My wife loves He-Man, and more specifically, the original TV cartoon—not the new Masters of the Universe movie, she’s one of the real ones. Naturally, that means she was wearing a fabulous Skeletor t-shirt the other day and someone started talking to her about it. Skeletor's skull-for-a-face helped turn the conversation a little strange, because this person started listing off the ways that human anatomy is so inspiring. God, according to this person, had given us noses so that we could wear glasses; ears so that we could hang our masks around them; earlobes so that we could wear earrings, and so on. (To explain their observation about masks, my MS treatment makes me immunocompromised, so we have to mask in public like it’s 2020.)
Now, I’m certainly not trying to make this person sound foolish. In fact, I can understand why they would come to the (incorrect) conclusion that our bodies seem well-suited to our technology, and therefore it is our bodies that are divinely designed in order to fit our tech. We sit so much with technology that it becomes a part of our environment, and usually that means we give it little thought. How often do we consider how water magically comes out of the tap or how shoving a pronged bit of metal into the wall makes our phones and computers charge?
More specifically in linking our bodies up with technology, there are some things that are so ubiquitous or often used that we may not even consider them technology anymore. Glasses or even contacts, for example, are indeed technology, but someone (like me) that has been wearing them basically their entire life may find it so mundane and part of routine that they become an extension of themselves, rather than a discrete piece of technology.
As I’ve been writing these CYBORG_ articles, researching, and generally listening to discussions about technology, I’m deeply intrigued by how often the supernatural is invoked in those conversations. It passes our lips as easily and unconsciously as the air we breathe. So when my wife told me about her conversation with this stranger, I’m fascinated that 1. God was involved in fitting us (God’s assumed creations) with technology (our assumed creations), and 2. technology was therefore at a similar level of God (we are intentionally made to fit into tech, lower creatures raised to something higher?).
We don’t have to look for divine design to understand glasses, though. For that we look to human-centered design.
Human-centered
Human-centered design (HCD) is a philosophy I came to understand in college. It’s an approach that prioritizes human needs, wants, and capabilities when creating or iterating on something. This means that the designs are intended to work with humans as they are. It seems so obvious and so simple that I thought it was absurd to bother naming it—we're all humans, why wouldn't we design for humans? The real world with insane deadlines, limited cash, demands from department goals or campaigns showed me why this philosophy is so radical and so rare. Sure, not every ad deserves the time it takes to deeply understand humanity's interaction with it—certainly not every product is worth exceptional design, either, like harmful, cheap, or distasteful things. But hopefully if you are involved with a product that is aligned with your values, you can engage deeply with HCD as your standard.
This approach does eventually apply to important or commonly used technology (hopefully, anyway, it's still no guarantee). In the example of eyeglasses, our current design is clearly influenced by the human wearing it. We had potentially millions of years with similar nose bridges and yet lived without corrective lenses of any kind. The first eyesight aids may well have been magnifying stones/spheres set atop a surface, eventually changing into handheld eyepieces, then into various designs to fit the lenses to the face. Following it further, we eventually figured out how to put the lens on the eye itself, and for a lucky population, fix the eye with laser surgery.
The history of glasses isn't about humans becoming more fit for the current iteration of corrective lenses, rather the slow improvement of technology to make eyeglasses more tenable for humans. Who knows if there is a better design than the glasses we are currently familiar with?
It often feels like things are the way they are now because it's supposed to be that way—or that it's an inevitable end on the path of progress. Part of that is the flood of new tech that we are exposed to, much of which has trended towards a similar, convergent look and feel (why do we think AI can create dashboards so well? Because dashboards are all the same...). Part of that is possibly the assumption that HCD is the default. If we always assume things are designed to be clear and simple, when we are faced with things that are complex or difficult, we are more likely to put the blame on ourselves, rather than consider the failure of the design.
Don Norman, a renowned design researcher, wrote in his seminal book, The Design of Everyday Things:
I have studied people making errors—sometimes serious ones—with mechanical devices, light switches and fuses, computer operating systems and word processors, even airplanes and nuclear power plants. Invariably people feel guilty and either try to hide the error or blame themselves for "stupidity" or "clumsiness."
As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.
In reality, as Norman explores further, issues, errors, and the frustration with technology isn't a problem with the individual, it's a lack of human-centered design (or something that hasn't been worked out yet in the design process).
The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That's why we blame others and even ourselves. ...But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.
This is just my personal take, but I wonder if this deep complexity and frequent experience of errors facilitates that common conclusion that technology is on par with the gods. Not only does it take someone with technical skill to adeptly manipulate technology, there is also so much abstraction that hides underlying logic or principles that technology becomes inscrutable like a god might seem. It actually seems very logical for a non-technical person to see glasses or any other tech as something coming from the gods, and our bodies needing to become fit for the tech, because commonly, gods require us to change our nature to fit their expectations.
As a technical person seeing this, I feel the responsibility to help fit technology to humanity. I may not be able to help reveal all of the secrets of programming to uninterested people, but I can at least make sure I do my best to relieve some of the stress people feel to change their nature to match the technology.
Eyeglasses on Squids
One of the fun exercises that can help break out of the assumption of technology as a one-way path toward a specific end is trying to design something for a different species—non-human–centered design, if you will. For example, how would a squid wear glasses? If a squid could create the technology to improve or correct its eyesight, why would we ever think it would come up with a design like human glasses? It doesn't have a nose to rest it on, nor does the design make any sense for its ocean environment. Contacts are also out, since they so easily slide off of the eyeball in water. What other options are there for attaching a lens in a way that is comfortable and useful to a squid?
If you want to take this to the next level, you can do what Art Director Tim Browning and his team did in the design process for developing alien technology ideas for the film Project Hail Mary. They started by trying to understand how Rocky, the alien life-form that roughly looks like a stone spider, would manufacture its items. The alien body doesn't have fingers, so the designers came up with an idea that perhaps the species has figured out a way to wear a device on the bottom of its limbs, which would act like alien 3D printer pens, allowing Rocky to "knit" or weave together strands of material to create more technology.
While we can't avoid human-centered design in some ways because of our bodies, senses, and minds, we can practice thinking about how another species could design their own technology assuming the possibility. I think this a great way to remind ourselves that we are also in the middle of a vast amount of abstraction. You can't just start with some technology, because it is built upon previous discovery, knowledge, application, manufacturing, and any number of hidden steps previously taken—all of which are directly informed by our own bodies.
We may be tempted in this digital age to figuratively leave our bodies. We may even develop some disdain for our bodies because they may fail us more often than it seems like technology fails us. Poorly designed or not, all of our technology (so far) is directly linked to our humanity, which includes our bodies, and if we don't prioritize our humanity, the technology will slip out of its usefulness and become a burden (best-case scenario) or a harmful detriment.