Aditya Dev Sood: Designing Shared Meaning

Dr. Sood frequently speaks and writes on technology, design and society in academic, industry and public forums. With foundational training in Architecture and Critical Theory from the University of Michigan, he is a former Fulbright Scholar with doctorates in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Sanskrit Philology from the University of Chicago

Dr. Aditya Dev Sood is the Founder and CEO of the Center for Knowledge Societies, where he directs design and innovation projects involving peer-to-peer networks, interactive services and interface design, as well as product design, including usability, form, color, material and finish. CKS is a full-service user-centered innovation consulting firm that works end-to-end, from understanding consumers to developing product prototypes to enhancing their usability and appeal for end-users. CKS has worked with the world's leading corporations in different sectors, including telecommunications, interactive services, aviation, automobiles, security, and home and workspace décor.

With CKS, he has authored the CKS Guide to ICTs for Development (2002), curated the exhibition Used in India (2005), written the Mobile Development Report (2007) and directed research for the Emerging Economy Report (2008), the lattermost being a comprehensive survey of technology, visual and material culture and societal change spanning seven countries around the world. He is currently directing on a major international research project on the future of data services in emerging markets.

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Aditya Dev Sood argues that a user is someone who is aware of the instrumentality of his or her actions with objects and systems with which he or she interacts. This is distinct from interactions with other natural and intelligent life forms for which there is communion, there is the possibility of a shared meaning.

Although understanding perception can be confusing, people are never confused in their perception of whether they interact with systems or beings. Also when interacting with a system that pretends to be a human being, the illusion will not able to be sustained indefinitely and will certainly fail the next time around. People seem to have a pretty clear boundary in their vocabulary when they think about things and systems versus beings. People do not expect a system to have intentions, but rather that the master of the system or the shareholder of the makers of the system have good or bad or capitalist or other kinds of intentions. People attribute intentionality to corporate players while expressing anger or interest or joy of the design or usability of the system. People have feelings about a lot of things and about objects as well. But that is not being in communion; it is not generating a shared meaning.

The technological systems that humans have developed in the last 80,000 years have been possible by space-time and the material properties of the chemicals compounds on planet earth.

People have interacted with the natural world in various ways and their bodies have evolved and interacted over time and all the social-technical phenomena observed are already always the potential expressions of our mind and there are no others that we see. Designers and engineers deal with systems that exist in space-time, in which their own body also exists. They have intuitions and there is that kind of inter-subjective empathy that guides their work. Unlike in art, where there is a uniqueness to signature and life experience that can be read and understood, socio-technical system designs are never unique designs. They evolve, slowly or rapidly; infrastructures as well as human beings change and adapt.

When handling technology or other artefacts, users need to be aware that their actions will have a determinative set of consequences. This is guided by a kind of presupposition of a stable physical universe. Laws of physical reality don't change.

In any functional system, however it is generated, the user generates ideas about what works in the system and what does not work. What its capabilities, attributes and functionalities are. He looks for features and cues and then he makes decisions based on their appearance, assuming the system to be regular and if not entirely rational, at least approaching regularity. Users become habituated to systems, acquire competences in specifying need, become capable in using and manipulating them.

Healthy organizations ensure that user-centred thinking exists within the community of engineers, within the sales group, within the strategy group and not just in one part of the organization. The intention is to design for the people who are actually going to use the artefact, and the intention is make it beautiful in an inter-subjective way, such that the designer and the user can agree that it is beautiful.

Designers and engineers have to develop the appropriate levels of empathy with the user to be able know and understand what the end user will want to relate to or will be attracted to. Ultimately, Sood argues, the designer should want to achieve a certain attitude that can be reflected in his or her work, which will cause the user to achieve a state of indirectly knowing that this product was particularly designed for him or her: "We would like you to see, not only the existence of another mind and other minds behind this artifact, but we would like you to know that we have been in communion with you when we designed this. You have to achieve that kind of empathy. If you don't, you will be obviously putting too much of yourself into the product you design, too much self and not enough collective truth, or truth specific to the target user group."

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