Designing Comfortable Digital Spaces with Melanie Kahl
Can a more collaborative approach to design create more comfortable shared digital spaces?
On this post-Summer break episode of the Cohere podcast, Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas welcome design and strategy leader Melanie Kahl to discuss how we might design more comfortable shared digital spaces.
Using Melanie's recent article "Cozy in the Crowd" as a jumping off point, Bill and Lauren speak with Melanie about her career, her design and strategy practice, and how we might translate real-world customs, design patterns, and affordances into the digital world in order to create more comfortable shared spaces.
Key Quotes:
“I think one, it’s one of the most interesting things from the article and in this discourse, in general, is just even asking people the question: Where do I feel comfortable? -Back to our point of designing physical spaces - We often don’t have an awareness in physical or digital spaces of how we’re feeling in those spaces, or we feel a certain way, but we don’t know why.”
“If we’re designing for emergent or taboo or very new things, we have to really diversify our methodology to be able to do this well. And digital communities end up having wisdom embedded in them. And that’s where I was like, we need to find better ways to tap into the wisdom of these emerging communities.”
The Tacit Wisdom of Community Builders
“I think community leaders who have built online communities have this tacit wisdom of, not only what the bigger patterns are, but what all the emergence is. And I think the experimentation happens when you start to really deeply listen and observe those leaders.”
The Possibility of Intimate Moments in the Crowd
”And it reminded me, going back to William Whyte's work, this idea of street conversations and how people actually stopped in the middle of a path to have a conversation. We like this idea of being proximate, but having some sort of intimacy that allows for choice-making. And I think that our news feeds used to be a little bit more like a sidewalk in a neighborhood. Now they feel like super highways.”
More Empathetic and Contextual Design Research
”Rather than thinking about it as all these features, think about, “yes, I wanna go to a party.” We walk into a party. We want to scan it. We want to see who's there. We wanna see the vibe and go in. And right now, the thing is either you're active, reactive, or a lurker. And I think we have to honor the perspectives of many more. We're going into these spaces and having felt experiences and we need to surface those and figure out what the design affordances are in those different spaces. I think that conversation of asking questions alongside rather than of, and then noticing and surfacing is a role that designers could do even more explicitly with folks.”
Resources from this episode:
Find Melanie online:
General resources mentioned in this episode:
Edutopia - Remake your Class series (500k views, summary)
Life-Centered Design Research course Melanie co-taught at CIID last year & curated reading list
Some relevant pinterest inspiration:
A collection of conversation pits & creative seating: https://bit.ly/convo-arch
A collection of indoor slides because... well, why not? http://bit.ly/indoor-slides
Books / articles mentioned in this episode:
‘A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous’ by David Marchese
‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’ by William H. Whyte
‘A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction’ by Christopher Alexander
‘Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space’ by Jan Gehl
‘Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development’ by John Tillman Lyle
‘The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think’ by Jennifer Ackerman
‘Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
‘Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures’ by Merlin Sheldrake
‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
