Sm<3 Phone: A Catalog of Provocations

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

"Sm<3 Phone: A Catalog of Provocations" is a companion publication to my Master of Graphic Design thesis "Extending and Enhancing Meaningful Conversation." The catalog features fictional products, the imagined voice of each product’s user and a design principle each product embodies. This work is directly related to the topic of “Radical Intimacies” because its purpose is to inspire software and app designers to imagine and build more heartfelt and authentic interfaces and interactions that enable people to engage in meaningful conversation* with their closest friends and family.

The principles (referred to as "mandates" in the Catalog): Design for Devotion; Disrupt Delightfully; Embrace Seamfulness. Interactional Friction Enables Conscious Action; Make Personal Actions Feel More Intimate; Give Emotional Weight to Irreversible Destruction; Cherish the Whole Rather than Promote the Fragment; Opting out Should be a Constructive Act

*meaningful conversation: Not casual, a conversation where self-disclosure takes place (Przybylski and Weinstein 2012).

What kind of communication approach do you use?

The product proposals in the Catalog are not apps for conversation. Instead, they are rhetorical. They rely on social psychologists’ findings that feeling close escalates intimacy and results in more meaningful conversation. The proposals question the means by which we connect and converse today, and provide mandates to design more affective networked experiences. The speculative proposals are presented as pages from a pamphlet with "Sm<3 Phone Mandates" any designer may choose to follow. Opportunities exist to design alternative experiences for young women, interfaces and functions that create conditions where meaningful conversation is more likely to occur. The Catalog includes a poster of the design mandates as its cover. This poster can be separated from from the publication and used as a propaganda-like broadcast tool.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

The Catalog of provocations invites other user experience designers to align the products and experiences they design more deliberately with user’s communication goals—especially if those goals are not “efficiency” and “speed.”

Disturbingly, research suggests that the array of social apps inside my smart phone, are shaping me. Like a dishwasher or an oven, these apps are tools for helping me get things done. With each, I perform a singular communication task, or closely related set of tasks, to generate or respond to bits and fragments of conversation with my social network (Gaver, Martin, and College 2000, 209). Most appliances, however, don’t interact with my personhood as dramatically as Facebook or Twitter. I am in danger when I mindlessly interact with apps in the same way I do household appliances. The habits I form using them affect my relationships with the people I care about.

Additionally, these apps are effective only when my communication goals match those determined by software makers. In general, interface design is aimed at universally maximizing my communication potential by connecting me to more people, more quickly, and more efficiently—a value system imported from the workplace. Broadcasting content using communication apps is “easy.” But what if I don’t want to talk to everyone in the same way?

Surely there is another way. The proposals in Sm<3 Phone: A Catalog of Provocations ask “What if the experience of talking to the people that matter most feels different: more meaningful and intimate?” Each mandate provides a starting point or new lens to apply to a designer’s work.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

The first person fictions I authored to accompany the products are based on rich personas are based on real people, communicating real content in actual contexts. They resulted from extensive primary (interviews and a survey of over 100 unique participants) and secondary research . The empathy I developed for each persona grew as I refined and revised her voice, an unexpected experience that yielded stronger and more credible work. That empathy drove my effort to take action on my research findings and design “solutions.” In that design work I also discovered a love of rapid, paper prototyping and honed my critical design voice.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

The Catalog does not attempt to introduce another set of unneeded and mindless app solutions. Instead, its fictions inspire and persuade people—designers—to join in to imagine “What if …?” or “What else …?” by pointing to people, their needs and new possibilities.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

In a sense, I have already implemented aspects of this work. First, I became a user experience designer at IBM Design where I design software products with a dedication to a people-centered approach. Since I also seek to inspire UX designers like me to rethink the communication experiences they design, I have performed readings of a several of these provocation at IBM Design, DesignInquiry and North Carolina State University as well as distributed the publication for free. My hope for MemeFest is much the same.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

I submitted the work for 2013 How Interactive Design in a student category and won. In addition, my graduate program at NC State has used my work as an example of another means to approach User Experience Design (from a critical perspective) but I’d love to see the work take on a life of its own in practitioner circles.