Enthusiasm and Criticality

When asked to describe my personal ethos, and my research interests I admit that initially it was hard to find a starting point. For most of my professional experience as a designer working in technology the norm was to subsume my own voice under that of the client, or the employer that I was working for. And in this world where design serves as a precursor/ accelerant/enabler of value drivers, oftentimes the function of design is simplified as ways to generate top-line revenue or cut costs for bottom-line.

One line of inquiry, or voice that I am developing in my research is how technology might be a force for calmness, groundedness and empowerment, in a world that demands so much from our attention. In this paper, I put this research focus, in particular my views on nostalgia, agency, hope-making in our current digital age, in conversations with critical thinkers like Thomas Streeter and Reem Hilu. I bring to the conversation my perspective on the benefits and limits of being a tech enthusiast of a certain age, who fondly remembers a time when technology, at least for me, was a positive force in the world. In my discussion of methods, I argue for the importance of the designer’s role in being critical about specific design decisions that takes power away from those who use the experiences we design. Here I aim to discuss a recent project I worked on, and thinking about storing and using user identities through the lens of Koopman’s idea of “infopower.” Lastly, I want to put forward a framework for myself and perhaps others on how we might think about hope-making.

I begin this paper by situating my own lived experience, and my relation to technology, with Thomas Streeter’s characterization of the origins of the Internet as entangled with humanistic visions of creative potential. In his 2010 text, “The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism and the Internet,” he refutes the notion that “rationality, technology, and the modern are somehow opposed to or fundamentally different from culture, the imagination, nature, and expression” (1). When I look back at the late 90s/early 00s, I see some of what Streeter characterizes as expressions of culture, imagination and nature in the way that the technology of that age functioned both in terms of aesthetics and in practice. Aesthetically the use of translucent plastics in handhelds, game consoles and computers seem to be a physical embodiment to this futuristic, yet open orientation of the Y2K era. The colorful G3 iMacs of 1998, for example, perhaps makes computers closer to human creativity than mechanistic rationality. In practice, I think of the sense of play or DIY ethos of the early Internet that encouraged users to get their hands dirty with code on sites like Myspace and forum boards. Another example of this liberation is perhaps the process of music sharing (as opposed to music streaming) on platforms like Limewire involved friction and time spent discovering, downloading, renaming, pasting in album art, manually creating playlists is a lot different than today’s more mediated, more pay-walled world.

I’m personally curious about the shift away from this view of technology as an enabler of human expression. I hold the belief that nostalgia could be dangerous in that it prevents us from critically thinking about things, however I want to put forward in this paper how perhaps an appreciation of what was good in the past, and having one’s own emotional relationship with that – might serve us to design and build better futures. One area where Streeter challenges me is in how we might think if the ‘openness’ of the Internet is something inherent to itself, or as he puts it, the “results of [its] peculiarities of history and culture” (16). It is easy as someone who grew up with the Internet to think of it as an almost precious thing or as an old friend, and that it’s almost personal when we see how it changed in the 2020s into something that feels more cold, calculating and corporate. But, grounding myself in critically understanding the ‘peculiarities’ of its origins, and what outside forces shape it. One outside force that I wish to interrogate in my research is the role of capital, its control of the design industry and how this leads to experiences designed to hold and capitalize on our attention and outrage.

Take for example, something like Instagram, which is promoted as a way to mediate companionate relationships between people (sharing, and tagging as ways to keep up with one another’s lives), however features interactive modalities, like infinite scroll video, that is very much rooted in a gambling-based design pattern. This is, of course, a way for Meta to generate revenue, by monetizing attention but in its effort, creates new problems like social media addiction. Another example, one that Reem Hilu brings into the conversation is Amazon’s Alexa as both companionate technology and entrypoint to unethical capitalistic consumption within the Amazon ecosystem. Reem Hilu talks about the way that “domestic applications of computing and digital media have proliferated as a common part of family life” (Hilu 13). In her historical analysis, she demonstrates how programs and products not “immediately appeared to be involved in companionate relationality were often designed and promoted as technologies” (Hilu 24) that could. While her analysis seems neutral – she paints the attempts as “not always successful or definitive, but… rather ongoing” (27) – in my examples I believe that perhaps within a capitalistic superstructure, this shift might be more intentional than it is not.

Now, more than ever, the “use of computers for control” (Streeter 47) shows up in subtle, more insidious ways. These examples I mentioned previously, I argue, exemplify Streeter’s argument that the humanistic vision for technology is not inherent in its inevitable development. By means of technology existing within the capitalistic superstructure, I posit that in the 2010s and 20s we’re seeing a retrenchment of values when it comes to the bold, bright, optimistic version that we saw in the 90s and 00s. There is also a blurring of the line with the figures that exist in the space, and how those associated with ‘fun and openness’ become some of the more horrible influencers of big tech that seek to control and dominate. Take Palmer Luckey, the cofounder of Oculus, originally a plaything of enthusiasts and geeks, now heads Anduril Industries – a defense company specializing in autonomous systems that kill and destroy.

So what should we do as technologists and designers in the 2020s? There is a superpower to those that exist in the intersection of being enthusiasts and critical thinkers of technology. The first is knowledge that we’ve been here before. I think of the example of Operation Igloo White as a “giant computer-based command and control system… that gathered data and used that data to direct near-instantaneous bombing strikes” (Streeter 47) used in the 60s, coming back through the likes of Palantir and Anduril. Second, and perhaps because of the rise of LLMs and this idea of the designer being an ‘almost engineer’ perhaps we can be decision-makers when it comes to the information systems, that as Koopman puts it, “can facilitate injustices, inequalities and unfreedoms” (Koopman 154). How might we consider Koopman’s concept of infopower when we designers get to influence, on a technical design level, things like how we store user IDs, how we treat sessions and analytics, and what tools we use to do so.

In a recent project, I was exploring ways to create digital experiences that grounded users, through a digital doodlepad for meditative drifting. As part of it, requesting a user’s geolocation data was an important part of the experience (as this idea of wandering in geographic and psychosocial space was a big part of the project), as a means to generate prompts or colors that they would use in their doodling. One thing I wanted to ensure was that all usage of that data happened on the client-side of things, and was not stored in any of the server-side tables I was using. Furthermore, all sessions were anonymized, and we did not create user IDs. When I think of Koopman’s schematic of inputs, processing and outputs (157), perhaps one way forward is in being aware of what is the most minimal of data I can ask to create the experience we want to design. Also, if I do ask for input how do we process said data (and how do we ask for consent to do so), and lastly who owns that output (perhaps a question for another essay). Ultimately I think it comes to some of the visions of control that Streeter characterizes through examples like IBM. I’m still trying to figure this out, but perhaps there is a way for us to create compelling, profitable experiences without resorting to using user data as that value generating force. Because I’m not storing user IDs, I can’t retarget them with ads, but maybe there is a way to consider experiences that prioritize privacy as a value proposition in itself.

So lastly, I want to put forth a framework for how we as designers might think of ourselves as hope-makers. There is something to be said about agency and hope when thinking about our tech-ified present and future. In a time where it seems that corporate and political interests have co-mingled with technology, I think it is important for us to remain hopeful. It is important to note, however, that there is a difference between optimism and hope. Where optimism is a general positive feeling, hope is a goal-oriented want to move towards the desired future. And as makers, can we make hope in the same way that we make artifacts, services, products? What does hope-making look like for the designer? And ultimately, how might we invite other voices into the process?

Works Cited

Koopman, Colin. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Streeter, Thomas. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. New York University Press, 2010.

Hilu, Reem. The Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.