On AI and Care
I’ve been thinking about the small things that happen within the margins of interpersonal interactions, specifically those that occur in a service context. The bus driver who always remembers you ride every day at a certain stop and waits a few seconds longer than prescribed to make sure you don’t miss your ride. The coffee shop barista or bartender who sees you walking in and starts making your order. These are “decisions of care.”
If “design is the rendering of care,” as Pavel Samsonov says, it presupposes that the designer imagines someone to care about. This same idea extends to getting different types of treatment in service contexts, depending on your qualifiers—where you are from, the ability of the person serving to relate to you, power dynamics, money, and a host of other factors—which makes measuring quality in these contexts far more complicated than just throwing together metrics and looking at a snapshot from on high.
I’m not thinking about the application of this concept in the context of large-scale consumer platforms. The proliferation of AI and the depersonalization of peer-to-peer experiences like trade, shopping, and even day-to-day interactions with local municipalities are increasingly being deputized to third parties. I’ve spent years complaining about large companies and universities outsourcing blue-collar jobs like cleaning services and maintenance. These roles used to be pathways to the middle class, as they enabled hard-working people, perhaps without the same educational opportunities, to receive the same benefits (real and fringe) that knowledge workers, managers, and executives get.
As we continue to mediate person-to-person experiences, people will begin to forget how to interact without a device, platform, or tool. If these platforms are owned by just a few companies without any interoperability, it’ll cause even more problems when they’re shut off or the rules change. Policymakers are ill-equipped to deal with these challenges because there’s very little in the law designed to navigate these complexities. Worse, things like vendor lock-in will trap medium-sized companies and smaller communities into platforms they don’t understand as well as they think. The prohibitive cost of these lock-ins will also cause harm that will be difficult to repair.
Civic life is transforming before our eyes. We’re not able to go backwards, but we can move forward within intention, but it’ll take deciding the sort of world we want to live in and not letting platforms, tools & AI destabilize everyday life faster than we’re able to slow things down.
On House Rules
I grew up playing card games, specifically Spades. As the oldest grandchild and the first kid of my generation, I often had the good fortune—thanks to my parents hosting these games—of subbing in for uncles and aunts taking smoke breaks during the ’80s. I cherished these opportunities to sit at the “big kid” table. Like many kids (read: Aries), I felt like a miniature adult at 6 or 7 years old, eschewing the things normal kids liked (note: I was wrong).
Monopoly takes too long to play nowadays, but it was always an opportunity to riff on the rules. Uno’s social media managers ignited a firestorm years ago when they tweeted that people playing with house rules on stacking Draw cards were incorrect. From a game development perspective, you can understand this, but it doesn’t seem nearly as fun when you manage to dig out of a hole like that and win anyway.
Society is full of house rules, too. On some level, being able to craft exceptions to the rules is how we’re able to live amongst each other. Letting someone go ahead of you in line when they have one item and you have a full cart, the parking meter attendant who turns a blind eye as you reach your car just as they’re preparing a ticket, or the time when my car was about to be towed during a rare street sweeping in Portland and I managed to save it because the tow truck driver told me, “It’s your car, I’ll drop it, just get in and drive away.” He knew that if his bosses showed up a few minutes later, there’d be no chance I’d be afforded such grace (and avoid the annoyance of retrieving my car from the impound).
Tech tools’ insistence on grabbing our attention violates a series of house rules, disrupting our everyday lives. There was once a relatively uninterrupted understanding among neighbors, which is now harder to map due to pervasive outside noise. As I contemplate my own complicity by not abandoning my dormant Twitter account, the only thing that stops me from posting more often is that almost nobody replies anymore. It used to be a useful tool for connection, but these days, it’s a substitute for connection in the grimmest ways. When people aren’t being heard, it’s a place to shout into a void, hoping for a ping back.
For a while, the disruption of social media enabled companies that had offshored their customer service to use social media to respond to their most dogged complainers because the negative press wasn’t worth going viral over. They’ve done a better job of staffing these remote agents than they ever did over the phone, though Instagram and other channels have replaced Twitter since its demise.
What responsibility do far-flung businesses have to the communities where they operate? It used to be that local businesses in the US would sponsor little league teams, donate money to schools, or find other ways to contribute visibly. These days, a sliver of this still exists, but it’s largely in the form of companies badgering their customers to donate money on behalf of the company to large charities instead of to local concerns. Youth sports have been completely turned into massive for-profit businesses; the days of quaint little leagues are long gone.
If you’re terminally online, you’ll see conversations between people who prefer cities and biking to suburbanites and rural folks who insist that parking and cars are the most important facets of any community development. I don’t know if regular people are having these discussions, but I do wonder what the future holds for generations coming up behind the people in the workforce right now. Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials have at least some distant memories of living in a society where trust and knowing your neighbors were important. Rural areas and small towns still have some of this, a bit out of necessity.
What happens when things that used to seem normal become distant? Nextdoor has replaced the neighbor check-in, and many apps now exist where you can monetize every aspect of your existence, including renting out your pool, a room in your house, or even your vehicle. Every time I see a delivery driver in an unmarked car dropping off goods to someones house, but in the middle of the street because there’s nowhere to park, I wonder about how we’re supposed to content with what’s legitimately called disruption? Policy cannot keep up with these new house rules, and none of the laws on the books were written to imagine the world we’re now contending with.
As we contend with this disruptive landscape, it’s important for us to solve the problems we can when possible. People love a good story and long-range plans deliver that, but we need to reimagine strategic models that work to patch disruption as quickly as it’s wrought onto society. We’re not going to solve these problems in one fell swoop, but rather, through lots of attempts across different communities trying different tactics and sharing them. Civic life is being upended and, unlike house rules designed to make a game more fun or competitive, we’re all rapidly becoming losers in an unwinnable game being layered onto our lives.
Robbed of thoughts
The proliferation of AI makes me think a lot about how many longtime internet denizen come of age online. We started with crude tools that were slow, inefficient, and forced us to learn how to reverse engineer them to make them do what we wanted. Today, kids get apps and tools that have the problem solved. There’s still an element of figuring out how to make them do what you want, but it’s almost gamified.
The other challenge today is cost. Free internet CDs would at least give you a glimpse of online life and hacking was a time honored tradition helping people absorb more of the culture than perhaps their wallets (or parents credit cards, in a pre-debit world) would allow. Today? Every experience is financialized to the nth degree. Board games are having a revival, but less for family game nights and more for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s to relive childhood with extremely elaborate gaming experiences that cost a lot more than a board game you bought from the department store. Online games are rife with DLC, and while the time honored tradition of kids knowing more about being online than their parents still exists, it’s an ever present blight on childhood as we know it.
It’s made me reflect a lot on the ways that I communicate online. I went from the early days of pre-blogs and personal websites, eschewing social media until I forced to make it useful. I’ve always made friends online, but it’s seemingly harder than ever to connect with people because we’ve atrophied all of the findability of the web, in favor of something far more insidious. Profit. You’d almost be willing to tolerate bearing some of the costs of this chaos, if it actually delivered on its promises from time to time. But no, time and time again, the internet of today is a charred husk of its former self.
As I think about how to communicate my ideas, I realize how much over a decade of microblogging, coupled with a pandemic has done to my own social networks. This year, I’ve found myself being more intentional about making real-life plans with far-flung friends, and trying to contemplate how to communicate my varied ideas in places where I’ll be able to find them again in the future. Tweeting to an empty audience was downright jarring, and none of the alternatives have delivered on being anything other than a fascimile of an experience that used to be somewhat satisfying.
I’m not sure if this means that I’ll be blogging more. I have lots of unfinished drafts of half-completed ideas that might be best left to the drafts. But it occurred to me that there’s some value in sharing sometimes, even if I haven’t fulled conceived of what I want to say, just to record the ideas. I don’t find AI writing tools to be especially helpful sparing partners. I just know that recording ideas on platforms that don’t belong to me, where those ideas mostly go to die feels like a really bad way to catalog thoughts.
So i’m going to think through ways to do it better.
Civil Futures and the speculative present
Beyond the obvious negative connotations of futurists, I’ve long been drawn to realities that imagine me in their ideas. One of the inherent contradictions of being a minority in the West, is always being aware that statehood, nationality, and the contents therein are fraught with complexities. You are what you say you are, but not everyone accepts this as fact.
So much of speculation is framing what you think tomorrow ought to look like. It’s easy to ignore people you don’t see in that reality, not always out of malice, but a myopia that is hard won. If you’ve always lived on the other side of the tracks, it’s hard to imagine a world that’s different. Even when you venture elsewhere, indelibable memories shape the lens of how we see the world unless you venture far afield and are forced to practice new ways of living and being.
One of my deep frustrations with long-range plans by elected leaders, working groups, and committees is they’re always ambitious, rosy and completed ignorant of the realities of the practice.
Lou Downe’s book Good Services talks about 15 principles of good services, aimed to be some kind of building blocks of what services are composed of. what the principles lack are the constraints to what makes services good. Service design has borrowed so much from user experience and interaction design that there’s often difficulty in seeing the differences and being able to differentiate the disciplines.
Service design needs more differentiation. At its core, service design is about people and the things they interact with. There are a lot of gaps between what service designs are involved with and where they should be participating. Right now, service designers are working on interactive problems, trying to make widgets better and improving the flow of making, buying and selling stuff. This is important work, but not knowing how to make something doesn’t make it easier for designers to move forward. Without being able to stop something that isn’t good, without something isn’t great.
Towards Civil Futures
In my mind, there’s a gap between the stuff that gets done and the people who need the services. There’s a poor information flow that needs disintermediation between the stakeholders, decisionmakers, and so forth and the people at the root of whatever services, system or platform. I was thinking a lot about civil engineering and the infrastructure of physical experiences and how there lacks a nomeclature and speciificity of roles for people who work spatiatlly betwen interaction and physical and being able to translate the lessons and learnings of these interactive layers more fludily and easily. The longer you work on engagements in certain spaces, the more context you develop for the problems of that specific space and how to translate the concepts of your own work.
Right now, there’s no real job in any of this. People just show up and start trying to figure it out. Even if you write it all down, unless someone else has also experienced that same situation there’s no good way to make sense of the actual role you did, because it’s part management, part operations, part strategy, part advisory and researcher all at once. These roles exist across multiple industries and fields, but few are as peremable as designing in the civic - public sector/sphere.
Being able to grow and advance the practice of whatever service design purports to be, requires the field (?) to develop itself as a profession and practice that goes beyond the professional email job that it’s percevied as now, coupled with whatever veneer of tech workerdom that helps the roles catch the fumes of tech salaries and downstream prestige.
Civil futures is a conceptual bet that isn’t a real profession, but has one embedded. With the ways that bureaucracts persist in the ecosystem of any government, the attraction of these roles to a sort of hall monitor-type individual prevents the sorts of progress that gets demanded by the public, coupled with the artificial noise between the public, the bureaucractic layer, any sort of press/lobbying and the decisionmakers themselves. Civic futures thinks ahead and epowers people with the strategic foresight skills melded with the other stuff to make a more holistic, impactful industry.
Civil futures imagines something past what public administration roles already do, positioning people with strategic foresight and tech fluency into roles that helps move stuff forward in places.
Why the pricing out of youth sports so personal
The NYTimes opinion story today on youth sports being a multi-billion dollar industry that prices out poor, urban & rural kids is indeed a personal one to me. I reflect a lot on my own childhood experience learning to play tennis in public programs that were low cost or no cost to participants. This access enabled me a relatively low risk to try something that no one in my family had any real context for, because we didn’t know anyone who had previously played tennis save for randomly picking up a racket and playing at the park with a friend.
While eventually now looks back as though my tennis playing was some kind of accepted thing, it wasn’t and my parents were afraid it was going to be expensive and that I wouldn’t stick with it. It turns out 1) it was not expensive and 2) I did stick with it. It wasn’t only access to coaching, it was the prolifteraton of programs that included year-round playing that also helped tennis stick. This was around the same time the internet started to really bubble up and even with tennis, marching band, and whatever school activities I participated in, I still managed to make all sorts of far-flung friends online arond the same time.
Without getting me out of the house in tennis, I feel like I’d have spent more time on the computer and less time outside engaging with people I’d never have gotten to know otherwise. The other thing is, tennis literally helped me move away from home, at different times of life it supplemented my income and helped me adapt in new communities. None of this would’ve been possible had things gone differently. I’m not of the opinion that all kids need sports, cultural activities like music and a wide range of other activities are a good balance for young people to discover themselves, learn how to practice and perform and grow confidence. Working together and being part of a team — whether it’s a play, a band, or simply helping put something together — is such an invaluable part of growing up.
The fact we’ve stopped investing in these areas of life makes me sad, because everywhere in the country, activity fees proliferate increasingly strapped school districts who attempt to do more with less. This pain is felt through booster clubs who supplement, volunteers who invest their time and kids themselves who sacrifice to play the games they love with their friends. It’s just sad to me that we’ve decided to take this approach to youth activities in a single generation.
8 Arenas of Action Matrix
- Complicated: For situations that require expertise, bring in knowledgeable people to create detailed plans and make sure everyone can follow them.
- Complex: If the situation is unpredictable, use regular feedback from a diverse group to make decisions and look out for unexpected changes.
- Chaos: When everything is a mess, sometimes you have to rely on luck or make a complete overhaul.
- Aporetic: When you’re stuck between two difficult options, set up teams to explore different solutions in simulations.
- Clear: When things are straightforward and well-understood, just follow standard processes and watch out for anyone breaking the rules.
- Complex-Chaos: To prepare for emergencies, develop and test networks that can sense human behavior, and use simulations to train.
- Liminally Complicated: Use strategic foresight in advance and prepare for the unexpected, including those who don’t fit the normal patterns.
- Unimaginable: Sometimes things happen that you just can’t predict or prepare for.