Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations, the tech industry bulldozes our innate biases for Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable).
Millions of years of evolution did a great job giving us genes to care about how others perceive us. But Facebook bulldozes those biases, by forcing us to deal with how thousands of people perceive us.
This isn’t to say that phones today aren’t designed ergonomically, they are just ergonomic to a narrow scope of goals:
- for a single user (holding the phone)
- for single tasks (opening an app)
- for individual choices
And a narrow scope of human physical limits:
- how far our thumb has to reach to tap an app
- how loud the phone must vibrate for our ear to hear it
So what if we expanded the scope of ergonomics for a more holistic set of human goals:
- a holistic sense of a person
- a holistic sense of how they want to spend their time (and goals)
- a holistic sense of their relationships (interpersonal & social choices)
- an ability to make holistic choices (including opportunity costs & externalities)
- an ability to reflect, before and after
…and what if we aligned these goals with a more holistic set of our mental, social and emotional limits?
Let’s call this new kind of ergonomics “Holistic Ergonomics”. Holistic Ergonomics recognizes our holistic mental and emotional limits [vulnerabilities, fatigue and ways our minds form habits] and aligns them with the holistic goals we have for our lives (not just the single tasks). Holistic Ergonomics is built to give us back agency in an increasingly persuasive attention economy.
Joe Edelman and I have taught design workshops on this, calling it EmpoweringDesign.org, or designing to empower people’s agency.
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What’s at stake is our Agency. Our ability to live the lives we want to live, choose the way we want to choose, and relate to others the way we want to relate to them — through technology. This is a design problem, not just a personal responsibility problem.
If you want your Agency, you need to tell these companies that that’s what you want from them– not just another shiny new phone that overloads our psychological vulnerabilities. Tell them you want your Agency back, and to help you spend your time the way you want to, and they will respond.