Resisting the tyranny of optimisation

My daughter, born in 2004, played with an old toy phone with buttons. Oh how she loved the beeps and chimes as she jabbed her tiny little fingers at those over-sized numbers, with their bright colours and exaggerated protrusions. That indestructible little phone was her favourite thing.

Then in 2007, a major event occurred: her brother was born.

Oh, and something else happened…

The iPhone.

About a year later, big sister, in an act of generosity she’s rarely demonstrated since, offered little brother her cherished toy phone.

He took one look at it, gave it an almighty heave, and made a b-line for his mother’s iPhone. And we realised, this guy only had time for things he could interact with directly; input mechanisms like buttons and mice represented an inefficient way for him to make the world do what he wanted it to do.

This new immediacy of the screen, our access to data everywhere, and the “social” connectivity that was now at everyone’s finger tips, changed our world fundamentally. For people like us — business thinkers, designers, technologists, makers of all sorts — it was an incredible creative brief. Not just for interfaces and creative expressions, but for organisations’ and products’ very reasons for being, for the ways they saw their customers; all was being rethought.

And I’m not sure the big collective WE (thinkers, designers, makers, businesspeople everywhere), did such a good job of it.

Sure, phone calls got cheaper. Booking travel got faster. Information surged to our fingertips more easily. We gained an incredible facility to make things faster, simpler, cheaper, familiar.

To optimise everything.

Alas, optimisation, as the end instead of the means, is a tyranny, kryptonite to the creative process.

Optimisation celebrates the rational over the intuitive, the functional over the spiritual, the individual over the shared (I recommend Bob Sample’s 1970’s classic The Metaphoric Mind if you want to dive deeper into the dangers of celebrating the rational over the intuitive). While it is an important tool, when we set optimisation (or it’s wingmen simplicity and pragmatism) as our main objective, we’re less likely to do things that make the heart sing.

And maybe that’s contributed to the fact that we have too many companies without moral compasses, too many echo chambers accusing other echo chambers of being echo chambers, too many leaders who depend on exclusion and division, instead of inclusion and common good.

Now, we have another chance to get it right.

New forces, of AI, machine learning and ambient technology, presents us with amazing opportunities to not just design for these new realities, but to shape them into better ones: surprising, human, optimistic, thoughtful.

Unlike my kids, the kids being born to now will not expect to push buttons or rub screens. They’ll want to talk to machines. And machines will talk back to them. Shaping what those conversations are about, where they can happen and to what effect, may be the most important brief of the next 10 years.

And it’s an invitation we should accept right now. Not to optimise for their obvious application to our current realities — the same, but faster, cheaper, simpler. Instead, to apply our crafts with people and their needs at heart. To tap into the things that define us as human: making things that are more beautiful than they need to be, embracing joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, the in-crowd and the disenfranchised. Participating fully in determining our own futures:

Connected homes should not be about selling people more stuff, but about helping families thrive;

VR and AR should not be about replacing, substituting or even augmenting physical experiences, but about creating new kinds of spaces that give people new agency to create their own experiences;

And automation and machine learning should not be about finding cheaper, more efficient ways to execute tasks, but about creating new partnerships between man and machine that allow all our work to be creative and life-affirming, because of, not in spite of technology.

Keeping things simple, sure, but not using that as excuse to taking the heart out of things.

And always we must have the willingness to ditch the established way of doing things, to reject nostalgia as the fix. We must have the fearlessness to imagine new things that makes life better for everyone.

To embrace the ambitious and the optimistic, with radical impact in the world.

And to resist the tyranny of optimisation.