34: The Joy of Designing A World Worth Wanting, with Erin Peace

The JOMOcast with Christina Crook

“The individual user is not the one who should solve the problem.”
Erin Peace is a product and service designer for Method, with user experience being her particular passion. Technology is both a vital tool in her work, but also the subject matter of every project - how can humans have a more joyful, or at least a less uncomfortable, experience engaging with technology?
A few years ago, Erin began thinking about how concepts like the attention economy and social media informed the worlds that designers like her were creating. Influenced at the time by the Time Well Spent campaign and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, she began to consider the impossible trap created by this ecosystem: that no amount of personal efforts can ultimately resist a pervasive system that one cannot reasonably escape, if that system remains harmful.
In this episode, Erin shares how this exploration informs her work and led to the creation of the site Dopamine.fun and the interactive story “Terms and Conditions,” darkly funny looks at the ubiquitous tools used to manipulate user behavior in unconscious and inescapable ways.
Key Takeaways:

• The harmful aspects of social media and the attention economy more broadly must ultimately be addressed by the forces that design and foster them; end users cannot “wellness” their way out of a toxic environment that won’t change.
• User experiences that engage the attention economy profit from capturing the maximum amount of your time and focus- but this model need not be of reciprocal value; wasting your time is as desirable as spending it.
• “Speculative Design” is Erin’s prescription for addressing the harm of unbridled, profit-driven innovations: designing with a process of envisioning the potential futures, positive and negative, that a development could bring about.

Favorite Quotes:

• “You can read about something all you want, you can hear politicians talk about it, but it’s not until you physically experience it or get a sense of it through some kind of experiential design that you really internalize it.”
• “Facebook’s not the first person to make obscure terms and conditions but the fact that they’re hard to read, the fact that they’re put in teeny little text, widescreen… I don’t read them all. No one reads them all, but you’re signing away a lot of your data protection.”
• “What should our future world be like, rather than how do we get there?”

ERIN PEACE
Dopamine.fun
Terms and Conditions: wrong-hands.netlify.app
Medium.com/@erinmpeace
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Christina Crook
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Credits
Hosted by Christina Crook
Produced by Christina Crook and Thomas J Indge
Editing and Music by Thomas J Indge (www.tindge.com)

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