and suggest that all thinking is conceptual in nature. Take a word like “jazzercise,” ideas like “Republican” or “Democrat,” or phrases like “The Paris of the Middle East”—we take for granted the layers of concepts and associations that have accumulated, often over many decades, to give meaning to these words; imagine explaining these phrases to someone transported from even just a few centuries ago! Even the way we express a single word can evoke a wildly different set of concepts. Consider some different ways we might utter a simple word like please: Puh-LEASE. (please). Please! Pleeeeeaaze? In this case, it is more than the word that is uttered; we’ve built up a set of prior associations—based on tone of voice—that also contribute to the message we understand.
Becoming aware of the conceptual systems that govern our own and others’ understanding is a powerful tool for understanding. This section is about the variety of ways that we might trigger, use with intent, and be aware of these pre-existing conceptual associations to help us and others understand new information.
But first, why care? How much of a difference can a simple association really make on understanding and subsequent decisions? To show how being aware of these associations can affect understanding—and decision-making—let’s explore our relationship with technology. Let’s take a critical look at the literal concepts we use to orient ourselves with something that is an abstraction.
Technology: Person, Place, or Tool?
As a designer working with technology, one of the fundamental frames I (Stephen) struggle with is how to think about the “things” I help make. Are the digital apps and sites I’ve designed more like:
• People with whom we interact?
• Places where we do stuff?
• Tools that extend our abilities?
• Something else, altogether?
Steve Krug, author of the book Don’t Make Me Think, suggests that technology should function like a butler, a person with whom we converse and ask to do stuff for us. When we say “Let’s check with Google” or “Ask Siri,” we’re thinking of these services like a butler. This “technology as person” frame is the one I (Stephen) opted for in my first book Seductive Interaction Design where I asked “How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?” By looking at first-time user experiences through the lens of dating, I was able to highlight all the opportunities we have to make our software more humane, desirable, and—to be honest—a little less geeky! This technology-as-person association also expands to many other areas, from personal robotic vacuums such as the Neato and Roomba to the sentient, sometimes frightening, AIs portrayed in movies like Iron Man, 2001, or Ex Machina.
But now consider how we view something like Facebook or even the internet as a whole: our frame shifts to that of a place we visit. As author and consultant Jorge Arango comments: “We ‘go’ online. We meet with our friends ‘in’ Facebook. We visit ‘home’ pages. We log ‘in’ to our bank. If we change our mind, we can always ‘go back.’ These metaphors suggest that we subconsciously think of these experiences spatially.”3
This frame shifts once more when we turn our attention to mobile devices, which by their physical proximity seem more like personal tools, extending our limited capabilities. We don’t talk with our phone—it’s not a person with whom we converse. We use our phone to talk to others; it’s a device we use to do things, a tool that extends our capabilities. Notebooks let us hold onto thoughts. Robotic arms let us lift more than we could otherwise. Shoes let us run farther. Mobile apps let us do more and better. But even this “mobile device as tool” frame isn’t that straightforward. If we use our phones to visit the places above, don’t they become portals to places in addition to being tools?
These shifting associations suggest that we as humans don’t have a consistent frame for thinking about technologies. We’re all trying to use tangible terms to make sense of something fundamentally intangible. But person, place, or tool ... something else ... Why should all this matter?
The Effect of These Different Frames for Technology
Where this choice of technology frame shows up is certainly in detailed labeling decisions, such as when a product team building software must decide whether to label something as “My Stuff” or “Your Stuff”—the best answer depends upon this fundamental framing question, and broader brand, experience, and perhaps even legal considerations. If it’s “my stuff,” then this thing is a tool and an extension of myself—like my files in my file folder. If it’s “your stuff,” then there’s an actor or person with whom I interact, that I hand stuff over to hold things for me.
What about hardware products? When the Neato robotic vacuum gets stuck, the error message asks us to “Please remove stuff from my path” or “Help me,” invoking the frame of a subservient cleaning bot that needs help from time to time. Even the sounds on these robots are meant to suggest something juvenile and prone to making errors—all an intentional frame designed to help us be more forgiving of what is still an early stage technology with plenty of kinks to be worked out.
If we take a broad, rational view of information technology, this person, place, or tool concept is how we understand something that is neither person, place, nor tool. In his article “The Post-Mac Interface,” designer Adam Baker comments: “Metaphors in user interface are like sets in theatre. They convince us to believe that the thing we’re looking at is like something else.”4 But software is bits and bytes that can be anything. Indeed, while the desktop metaphor was a big leap forward and useful to make personal computers accessible to a generation—linking the unknown to what is already known—we’re now stuck trying to move beyond a metaphor that holds us back, often in subtle or invisible ways. Consider how difficult it’s been for most people to switch from a folder-based system to a more robust tagging and keyword-based system. It’s hard to set aside one frame and view something in a wholly different way.
Or consider the underlying conceptual shift embedded into something like Google Docs. Behind the document editor as a “writing tool,” is a more fundamental shift to writing as a shared, collaborative activity (technology as platform). While most of us have rationally made this transition, consider how often we’re still caught off guard when we see other people—in real time— editing a document that we’re also working on. This shift from solitary tools to a shared collaborative activity is a fundamental one that we’re seeing across multiple domains. But these shifts take a long time before they feel natural. What more could we do if we didn’t have to bridge these concepts from one generation to the next, or one major invention to the next?
Okay, maybe you’re thinking “Software labels. Robot sounds. Desktop metaphors. Our concepts for approaching technology aren’t that huge of a deal, right?” Let’s make this personal. Let’s extend this out to a critical conversation that is happening right now and will have serious legal implications for decades to come.
Technology Framing and Human Rights
At the level of public policy, our choice of frame can affect legislation dictating our rights as citizens. If we view our mobile phone as a butler who relays messages for us, then intercepting messages is akin to surveillance, and we have legal precedents for this. We can treat this technology like we do wiretapping. But what if, as human rights activist Aral Balkan suggests, our mobile devices are extensions of ourselves? In a rather impassioned plea, Balkan questions
