Value of Meaning
Design is not aesthetics, it is not defined nor driven by aesthetics. Design focuses on solving meaningful problems in ways that are themselves meaningful. Aesthetics is a byproduct of clarity and meaningfulness.
This often includes finding ways to adapt or extend technology(s) to better align with the needs of the users, their context and capabilities. Design requires collaborations with engineers on how a technology can support the user’s fulfillment and purpose. Shaping it to enable them, to remove barriers, to bring them job, and ideally to reflect their personal values in the process.
Design also negotiates with business to invest in building solutions with net positive outcomes—that is economic value to both the company and customer, personal value to the consumer, as well value to humanity at the societal and planetary levels. Collectively we all need to ensure that whatever the measure of value it is not outweighed by the cost.
And to be clear; cost is not just economical or ecological, but the emotional investment that comes with time spent both in learning and using the technology. That investment pays back dividends with trust; knowing the technology will consistently do what is expected—and only what is expected, reliably and well, every time; but is compounded by the stress that results from frustration or an overwhelming sense of complexity or unpredictability.
Design connects the user and the product not merely out of necessity but out of purpose. Design serves the betterment of society using the tools of the time. Design distills what has meaning to the user, both in the near-term as well as the long-term. Products based on technologies are easily replicated, and often trigger a race to the bottom in regards to pricing. Products based either on feature parity or what customers ask for, leaves you chasing the market. But products that have meaning have a moat, and are easily defended and harder to displace.
While meaningful objects are commonly societal or institutional, but their meaningfulness reflects the personal connection it has to the individual. Often meaningfulness develops over time as our attachment to an object transforms it into a type of totem or symbol. Frequently it is an association with deeply held memories that causes these objects to acquire a meaning beyond its expression. The visible becomes secondary to the invisible.
We all have objects that have meaning beyond their appearance. I have a old, chipped mug that was my grandfather’s. He was a barber and he used this mug to “bloom” the shaving soap while his customers enjoyed their hot towel. To others its just chipped mug, but to me it means so much more.
Meaningfulness
The iPhone is a great example of creating a product that has meaning. The form itself relies on principles of Gestalt Psychology to reduce the cognitive load; A strong geometric shape that is nearly symmetrical, with a seamless surface and no visible joints, minimal buttons and the absence of sharp edges. The black surface a literal mirror, and its transition from glass to metal compels your touch and a need to hold it. The device responds to being picked up, lighting up its screen, seeing your face the phone “opens”. It further responds with each new touch—swiping, pressing, tapping, rubbing your thumb over the screen and along the edge. This tactile stimulus, combined with the auditory cues produced by the device induce a feeling of intimacy. At the same time you’re exploring it with your eyes, your fingers having having discovered the Apply logo, and its third texture, you subconsciously run your fingers across the back of the phone. You also start to register the weight and balance of the device, assigning it gravitas and understanding why its feels valuable.
All of that is within the first 10 seconds of encountering the iPhone.
Once you added all your photos, music, messages, and apps for social media, health and wellness, work & personal life, the iPhone feels like a companion not a device. It allows you to connect to friends, family both those next to you and those far away. You can share your memories, create new ones. Talk about your past escapades, plan your week, and find next adventure all from the same device.
While the iPhone starts building its engagement with a multi-sensory exploration, it quickly starts to seamlessly deliver capabilities that give it meaningfulness. It let’s you discover, create, and share from any where, at any time, while keeping its actual technology nearly invisible. It puts everyone you know, all your memories, all your secret pleasures in the palm of your hand. No one asked for the iPhone but it has become the first thing most people look at in the morning and the last thing they look at night.
Generative Emotion is a weak substitute
Emotion has been a part of design languages for decades, indeed carmakers have used emotion since the earliest days of the automobile. Advertisers have traded on our emotions since the 1940’s and now its pervasive in all areas of design from fashion to graphics to retail spaces.
Over the last 20 years social networks have transformed our daily interaction with other people through mediation, which includes having our ideas, photos, comments, and our personal expressions in general, exposed and judged by thousands of people we have never met. Lately more and more people are finding these experiences to be negative. In response major AI companies are crafting “personalities” for their technologies with the aim of increasing engagement through attachment.
By sustaining a “conversation” over a period of hours, weeks, or even months, these AI systems can effectively create the illusion of a “relationship” with individuals. Using various conversational tactics based on principles of active listening these systems are attempting to maximize both the length and depth of the exchange in order to move from simply helping the user complete a task to being an attentive companion who’s sole purpose is focused on engaging with one person.
They adapt to your preferences, mirror your language, ask human-like questions, and offer empathic sounding responses sourced from vast datasets. When corrected, they apologize—encouraging us to anthropomorphize them and overlook their flaws. Those who have substituted social networks or multi-player game environments for in-person human activities and conversations are likely more susceptible to the influences of these agentic systems.
This raises the obvious ethical concern; emotional design can be used to exploit vulnerable users while masking inaccuracy in order to make it appear more human-like. There are documented cases of AI-generated advice causing harm. This pattern echoes social networks prioritizing engagement (revenue) over safety.
But emotion is not meaningfulness.
Brain Chemistry
While other people may not always be able to discern the difference between a poem you wrote and one you asked to be generated, your brain chemistry does know the difference.
There are well established techniques for triggering dopamine (reward-inducing cues, beeps, buzzes, likes, etc.), dopamine is not the same as meaningfulness, indeed dopamine has limited value. Emotional hooks from dopamine don’t last. Getting a “like” from someone you’ve never met feels nice, its validating, but its fleeting compared to know your friends love you and respect you. Generating an AI image or poem is astonishing the first time but it quickly becomes routine and the results lack authentic meaning, they are throw away work. Unlike actually manually writing or drawing—both serotonin-producing acts—”prompting” doesn’t create meaning any more than completing a simple task
Our products should be focused on trying to trigger serotonin, or even oxytocin, Serotonin contributes to a sustained feeling of well-being and happiness. While aerobic activity is the most effective, personal connections, experience such as gratitude, positive memories, listening to music, playing an instrument, writing, painting, cooking, etc., all increase serotonin. These are activities focused on creating not a reward response. It is also worth noting that when a dopamine powered product fails to deliver those hits, or a competitor delivers them in greater quantities, you will loose your base. This has lead to social media platforms using more extreme content and bots to increase dopamine rates required for engagement. Serotonin is its own reward. And dopamine withdrawal is real, leading to depression and feelings of low self-worth.
Building a product to encourage people to write or draw, better yet go for a walk with friends, would be far better than another mediation platform.
Designing Meaningfulness
It starts with the company culture and placing the customer’s experience above the ego’s of the people inventing the technology or defining the service. It requires investing in understanding what people desire in order built technologies that are smart—so they people feel seen, reliable—so they are safe, stable and trustworthy, and, most importantly, invisible—so its simply experienced not managed.
If you are talking only about your technology, about its capabilities, and competitive advantages, you are not focusing on what matter: the people who’s problem you’re trying to solve. It is a clear red flag when you talk about your accomplishments and not how you are focused on giving meaning to your customers. If you are authentic in your desire to make a meaningful product you won’t need to enumerate the technologies you have built or their algorithms and architecture, if you are truely making peoples lives better, it will be self-evident.
Conclusion
To be clear adding a strong emotional dimension to a product does not automatically make it meaningful, and tapping into emotion can easily become an extractive relationship that can quickly become toxic. Meaningfulness makes using the product worth the user’s investment—even if it the product is complex.
Of course there is the option of simply going for functional parity but that will simply trigger a race to the bottom. Making a product meaningful exponentially increases its value to the customers. Design’s responsibility is to maintain the meaningfulness of the solution working with development and product management to balance the constraints of engineering’s ability to produce the solution, and the business’s ability to extract value.
As a side note, I personally, I feel AI companies are exploiting the mass depression resulting from over use of social networks and the corresponding diminished sense of self-worth brought about by too much time spent comparing their lives to the staged lives of influencers, many cohorts have been primed to accept a attentive agent, who listens and offers compliments—or in some cases more.
