A renewed age of meaning is upon us and, interestingly enough, those creating digital experiences have a unique opportunity to lead the way. Here's why.

The market economy has enabled us to lift ourselves from basic subsistence to the point we can worry about whether the next flavour of Doritos will be sufficiently stimulating to our palate, whether this bottle of truffle oil is properly infused, or whether we can sculpt our bodies to just the right level of attractiveness. We are discovering, however, that everything is not enough.

The search for meaning has always been a focus on humankind. Contemplating the finer points of one’s place in the universe, however, tends to get clouded when you’re wondering if you’ll have enough to eat tonight. As we’ve increasingly brought ourselves and others out of poverty, we are free to think these higher-order thoughts.

This is not new.

What is new, however, is that while we were busy chasing the satisfaction of our every material whim, we made the mistake of disconnecting ourselves from the human traditions that accompanied us for millennia as we grew and developed. This is tragic because something doesn’t get to be a tradition unless it’s awesome. When something stands the test of time, that simply means that millions of people have grappled with it and found it worthwhile; to the point where they want others to benefit from it. Tradition does not hamper progress, it gives progress context.

Many of us are without context now.

As a result, we are scrambling to replace the millennia of accumulated human wisdom that we summarily torched, in order to find ways to combine that lost meaning with what we buy. Case in point is Colin Kaepernick’s arrangement with Nike. When Nike started as a brand they focused on performance and excellence. If you bought Nike products, you signalled to yourself and others that you valued high-performance. Kaepernick was an odd choice because he was, by all accounts, a mediocre-performing NFL quarterback. By the standards of the rest of us mere mortals he is an amazing athlete, but by standards of excellent performance, he was not even near the top of the heap. By choosing him as a spokesperson, Nike signalled that high performance was no longer a priority. Something else was.

In Kaepernick’s case, his value is rooted in his public protest against injustice. Justice, like beauty and fairness, is in the eye of the beholder. If you ask people what they think his protest was about you will get a wide variety of answers. Kaepernick’s protest is a veritable Rorschach test of wokeness, where each person can bring their own interpretation to it. That’s the genius of Nike’s support. If the protest were only about police brutality, that would be too narrow for a wide-ranging brand like Nike.

As we buy more and more according to our values as a way to feel good and to signal what we believe to the world, it becomes increasingly difficult for brands to get the right tone. It is already very difficult to imagine someone who would buy a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte after having lunch at Chick-fil-A on their way to the gun range, all while wearing the latest Nike sneakers. The future does not look any less fragmented.

So what’s a brand to do?

Let’s take a quick trip to Germany to see if we can find some answers.

In the early days of the Ulm School of Design, the concept of “form follows function” took root. At the time it was quite radical because it put the needs of the user front-and-centre in the design process. Before that, the focus was on the needs of the manufacturer - what was efficient, cheap, and scalable. By bringing the utilitarian needs of the user earlier into the design process, designers of all types were able to factor in the needs of the end user before putting pen to paper. Consider this quote from Jørn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House: “The most important thing is that you are able to imagine a life lived by people before you begin to design the house.”

For years, designers of digital experiences like websites, social media platforms, online games, etc., have used this approach to inform their work. By spending time and effort to understand the needs of the user, these designers are able to create website taxonomies, content, and information architecture that fits closely with what the user needs to accomplish.

The problem is that nowadays this is the equivalent of providing properly-infused truffle oil. It’s fantastic. It’s appreciated. It’s even expected. But it’s no longer enough.

Back to Germany again for a moment.

The role of a designer is to take a wide range of inputs and needs and incorporate them all into something new and useful. As the form-and-function crowd discovered, bringing the user needs into the process enabled a better synthesis of inputs because it brought more considerations to the table from the start. In his groundbreaking book, The Semantic Turn, Klaus Krippendorff one-upped his former Ulm School colleagues. Krippendorff said that a designer must look beyond the utilitarian needs of the user and focus on the meaning the product brings to a user’s life. By focusing on what a thing means to someone (i.e. semantics) a designer is able to take even more into account than the immediate use of the thing. By infusing the design process with meaning, the end result not only matches the needs of the user functionally, but it also meets their need for meaning in their daily life. Not only that, it actually creates new sources of meaning for people.

Nike got that right, and everyone else needs to figure it out now in our own sphere. Turning to the design process outlined by Krippendorff is a great start. The process, pictured below, essentially outlines the additional layer of thinking required to ensure the additional layers of meaning are incorporated into the design process.

In a form-follows-function approach, the designer will focus on the left side of the system. In a meaning-based approach, the designer will incorporate the various components of how meaning is created and derived by the user. The elements of this are straightforward if you look at it from an insights perspective. How does the user act on the artifact we create? What context does is play in their life? How do they make sense of it and include it as part of their daily life? What existing meaning does this address create for them, and what new meaning does this create that they didn’t know they had in the first place?

These additional layers of analysis map back to the product semantics, (i.e. the inherent qualities of a product that signal meaning), which can be thought of as the third person in the process along with the user and designer. There is much more to this analysis and how to make it work day-to-day, but this should provide a good overview.

This is all well and good, but what does this have to do with digital experiences and those who create them?

Those who create digital experiences are already very comfortable incorporating hard data into their design process. Digital experiences have always been driven by data, both in the sense that they are based on technology, but also in the sense that they stir up incredibly rich information about the users themselves. When users interact with digital experiences they leave a rich trail of information about their behaviour, attitudes, decision drivers, and their very lives. For digital experience designers, this has always been part and parcel of their process. To date, this has proven to be a barrier to entry for non-digital designers and consultancies trying to succeed in the growing digital experience industry. Whereas they may be comfortable with design or with data, neither has lived and breathed in an atmosphere where both are intimately commingled. A communications agency may have Noserings and Ponytails, but they don’t have a culture of coding. A consultancy may have Solution Architects and Quant Jockeys, but they don’t have artists. 

All that is changing, however. While this has giving digital experience designers a competitive advantage, it will not last forever unless they are able to leverage what they’re good at - combining art and data - to incorporate deeper layers of meaning. The ability to create compelling experiences that help users accomplish more things is rapidly becoming a commodity. More is expected. More is demanded.

Meaning is demanded.

The opportunity for digital experience designers now is to use their ability to leverage data in the design process and expand that “data” to include information about how users bring meaning to their world using what is created for them. Practically speaking, that means the data teams that support strategy and design need to ensure that they continue to examine HOW people behave (using site analytics, social listing, marketing science, etc.), WHAT is of interest to them (using SEO), but also WHY they do what they do (using primary research).

The old fable of the blind men and the elephant is a metaphor for what digital experience designers face today. In the fable, a group of blind men try to describe an elephant using only their sense of touch. The one at the trunk describes it as a large, anaconda-like creature. The one by the leg describes it more like a tree trunk. The one at the tail describes it as a small twig. Each of them is right, but in context, they are wrong. Data can be like that. Without a complete picture of the user from various perspectives, the chance of parsing out the true nature of the meaning at play is thin at best.

Part of the challenge around organizing data and the resulting insights is having a single organizing principle to start from. This is where meaning-based design can be very powerful. Not only does it meet a very real and pressing societal need, but it is a fantastic way to guide any design process. By constantly asking what meaning a product needs to have, and what new meaning it can create, a team can focus its activity from the start of a design process to the end, and afterwards as the design is continually evolved and optimized.

Great designers constantly ask themselves one thing throughout the design process: What are we paying attention to as this evolves? If we answer that question with “What will this mean to people?”, we will accomplish amazing things.

Will this usher in a bold new future where digital experiences bring the meaning people crave to replace the time-tested wisdom of humanity that we have thrown away in our rush to actualize ourselves?

Hardly.

This is simply a process for ensuring that meaning happens in design, but it will never be a way to decide what that meaning is. That’s part of the age-old dance we all do as we grapple with the world around us. We may find that the wisdom we’ve thrown out may be worth re-kindling; at least in part. We may also find that chasing our own urges and desires or the latest woke-ism provides us with enduring satisfaction. You never know. 

Regardless of where things lead, we can be certain that those creating digital experiences will serve society very well if they can make sure to keep up with the importance of our immutable dance with meaning and provide a process for meaning-based design.

Dr. Mark Szabo runs the research studio for Critical Mass, one of the world’s leading digital experience design agencies.