Anticipatory design and the concept of freedom
Today the average adult now makes more than 20,000 decisions a day, some of them are big like “who do I want to marry and spend the remainder of my days with?” while some others are smaller like “do I want ham on my breakfast sandwich?”, and some are super small and maybe not even very conscious like “my mobile phone just lit up, should I take a glance at it?”. As a result of this cognitive load many today diagnose our society with decision fatigue, a kind of weary feeling you get after being faced with too many decisions. Anticipatory design aims to reduce cognitive load of users by making decisions on behalf of them. Aaron Shapiro, the CEO of the consultancy Huge, stated already in 2015 that anticipatory design will be the next big breakthrough in design and technology. As it will create “products, services, and experiences that eliminate the needless choices from our lives and make ones on our behalf, freeing us up for the ones we really care about.”
The goal with anticipatory design is to create an ecosystem where a decision happens automatically and without user input. We can already now see examples of anticipatory design when google suggests what it is that we are searching for. Or like right now at this moment when I am writing this text in Google docs and get suggestions on words to use. But these are rather examples of optimisation, and the ambitions for anticipatory design is much bigger than that.
Imagine the next time you will have to make a business meeting to the other side of the world (for this thought experiment we have to imagine that a zoom meeting is not an option) you don’t have to look in your calendar, find flights, choose flights etc etc. Instead this will happen automatically by the system, based on the information and prior knowledge the system has on you. According to Joel von Bodegraven, anticipatory design relies on learning (Internet of Things), predicting (Machine Learning) and anticipation (UX Design). Meaning that smart technology that operates within the realm of IoT learns by observing us. The data is then interpreted by machine learning and algorithms, and from this UX is done in order to create a seamless anticipated experience. Still anticipatory design only works when all three actors are well aligned and effectively used.
What is interesting about anticipatory design is different from more “conventional design”. More “conventional” design creates a product or service the user will use, in which the user is presented with information and options. When the user makes a decision, something happens as a result of this. This in comparison to anticipatory design, where decisions are made and executed on behalf of the user, it could be understood as a kind of autocomplete for intent. This touches upon questions connected to choice and freedom, why it is interesting to try to use the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s thinking as a lens, specifically his ideas around bad faith, when looking at anticipatory design. Bad faith for Sartre is when we accept something for true, not necessarily because it is ultimately true but because it is easy and convenient for us to believe it.
Sartre wants you to understand that you are in the driver’s seat of your own life, and that you are not limited to the stories you or others tell about yourself, in any given moment you can choose a new story, and choose the meaning of your own life. Sartre also acknowledges that this radical freedom can create a kind of nauseousness in people, and that it is a very uncomfortable place to be in. In order to get out of it people adopt bad faith. Sartre gives an example of a waiter that really hates his job, but instead of quitting he tells himself “I am a waiter, always have been a waiter, always will be a waiter”. What he is doing here, Sartre would argue, is that he is cutting off his own ability to make choices, he is telling himself that he doesn't have any options, and it is entirely self imposed.
So let’s return to the value proposition of anticipatory design brought forward by Shapiro, saying that anticipatory design “eliminates the needless choices from our lives and makes ones on our behalf, freeing us up for the ones we really care about.” From this quote it seems that Sharpio believes that anticipatory design opens up for more freedom, because when we leave it to the system to make the smaller decisions for us, it is simultaneously giving us more time to make decisions around the really big questions. Now I don’t think Sartre would have agreed with Shapiro. Instead I speculate that he would have accused anticipatory design as a pathway towards bad faith. This as he would argue that anticipatory design robs us of our freedom to choose when the system does the choosing for us. In the example Sartre uses of the waiter he is exemplified as living in bad faith when he is cutting off his own ability to make choices, and telling himself that he doesn’t have any options. Now I find this very similar to what anticipatory design aims to do, but instead of the waiter telling himself he doesn’t have any options, a system is telling us we have only one option.
Here we can see two very standpoints on how freedom is connected to anticipatory design. Maybe we could think about it like this; whilst Sharpio thinks it is freedom not having to make all choices, Sartre might think that anticipatory design robs us of our freedom as it makes choices for us. And as there is no right or wrong here, we can only understand that if we want to discuss anticipatory design and freedom, it all comes down to how we choose to understand the concept of freedom.
Sources
Future today institute report 2021
The next big thing in design fewer choices
Designing anticipatory user experiences
Philosophize this #086
