Hey chatGPT, show us the layers of the internet!
How user interface design reveals or hides the complexity and diversity of a system
Imagine you are standing on a beach looking out at the big, blue ocean. Your only vessel for exploration a boat. You row out for miles and miles, wondering what lies below. Now imagine you are handed a pair of snorkels. You jump into the water, float and look down. But what lies below? A vast, mysterious, and dynamic terrain floats underneath, waiting to be comprehended, but you are limited by the affordances of your tools.
The internet is not unlike the big, blue, unknowable ocean, and the affordances of our means of discovery, be they boats, snorkels or submarines, shape what we observe and comprehend. I have historically eschewed user interface (UI) design for the more analytical aspects of design, such as user research or experience. But I think I was wrong to do this. The affordances of a user interface provide an invitation to understand the software. The visual design of a website is a reflection of the values of the people behind the product and is the only means by which someone can try to understand the system or the content below the surface. This is actually quite a profound revelation for me!
For example, I am writing my Substack article in this text editor and when I click the ‘Preview’ button in the top right, I am “telling” the software that I want to see what the article will look like. However, without this button I may have never considered previewing. This small bit of UI creates an idea that might not have been there at all. I find this magical!
I want what I design to invite people into inquiry and newness. For example, does the design of a Wikipedia article hint at how Wikipedia really works? How might we peel back the layers and enable our readers to wonder more and be curious? And of course, might this wonder and curiosity encourage them to participate? Zooming out from this meditation, can these same questions be applied to the internet more broadly?
How does the design of internet searching make people feel about the internet?
Consider Google’s mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. A worthy effort, but in its heroism to do so, Google monopolized internet searching thus creating the false notion that there is only one way to organize the internet. This is simply not true! To quote the subversive collective tiny internets, “What if we imagined an alternative future, one in which the internet was a global social fabric that we took care of together and technology was an everyday instrument for people to create, express themselves, and play in?” A hegemonic approach to the internet diminishes human creative potential. If we choose plurality over hegemony we will discover endless forms of human expression online. This can be applied broadly or specifically to Wikipedia (where I work).
Google, the primary paradigm of the internet since I was in middle school, by design has shown us that the internet has many destinations (i.e. websites), and each destination was built by different people. A query returns an endless list of websites, and despite them being ranked and uniformly displayed, you get a sense of how vast a body of information there is on a given topic.
But we are in a period of change. Conversational AI presents a new opportunity for making information accessible. My primary concern right now is that an interface like chatGPT, in its current format, obscures the diversity, complexity, interconnectedness, and human labor of the internet. It flattens an otherwise multidimensional online world by siphoning, packaging, and presenting information without citation. This will have very real consequences not only on the user’s imagination of the internet, but also encourages a more passive consumption-oriented experience online versus an active and participatory experience.
What if AI chat interfaces provided links for further exploration? Or citations for the information the model generates, just like Wikipedia does? What if the interface was not minimal but instead a living archive of digital information? What if a chat interface looked like a library, with troves of books by different authors visibly present but a powerful search available to the reader?
My primary concern right now is that an interface like chatGPT, in its current format, obscures the diversity, complexity, interconnectedness, and human labor of the internet.
I am an optimist. I want to work with advancements in technology and shape them, but this also means asking why we build what we build. As designers this means demanding that we build for user needs and not business needs alone. Where creativity and human need intersect is where you will find me.