As the book Artful Design makes it way through design in various mediums and dimensions, a central theme has been that technology should address all facets of our human needs. This principle is perhaps most strongly reflected in Chapter 7, social design, where Ge talks about making social tools to better connect humans and create meaningful interactions.

From Ocarina to Leaf Trombone: World Stage, Ge’s music apps have been building around the concept of anonymous social-musical participation, and how to use technology to help people experience it in new ways. As Ge aptly puts it, such occasions where participation is all that matters can “bind and connect people without affiliation and politics, help us find something of our shared humanity”. I believe this is an age old tradition – ever since tribal times we have been dancing and singing songs together, using music and art to connect to familiar people and strangers alike. By creating a global, anonymous music-sharing network using technology, Ge’s work is a perfect reflection of his belief that we should “value participation and design for it”. (Principle 7.6).

But more than that, I was intrigued by what might have motivated Ge in these designs. We have seen previously (interview in Ch. 2) that Ge laments about the good old tradition of family members making music together dwindling as technology progresses and brings pre-recorded music readily available to us. I cannot help but wonder, more broadly, if this is a trend of our technology, that as it grows powerful, it makes things too easy for us? Now, more than ever, technology is heavy-lifting our daily tasks so what remains become too easy for us to do, and delivering art and creative contents with such high fidelity and quality that’s all too easy for us to just sit back and enjoy, such that we are deprived of our agency? In the realm of social media apps, it is now a often-heard concern that we are induced to become passive receiver who excessively watches fragmented content that we cannot deeply and meaningfully process. As a side effect of all these, will we simply become de-motivated to creatively express ourselves at all? Are these social media feeds and technology at large doing us a service or a disservice?

In fact, this tension is addressed by Ge in page 394, when he says “there is a beautiful tension between using technology to discover new contexts … while reclaiming something older, more innate, ever in danger of being lost in the tides of progress”. In my understanding, it is technology that drives this progress away from traditions that we’ve been keeping. If all these time-old traditions are erased without new substituent forms, will we still be the human we are today, and if not, who will we be at all? It does sound interesting to me that we are leveraging technology to offset the negative impact brought about by technology in the first place. Perhaps that IS the job of an artful designer in the age where technology is so ubiquitous. We have to be wary of what it does to us, and take it upon ourselves to cleverly design systems to induce benign social interactions and quintessentially human behaviors, and restore the “human” whenever it is at risk of being “dehumanized” by the machine. What Ge describes as a “beautiful tension”, I see as an “existential threat”. Am I overthinking? Well, better careful than sorry. :)