@giorodriguez Forget Siri and Her for a moment. There's another approach. Part four in a five-part series entitled, “Design for Emotion”
[Design for Emotion: a five-part series on the use of emotion in consumer technology product and service development. For a podcast series on the general topic of "design for emotion," go here].
At the start of this series, I talked about the film Her, and proffered it as a parable about man-and-machine for our time. Not long ago, the story was about man versus machine. Today, in our media-and-device saturated world, the story is what happens when man loses machine (like boy loses girl), the only things upon which we can reliably depend.
Of course, there's an antagonist in this parable, but it is not the machine. It is in fact the human being, who knowingly or not has made us so dependent on the machine. It's a nice simple story, and we like our stories simple. But it obscures the evidence of an opposing storyline, perhaps less visibly but there nevertheless.
People
What we're beginning to see is the emergence of technologies that are specifically designed to bring people together offline. One company I spotted early in my research is At The Pool, a startup whose brilliant and hyperkinetic founder, Alex Capecelatro, took the time to study practically every dating site to grok the art and science of pairing people. But whereas Match.com traffics in romantic liaisons, At the
Places
Another essential component: technology that enables people to find places to meet. One platform has been around for quite some time: Meetup, which grew quickly by making it simple for people to identify and use all the existing "third places" in the physical world. A newish movement -- the Quantified Self -- was practically built on the Meetup platform; it boasts 171 groups in 121 cities in 38 countries today. But, as we learned in our survey of offline event design, people are beginning to experiment with other networks of physical space. Several years ago, for an initiative co-sponsored by The White House, a network of state and community colleges was tapped to rapidly organize meetings throughout the US (disclosure: I was an advisor on the project). No doubt, The White House brand helped to illuminate and activate the network. But just as important was the knowledge of a network of space, dormant or otherwise; that kind of knowledge might help other organizations grow by engaging many constituents -- in different geographies -- in meaningful live experiences.
Organizations
And here's where match-tech might come into play again. It's one thing to match people to people, or to match people to places; that should be the mantra for all organizations. But what about matching people to the organizations themselves?
We see a pretty big opportunity here, and we have sketched what a technology platform that does this might look like. For now, what's important to note is that organizations -- businesses, NGOs, government agencies -- have an enormous opportunity to rethink how technology is used to bring the right people to the right event, and apply all those patterns and principles of "design for emotion" to create meaningful live experiences.
One organization -- a social network called A Small World -- recently abandoned its mission as an online network to deliver premium offline experiences for its "members" (as CEO Sabine Heller told me in an interview last fall, A Small World today is more of a club than a social network). For the crowd they serve -- young business travelers with lots of disposable income -- the strategy makes sense. But it also makes sense that other organizations are thinking of this role for tech, where the tools are for remixing the physical world -- around people and places -- rather than simply serving as a proxy for it.
There are many reasons for this, and I have looked at some of them throughout this series. But in the final installment, I'll look at what I believe is the most important reason. It all hinges on what we say when we do something "by design."
