GoKawiilThis post tells the story of the session at FOO camp this year that I co-ran with Matt Webb on the Manufactured Normalcy Field. It explains the background of the idea, describes the structure of the brainstorming session, outlines its results, and then tracks some of the uptake of the idea since FOO, specifically in a recent episode of A Show with Ze Frank.
A few months back, Nick Pinkston turned me on to Ribbonfarm, the blog of Venkatesh Rao, a researcher and entrepreneur. Ever since, it’s become a reliable source of mind-grenades for me: explosive ideas that carve up reality in a way I’d never imagined and stimulate new ideas. Ideas you can not just think about, but think with.
The most productive of these ideas for me so far has been the Manufactured Normalcy Field. The Field is Rao’s attempt to explain the process of technical adoption. Rao argues that when they’re presented with new technological experiences people work hard to maintain a “familiar sense of a static, continuous present”. In fact, he claims that we change our mental models and behaviors the minimum amount necessary to work productively with the results of any change.
In cultural practice this process of minimal change takes two primary forms. First, we create stories and metaphors that map strange new experiences back to something we already understand. Rao gives a number of examples of this: the smartphone uses a phone metaphor to make mobile computing comprehensible, the web uses a document metaphor, which has persisted in our user interfaces even as the underlying technology has changed, and “we understand Facebook in terms of school year-books”.
Secondly, we make intentional design choices aimed to de-emphasize the strangeness of new technologies. Here, Rao explains via the example of air travel (a field in which he was educated as an engineer):
"A great deal of effort goes into making sure passengers never realize just how unnatural their state of motion is, on a commercial airplane. Climb rates, bank angles and acceleration profiles are maintained within strict limits. Airline passengers don’t fly. They travel in a manufactured normalcy field. When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. Including generating brief periods of zero-g. Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat."
Given this framework, much of the way we currently market new technology is misguided. Geeks, especially, are prone to praise an innovation as disruptively, radically new. But if we believe Rao, that’s the worst way we could advocate on its behalf. What we should do instead is try to normalize the new technology by figuring out the smallest stretch needed to get the Manufactured Normalcy Field to encompass it.
In fact, taking this into account, Rao describes a new role for user experience design:
“Successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential.”
The Manufactured Normalcy Field and Design (at FOO)
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