A Neat Little (Digital) World

Dave Matthews sings in one of his songs, "Be wary of those who believe in a neat little world 'cuz it's just... crazy you know that it is". I think this sums up my stance on the concept of humans as analog beings. Digital, certainly, is neat, tidy, and discrete. But we analog beings each make inferences, draw conclusions, and make assumptions based on our own complex and personal experiences, education, and emotions. Take this specific assignment: to blog about a specific reading. The reading is exactly the same each time it's read, but how we each read it is unique. With billions of discrete, personal experiences, doesn't it make sense that we're created a digital mode of thinking, that eliminates the nuance of human error, emotion, experience? It is our analog mode of thinking, understanding, and learning that has allowed us to create the digital way of thinking, which goes where we cannot. The mistake has been in trying to make humans digital, when digital is simply a tool of the analog.

What we have, with digital, is a human creation. Digital does not exist naturally in our human world. Where we cannot escape our analog thinking, in comes digital. The subtlety of analog is erased with digital. I can't do complex arithmetic without it becoming a personal experience - I want to equate the numbers with tangible things - money, units of measurement, etc. Numbers take on meaning. Take out the thought behind the numbers and - in comes digital - simple math, unclouded numbers and equations without thought or experience or social context. Just. Numbers.

As designers, I think we have a great responsibility. As we all have been and continue to be more dependent on digital in all areas of our lives, it's our job to bridge the gap. We must be sure that there is a compromise between the "slavery to accuracy" that Don Norman explains is implied by "being digital," and the intrinsically analog experience each person has with the world. When we design interfaces, we have to work with the medium in which we are building, and at the same time for the people we are building for. We have to design in terms of yes/no, on/off, 0/1 for the kinda/sorta, sometimes/a little bit, maybe/it depends. We have a job that is to do what I think is the ultimate goal of digital, which is to provide support to the masses. We've created the digital to help us be more productive, and so when we build upon them, we must build them for use by the analog.