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Introduction

Every weekday morning I commute to work on BART, the San Francisco Bay Area’s metro system. When I look around at my fellow passengers, I’m struck by how few of them seem to be fully present. Many of them—often, most of them—are staring into small glass rectangles in their hands. Their bodies share this train car with me, but their minds and attention are elsewhere.

Where are these people? I sometimes catch glimpses: chat bubbles, games with colorful candy explosions, videos of Bollywood dancers, a news website, a cat GIF, Facebook. Sometimes a smile or a frown flashes across their faces, evidence of an interaction that the rest of us are not privy to. Their focus is intense: they only come back to the here and now when the train pulls into a station or makes an unexpected stop.

In the moments during which these passengers are focused on their glass rectangles, we’ve somehow stopped being in the same place together. The boundaries of the physical environment we share no longer constrain them: they’re engaged in something—a bank transfer, a political argument, a shopping expedition, a flirtatious encounter—that’s happening somewhere else. That somewhere is very interesting to me. This is the “place” where many of us do our shopping, learning, and banking. We meet with our friends and loved ones there. It’s also where major parts of our social and civic interactions are playing out. Every year we’re spending more of our time there. According to a survey by We Are Social and Hootsuite, as of 2017, people spend an average of five hours and twenty minutes online every day, with some countries reporting an average of nine hours per day. That’s over half of their waking hours spent in glass rectangles of various shapes and sizes.¹

Since 2016, over 4,000 retail stores have closed in the U.S. The trend, which has been called “the great retail apocalypse” in the media, is being driven in part by a shift in shopping habits from physical stores to websites such as Amazon.com.²

It’s not just retail. More of us are also finding our mates online. According to a study published by the Pew Research Center, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. who used online dating sites tripled between 2013 and 2016. Today, 5% of Americans who are married or in a committed relationship say they met their significant other online.³

Americans are also increasingly learning online. According to a study published by Babson College and sponsored by several other institutions, more than six million students registered for online courses in 2015. This represents almost 30% of all higher education enrollments in that year. The percentage of students signing up for such “distance education” courses has been increasing, while on-campus student registrations have been declining.⁴

And, of course, we’re also having more of our public discourse online. The influence of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been well documented.

We’re moving more key social interactions to information systems every day. Although I speak of “small glass rectangles,” this is just a synecdoche for all the digital devices that give us access to these environments. A decade or so ago, the majority of people accessed them using desktop or notebook computers; today, most people use smartphones. In the future, we may access them using devices with no glass at all, such as smart speakers or smart objects embedded in our physical surroundings. Technology proceeds unabated, weaving software into more and more parts of our daily lives.

Given how central these software-based experiences have become to our societies, we must ensure that they serve human (and, more broadly, planetary) needs. We must look beyond the alluring superficial aspects of what technology can do for us, to the underlying contexts and systems we’re creating and to the distinctions we’re imposing on the world. We must strive to make these systems viable in the long term and ensure that they also support the viability of the societies that make them possible.

Most contemporary discussion about software design frames the object of the work as a product, a tool, an interaction, or (at best) a service—all transactional and, to a greater or lesser degree, ephemeral. Software applications do have characteristics of all of these things, but they also have characteristics that make them place-like; they create contexts that influence the way we understand the world and, hence, how we act in it.

Places are longer-lived than products, services, or tools; we conceive of things differently when we know they must endure. We’ve also been designing places—buildings, towns, parks, etc.— for a long time. We understand the forces that shape spaces and forms, and how they influence our behavior. As a result, there’s much that software designers can learn from architecture.

This book aims to make these connections explicit. In particular, it seeks to answer the following question: How can we design information environments that serve our social needs in the long term?

This calls for software that fosters sustainability and resilience at all levels: economically, socially, and ecologically.

In the Spider-Man stories, Peter Parker learned that with great power came great responsibility. Software designers are facing a Peter Parker moment: we must realize the great power we have over people’s understanding of the world and their behavior in it, and wield that power responsibly. We must—in Alan Cooper’s memorable phrase—become better ancestors.⁵

A Bit About Me

I’ve been designing software (mostly websites and apps) professionally for almost 25 years, and as a hobby for at least a decade before that. I was educated as an architect, and worked as one for a year before I left architecture to dedicate myself fully to designing information environments. So my approach to user interface design is informed by placemaking. As you’ll see, there is much that software designers can learn from architecture.

Who This Book Is For

“But,” you may protest, “I’m not a software designer!” Don’t worry—I’m not talking about people who have the word designer in their job title. As you’ll see, I have a rather broad understanding of what design is. If you are responsible for a digital product or service, or part of a team responsible for one, you will benefit directly from understanding how to design more sustainable information environments. And if you aren’t responsible for such a system, you will still benefit from reading this book. Many of the most important decisions in your life are mediated in places that happen in small rectangular screens. It behooves you to understand how information environments affect your behavior.

We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.

—Paola Antonelli