Branded

Simply, a beautiful conversation.

Om Malik is someone who I have always looked to in order to make sense the impact that technology has on the world. He has an uncanny ability to bring a very human perspective to some of to the technology that so often seems to be cold and inanimate. 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Om on the Branded Podcast recently. Heres what I learned: 

Storytelling as a tech skill: Stories are a way to fire up our imagination. Behind every piece of technology, every piece of data is a human being and human beings all have a story to tell. We would be better served by always asking ourselves "What can technology do for the human being?" when we think about communicating new tech in a story. 

Humanism a feature: We need to start thinking about how the technology will actually be used in peoples lives, instead of assuming that everyone is just going to start using it most effectively. We have had a very simplistic notion in society as technology as a tool, we have to become more open to society influencing technology itself. 

The evolutionary process of thought: Writing as a means of thinking out loud. Words on paper can actually help you undertand what's going on in your head. 

The difference in writing as a job and writing as a way of life is writing with an end objective in mind vs writing as "method of sharing my mind with you" a way to expand your thinking. Not just how many times your were right, but how many times have you changed and have you evolved your thinking. 

The investor imagines the evolution of the problems in the world: Every product exists to solve a problem, but problems like people are not static, they evolve over time.

The story supersedes the service: The longer the story the better the brand, it is about the consistency and longevity of the narrative. In that sense, the product becomes a representation of the brand's story. Which is not in the tactics of blog posts, or copywriting, it's about when someone sees your product, can they understand what your brand is all about, your unique point of view? For example, Madison Reed - you don't even have to be their customer to know their brand story. 

Emmergent communities as a brand's true power: Word of mouth as the basic unit of trust and brand power and the ability for a product to inspire a meaningful personal narrative. Real branding is just that, when people have a positive emotional memory attached to a product or service. That is when you have these emergent communities arise, like with Peleton Bike 

Luxury comes from rarity: Your time is very rare, your family, your experiences. One of one. Let's not conflate cost and money with luxury, the rarity makes things luxurious in its true sense, not the price. 

For much more and the full episode, you can listen here.

"History does not repeat, but it rhymes" Mark Twain 

The notion of money and value are things that most people do not question. 

Like the air we breathe, it is just there. 

But what happens when we begin to question the origin of money? when we begin to question the nature of value? and perhaps most importantly when we begin to think more deeply and question the necessary properties of money in an increasingly digitized world. 

Fundamentally, I believe that money is one of the most interesting design problems because it is, at its core, a solution to human trust and cooperation at a large scale. 

Although, as the world evolves, as new technological progress is made, the properties of money must change, and thus our design solutions must evolve as well. 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Andrea (Andy) Morales about designing value from a human-centered lens, here's what I learned: 

The Design of money and value: Money has always been redefined throughout history. How do we learn from those periods? because this has been done before. 

Foundational Money Design: Humans are not just incentivized by greed, what can we learn from sociology, anthropology, community organizing about the economic irrationality of emotions and our primal motives as human when designing for money? 

Tokens as a medium of expression: Spending as a way of telling the world what you believe… similar to why we buy certain brands, what will the tokens we buy or the community networks we choose say about us? 

Learning from game design: Levels, Loops, and Flow. What happens when we think of users as players in a game? 

Designing For Fairness (or consequence): How do we show the potential impact of non-whales from a design perspective? When you let people vote according to the weight of their token, networks tend to die. The idea of levels and the grind of harvesting tokens/influence is a potential solution. "With great power come great responsibility" giving people a clear path to power, but we should also make the consequences of power clear. 

Participatory design: Bringing in users and other stakeholders make your design better because it is not just about ideas, it is about partners. Targeting the right people and bringing them into your process is essential. We must have humilty - we don't know everything… it is a way of realizing that there are unknown unknowns, and other people can point them out for you. 

Overcoming dApp hurdles: We need to convince users that dApps are more valuable to them than anything else, how do we do that? Some examples are helping them understand core terms, dApps that have different levels of fidelity for new and expert users… 

Growing users: Keeping users engaged by offering them a path from new user to expert user. 

New kinds of metrics: Defining metrics that are more tethered to the actual use of the system, for example, community health over daily active users. 

Common questions for decentralized design: 

Does this need to be decentralized or not? 

Who are we designing for?

Are we just designing for the people who are already in crypto? Who are they, what do they look like? Beyond demographics. 

What sort of systemic change am I proposing with this product? 

What lever am I pulling in the system, how is my design changing the entire system? 

How and should you account for gender and racial bias in your products?

Brands On The Blockchain Ep.3 - Where Are All The Dapp Users? w/ Sarah Baker Mills of ConsenSys

Alex Van de Sande 

Designing for Identity  

Core to our digital lives is the idea of identity. 

We use our or identity to use our favorite messaging apps, book an airbnb, or connect with an uber driver. The question then becomes, who really owns this sense of identity on the web? is it you? 

Unfortunately , there is a an incestuous relationship between your sense of online identity and the business models that the companies employ in order to sustain operations, this their defensible market position, with your data. 

These facts have got me thinking about the role of design in identity and blockchains, they were greatly inspired by the conversation I was lucky enough to have with Alex Van de Sande, heres what I learned. (For the full podcast conversation, click here.) 

What is the type of problem that we are trying to solve? The Facebook problem- what does that mean? The idea of identity on the internet, and the idea that the internet should work based on identity, and the biggest provider of identity on the internet is facebook. This means that our is Freedom tied to some server, somewhere "in the cloud". This means that you are trusting one person or entity for the freedom of expression on the internet. How does that relate to design? It means that we must keep in mind the idea of designing for openness and non attachment in dapps. Users are now in the know, they now have freedom and this must be top of mind. 

Designing new online communities. How does design inform digital governance? The tools of voice vs. exit, in building communities we must give users voice and the ability to exit. We do not have this in our current social networks. Eg. in twitter you could vote, but you don't have much power, no one will listen to you. You could exit Facebook, but there is really no alternative. 

The private key paradox: We are telling users two opposing things, and it is an open problem to be solved. First we say, be incredibly safe with your private key - do not tell it anyone. Then, on the other hand, we are saying make any copies of it, when the easiest way to make backups is from screen shots, etc .. which ends up in some server and then is easy to be lost. 

Designing for identity: "In the blockchain, no one knows you are a fridge" 

Blockchain Design process: A designer needs to understand what happens under the hood, they need to know how the tech works and what its capabilities are. If you don't understand how it works - you are not designing, you are doing fiction. In blockchain design, you need to understand the limitation and capabilities of the technology and why. 

Key question's: 

What can I create as a designer that I can abstract the notion of all the technicalities? do my users need to care about this thing? is there a way that I can remove the complexity and just focus on helping them get where they want to go? And in order to adequately answer these questions we must answer What does my app really do? Why does it really exist? Where is helping my user get to in their life? 

Action Movies & The The Purpose Of Design: In a movie the audience is always aware of what is happening, the audience is always aware of what is urgent and not urgent. If we could imagine a movie interface, the key question would then become what is it that you need to show? what is it that the audience must understand in this scene? We must always give context. 

Blockchain Transparency: If movies are context, what is transparencies role? On blockchains dapps you can provide so much info, when can I show that info? To, from, value, and data (Basic info) - but not easy for the user to understand. The key question is: How can we turn blockchain data into actionable knowledge and understanding for users of varying skills? 

The above list does not in anyway do justice to the depth of knowledge that Alex Van de Sande provides in the audio recording, to listen in full simply click here.