This structure starkly contrasts the way Apple designed Keynote, another slideshow/presentation application. While its interface also uses a tabbed approach, the tabs are divided by the various types of objects that can be included in presentations: slides, text, shapes, charts, tables, etc., each with its own set of related actions. Because of this more objective and logical grouping (as well as many of Keynote’s other features that obey principles of approachability and recognizability), the product is quite successful and easy to use.

Objective design doesn’t cater to a specific workflow. Rather, it simply provides a logical structure that plays into our innate psychology. This structure is also behind good writing, movies, music, and other widely successful products and experiences. People are inclined to seek out order and hierarchy as a way to categorize, identify, and define the objects and experiences they encounter and don’t respond well to deviations from this natural process.

If someone challenges a product’s design with aesthetically or emotionally based suggestions and changes, they must be reminded that design decisions are based in logical reasoning. It’s this highly disciplined, unemotional, and perceptive ability to break down gray areas into small, inarguable black-and-white building blocks that allow for the most effective communication and, more importantly, designs that just work.

It’s sort of an accident that I’m in the technology industry. When I was in grade-school, I never did anything technologically related: I didn’t program, I didn’t design websites, I didn’t read articles… I did teach myself the basics of a few Adobe programs, but mainly I used computers like the majority of people my age: I chatted with friends, I wrote documents and I played games. But now I find myself in the center of an industry that frustrates me and feel unlike many of my design colleagues. I’m not interested in the latest tech gadget or a new website or the visual subtleties in the iPhone. I don’t read the blogs online, I don’t make pixel-perfect mocks and I honestly don’t want to have to “check in” on a dozen versions of the same service. I just care about people and want to make things they like to use, especially if it makes them happier and feel more connected.

My mindset is one of people, not products. Only recently in the industry has there been a strong push for user-centric design, with dozens of these new roles emerging at tech companies. Before now, technology products mainly focused on productivity tools which helped us increase our efficiency at getting things done. Now, however, we’re focusing on people and their interactions with each other.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces.

We are experiencing a shift in the mental and social model; the world is becoming more open and connected. We can see this especially in the younger generation, which takes to computers like fish to water, and is extremely comfortable with the openness and ubiquity of social technology. But the vast majority of people find us moving too far, too fast and they can’t keep up. We’ve pushed to build simpler tools over the years to make them easier to understand, but are we getting too simple too soon?

Now I, like many a designer, advocate for simplicity. After all, Apple has built much of its success on designing interfaces that mimic real-world interactions, simple and to the point without too many complications. But on the Internet, we’ve seen a different trend, more along the lines of a single-service front-end. You can do everything you want from one text box on Google. You can post updates to any one of thousands of people from one text box on Facebook and Twitter. Engineers work tirelessly to build systems that give you supposedly exactly what you want up front. It’s magical, and there’s little under the hood explaining how it works. Productivity-wise, this is pretty good. But if we’re trying to connect people with each other, replacing the face-to-face medium that’s existed for centuries, I think this is approach is a bit ahead of its time.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces. The issue we are facing with social technology today is the lack of defined spaces. Technology and tools may grow leaps and bounds over the years, but we are still biologically limited. We are very context-dependent. In order to understand the world, we build mental schemas of how things work and are put together. We inherently recognize the difference between spaces and their respective functionalities – that’s a big part of how we learn about the world. But with the advent of technology, we’ve been able to conflate the mental model and give users the ability and desire for having everything in one place at their fingertips. Some love it, many don’t.

We have an issue that’s twofold: 1) How do we consume information across multiple social circles from potentially hundreds of people and still be able to give the same attention as we would in a face-to-face conversation, which occurs between only a handful of people at the most? And 2) how do we converse with our various social circles in only one online setting instead of what would otherwise be multiple independent groups at different times?

The answer is not really about simplifying, in fact it’s the opposite. We need to be building in a little more complexity and shape the structure of the products themselves to allow for contextual mental models that accurately affect the real world. The hard part is, the industry seems to be moving in a different direction. I find it pretty hard to design for other designers nowadays since expectations are so high. They’re higher in the industry than they are for the real world. Ask a product designer what the difference between two versions of the iPhone is and you’ll no doubt get a 20-page paper. But ask an average person and you’d barely get a paragraph. The fact is, the tech industry has ramped up considerably in the last decade but the rest of the world hasn’t yet.

With so many options in reach, it can be a bit paralyzing for anyone. The message in the book The Paradox of Choice suggests that people need choices to feel free, yet too many choices will have the reverse effect. It supposes that we actually feel better when we have limitations, so making a decision doesn’t feel as heavy. I’m confident that as technology becomes even more prominent in our day-to-day lives, we will shift to a more carefree, open mindset. But at least for now, let’s be a little cautious on the strides we take, a little sensitive to the consumers’ hesitations and let’s make sure people feel comfortable along the way.