?Would you pull the trigger...?

(See also: The Right to Privacy and Design is Ethically Neutral.)

...without actually and carefully reading the fine print?

Of course, part of the trick used in this case and in nearly every case you encounter daily in your digital life is that the Moment of Use? is never conducive to an Interval of Diligence?. And thus you are placed in a situation in which desire, convenience or necessity push you to forgo your best self-interest.

The title image of this post illustrates a simple hardware Terms & Conditions Dialog Box. Is it disturbing? Efficient? Outrageous? Commonplace? (It is extremely common as a matter of fact.) Could we say —or are we saying it already by our daily actions as designers for-hire— sort-of à la Marshall McL— that...

“...the interaction is the message?”

It may not always be so, nor meant to be so by the originators of messages. But things, ideas, information, signals, noise and notions, as well as inputs and outputs have a way of becoming independent, of escaping into free agency, of slipping quietly or loudly out of our sphere of control, or changing allegiances, breaking away from mechanisms or perfectly fitting into mechanisms they however may enhance beyond our wishes or destroy in a crunch of mechanical arrest. Small gestures may snowball into catastrophes. Huge efforts dwindle into inert cocktails. The danger comes equally from achieving combustion or not achieving it.

Have you ever read the fine print?

When do we, would we, could we, should we, must we: draw a line —or a wall!— between our patrons’ design requests and our willing design proposals? And for what reasons and for what outcomes...?

Has the fine print ever come back to haunt you?

...OR...

Has the fine print ever come back to haunt others who become the collateral damage of your design intent and your patron’s business intent?

We may think it is the muzzle that best and most expresses intent when it comes to guns and this category of machines. But I find triggers the much more intriguing and design-bound elements. It’s where the action and user-intention and of course the design...er...intent come together. Or fly apart!

The trigger is where all the issues revolve around each other—and resolve into acts of use.

Is the trigger in the image above pushed into double-duty in a nefarious way...?

Consider where or when all the other triggers, the points of no return, are found in our designs and in our daily lives. As designers, it is us who often place them there or then—even if on behalf of others. But all of us live surrounded by triggers of our own making and not. How do they (the triggers) define or reveal the needs, goals and aspirations we design for, and live by? And what about those of the people heading towards them (the triggers) and living the accumulated consequences of whatever those triggers do?

There is a Frankenstein tendency to our assemblages of ideas and notions, objects and actions. Expressing the same fear that drove Asimov to write his Three Laws of Robotics. (To answer the fundamental question: ?Can the frankenstein effect be by-passed?)

ROBOTICS, whether HARDWARE or SOFTWARE, is AUTOMATION, and every act of AUTOMATION adds a % of FRANKENSTEIN-EFFECT to the RISK-BENEFIT EQUATION.

A firearm is an obvious machine. But so is —if maybe not so obviously— social media, to take just one example. Both are objectified, designed experiences, simplified to mainly small acts of grasping, touching, pulling, clicking, moving actuators, and then… it happens. It’s easy, all too often too easy, to cross a single threshold, (a trigger moment,) a tiny dumb detent, into furiously multiplying fields of consequence.

AS A DESIGNER WE SHOULD BE VERY AWARE OF WHAT MECHANICAL DETENTS ARE AND HOW TO IMPLEMENT THEM IN SOFTWARE OR SERVICE ENVIRONMENTS; OTHERWISE WE ARE BEING (DIGITALLY) RECKLESS.

What happened in that United Airlines flight fiasco was just one more of the countless cascades of microscopic policy-implementation mistakes that happen nearly constantly around us... but end up going unnoticed or being socially invisible. This one ‘went viral’ because it was visible and easily transmissible. And because, regardless of who was right and who was wrong, it was very cringe-worthy. For good or bad, we have mechanized simple gossip.

Is the moral of the tale that big corporations are bad? No. The moral of this tale is that many things are hidden in the fine print. How come technology and design do not help us with the fine print? What can we do as designers to make sure our use of technology actually fulfills the needs and desires of our ultimate end-users?

Just a thought. (More to come.)

— by Hector Moll-Carrillo / copyright ? 2016, 2019

? ? ?

NOTES

[note X] Xxxxxx