When I was a kid, my family didn’t have TV. Not that we didn’t have a TV, we did; rather, we didn’t have cable. Sometimes we could pickup the public stations by clipping the coax antenna to an antique candle stick before the switch to digital. After digital, it was all VHS’s and DVD’s. My parents didn’t want me and my sister watching any violence on the boob tube, so we were pretty restricted in the local magic video. At some point, I was recommended an old 70’s BBC show, Connections, hosted by “science historian James Burke.” You can find episodes free on youtube these days. It was this show that I was constantly reminded of while reading this chapter.
If you’ve never seen connections, each episode goes from an ancient invention, describing how it changed the world at the time and the consequences that those changes wrought, usually including new inventions. This iterates forward in time until reaching modern times. It seeks illustrates the connections between scientific advancements throughout time but in doing so makes an excellent case for how the social consequences of a design are both impossible to predict yet also arise naturally from the design. See the show was not only concerned with advancements like the stirrup and gunpowder, but also social tools like money and trade. It looked at designs as a part of their surrounding systems rather than history being a consequence of the designs. Or at least thats what I remember anyways…
In contrast to Principle 7.1: “Design for human connection,” Connections suggests that human interaction as a product of a design is both inevitable and unpredictable. It promotes a complex view of connection between humans, independent of time and space. Perhaps James Burke would see attempting to affect human connection through design as just a flight of fancy.
The first season of Connections ended in the seventies, long before the rise of the internet. Though two additional seasons have been produced since then, with a retrospective in 2004, I do wonder how this applies to modern digital design. Certainly we can understand social media as an idea - a cat that can’t be put back in the bag, but this doesn’t apply to the product that is Facebook. The entire company’s profitability is based on continued control and manipulation of the platform. Facebook can be easily changed or destroyed according to the whims of a few. Governments across the world had to band together in order to stop the manufacture of asbestos after their destructive impact was understood; Facebook only needs a few people to care. Thus, I have to wonder why they don’t? Perhaps they can’t. The human connections that it creates are so transparently toxic to the stability of this country. Perhaps we have designed a culture that excuses specific actions so fully that those in control can forget their own power.