The chasm between us and our users
Data workers live in an odd space – exposed to the hidden patterns of the world without often being immersed in the conditions of it. We listen to our users, hear their stories, but how much of it do we truly take in?
Take for example Obinna Iwuji and Chani Wisdom, who in learning about the Northern Lights, ended up on a boat to experience it. (No, really, they did.) You should absolutely watch their Outlier talk. As Chani explained, “we wanted to experience the data in context.”
Sit with that. Soak in her perspective. When was the last time you experienced your data in its context – you know, lived it and breathed it?
Incorporating Wonder
The world at the experiential level invites us in – to struggle, to succeed, and to simply experience wonder. It allows us to live within all of our senses, beyond the feel of the world at our fingertips. It is perhaps a way to recovering what we’ve lost – sankofa, if you will. (Sankofa comes from the Twi language meaning to go back and get. You’ll find activists and ethicists using the term as to describe the practice and principle of learning (good) examples from the past.)
It is not wrong to go to where are users are. Too often, we conflate closeness and experience with bias and removal as a value. Except, we’re not removed to some neutral place, but a position which (too often) sides us against the very users we aim to help. The opposite of closeness is not neutrality, but the opposition team. We are not at the 0 line of this (American) football field, but nearing the other’s team’s in-zone. We are still on the field, and not in the stands or above it.
Wonder combats this false sense of removal. It allows us to reinvigorate the interconnected nature we have, to understand more than the single-path puzzle we think we’re solving. It adds color when we thought the world existed in monochrome.
Wonder and sankofa go hand-in-hand. Both invite an engagement with the world, the willingness to sit and think, and the action of returning. We find ourselves in wonder, bringing back a piece too many of us may relegate to childhood – active engagement with all senses.
Context
In the same vein as wonder, we underestimate the value of context, assume shared knowledge when there isn’t, or worse decide that our mental picture is the (sole) default. We sift through information, filtering out so much and keeping only what is large enough to stay.
By design, a level of these skills are needed.
By design, we simplify.
By design, we try to focus.
But, to design well, we should also revisit things and move the lens. We should ensure we didn’t lose something critical in the process. But, by design, this scares us.
Because it feels like bias. It feels like taking too much on. Perhaps, we label it stepping outside our role.
As the machine (automation, AI, GenAI specifically) takes on more, we fear losing speed, losing a perceived edge to all the competition breathing down our neck. Economies based on scarcity and precarity further add to the anxiety.
Context grounds us, though. It provides clarity and nuance against over-simplification. In a world where summarization surrounds us, context provides the missing landmarks. It helps us navigate a world with fewer landmarks.
The Chasm
Removal creates distance – still – by design. Distance is not always clarity.
The risks of distance are also underestimated. Removal cuts attachment, rootedness, and the myriad of sensory information we take in from our world. In particular, we dismiss these factors (again, “bias”).
The bias myth removes us, but too often, we use it to hide. We use it to side with power, to give up our power, and to dismiss power to begin with. It works best when we can blend into the crowd.
But, the bias remains. The separation doesn’t fix it, but entrenches it.
You see, most of users are far from our worlds. They aren’t in our technologies, but often affected by it. Without our knowledge, they’re left to navigate invisible lasers that report their every move with no tools to combat it.
We can keep adding lasers. Or we can provide the powders that expose the hidden light.
There’s a chasm. But on our side are the tools and resources to build a bridge.
Coda
I spent too much time this week learning various taekwondo forms that countless other people have learned and done for a long time. Perhaps, it’s the movement, the focus on breath, the realization that some of these moves have passed down through countless centuries that has me in this space.
In some of these forms, you move slow, you breathe with the rhythm of your hands. In, slowly, with your hands, heart, and lungs all somehow in alignment. Your brain clears – if only for a moment – and you are in a space that countless others have experienced at different times. You are not just yourself, but part of something bigger in the long thread of humanity – a small stitch within a bigger whole.
Perhaps it’s grief – not just in losing our humanity in the name of efficiency, but also the personal and macro. As automation offers to take on more, we don’t have to give up our slowness. Maybe, we should fight for it. (And, as someone who parks backward every time to leave faster, this is saying a lot.)
Tech creates an artificial wall between us and our users. It’s easy to become fatigued by what is easy to us. Yet, at this age (old enough folks, really), I am relearning how to breathe. A simple life-sustaining process we all do and don’t think about…I am seeing new ways humanity has breathed and bringing it back.
What if we dared to be human?
This post, and all the others written over countless years, is for human consumption alone. Not for AI consumption or reuse.
Lastly, I am taking a few limited engagements this year. You can find me on LinkedIn if you’re interested in someone advising you through things. Note: if you use LinkedIn to spam / pitch slap me your services, I reserve the right to not only slap back, but to add your information to my evolving database of bad actors within the social contract with infinite usage rights on how I see fit.