Design is pervasive: what we design is designing us. — Anne-Marie Willis

The products we build with technology are often with the best of intentions — to connect us, increase our productivity (dear god, humans love productivity) and to make our existence better. However, as GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) race to disrupt, the idea, as the philosopher Bernard Stiegler says, is that we proceed faster than societies can evolve, and impose on them technical models that destroy their social, cultural, and psychological structures. Disruption with a good intention isn’t enough to shape the outcome we might desire. We’re at a tipping point with technology where this is everyone’s affair but the responsibility lies with the designers, entrepreneurs and engineers to think about how our products are going to affect human to human interactions and not just human to product interactions. If not, studies show we risk designing products that can potentially cause us to feel depressed, feel isolated, negatively impact our elections or accuse us of creating generations of narcissists. If any of these studies are true, the implications are enormous. It’s too risky. We must intentionally think about the culture a design will spin up and spin into society. This is just as important as any other aspects of the business but arguably most urgent.

To design ontologically is to think culturally

“Design is something far more pervasive and profound than is generally recognized by designers, cultural theorists, philosophers or lay persons.”

Silicon Valley and the technology sector have become the cradle for pervasive design — cars, rockets, phones, apps, internet, AR/VR, Ai — all products we're designing that generate various behaviors. These behaviors en masse are ultimately where culture takes its lead so we must hold ourselves accountable to scale responsibly and consciously. I believe that we can use the theory of Ontological Design as the basis for creating a framework to guide the way we design.

So, how do we design ontologically?

I’ve long been a student of culture — whether it’s thinking about the importance of culture to designing great products and how or experimenting with methods to track it or exploring ways to influence it. I’m a strong believer in how culture designs us so I propose culture-thinking as the framework to assist with the way we design.

Culture-Thinking is a mindset towards actively observing the behaviors a design would generate, its impact on our culture and iterating for better human interactions in our society.

Attention & Behavior

Culture-thinking is behavior-centered. It focuses on the actions around our designs and assessing, at scale, its impact, i.e, culture generated. To think about behaviors a design generate is to carefully study where we’re putting the attention of a user. Take for example, Facebook. They want to make the world more connected. But to what exactly? And who’s defining connect?Facebook is known for designing a newsfeed that intentionally keeps you scrolling, so you keep consuming. As Tristan Harris eloquently puts it, they’re hijacking your attention. Attention is the hinge between conscious control and the patterns of reactivity that have already been set up by the psychological system or the environment. By hijacking your attention they’re contributing to generating a behavior that only connects you to your phone (or some screen near you). Why? We know without a doubt that humans are social creatures needing human connections. Do we really believe that profits cannot be made from such a need? Is there no way to align?

Having a framework that lets us think about this beforehand and ask the difficult questions pertaining to the design of our social evolution is what will take our designs deeper.

Ontological Design happens at the intersection of design-thinking (human centered), circular design (environmental) and culture-thinking (behavior-centric)

Design thinking is “human-centered” focusing on the problem of an individual, solving it and scaling to reach more humans with that problem. That’s great and have shown amazing results over the years. However, this framework presents little opportunity to think about long term impact these innovations have on us, as social beings.

Circular design is a new guide for designers thats encourages them to create products that stay in closed loops and business models that discourage waste. This thinking leverages our capitalistic model to encourage businesses not to waste — so they can save on their bottomline. I believe it to be a great initiative for our environment. However, it lacks this social thinking towards our designs.

Culture-thinking is a deep and profound compliment to these frameworks — design thinking and circular design — because it’s a commitment to a team’s social responsibility towards positive impact on our society. Any team that adopts it is making a clear statement to society — they care about how we move forward.

We cannot fail to recognize that design is something far more pervasive and profound. It can solve much more than human and environmental problems. Design can navigate our social evolution.

What do you think?