Breaking Digital Patterns with Designer Hector Ouilhet

Hector Ouilhet, Head of Human Centered Innovation & Strategy at Google, has been thinking for over 20 years about how the digital interfaces we encounter shape, and are shaped by, human culture. We chatted about the patterns that these algorithmic interactions sometimes lock us into, and how we can redesign them to drive generative discomfort. Access to spreading your own ideas widely, a very recent possibility, Hector notes, is also shifting our relationship to truth; we asked how platforms might design better ways for us to interact with information. Read on for more on design practices for a changing information ecosystem.

C/Change: Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.

Hector Ouilhet: That’s not a simple question. I think I’ve lived in 12 or 14 cities, in seven or eight different countries. The reason is that I have this desire for something bigger than me, and I don’t understand that yet. So I need to move around to understand that, so I I arrived here through a lot of confusion. My path has been a bunch of really bad promises to myself in thinking I was going to be an engineer because my dad told me I was going to die of hunger if I became an artist, which is what I wanted to be. So I did four years of engineering and finished, but I was really sad about it at the end. Back then there wasn’t this thing called UX, which would have been closer to the thing I wanted to do – working between where people and technology talk to each other. The idea of “interfaces” was just emerging. I ended up moving to Vancouver to work in an agency. THere I started to work on interfaces – things started getting cool. I applied to the MIT Media Lab, but I couldn’t afford it. So I applied to another school called Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea in Italy and did that for two years, which was amazing. MIT was interested in my dissertation and they invited me to be part of their lab in the Media Lab, and then soon after I joined Google.

C/C: I’d love to hear your thoughts on how interfaces can allow people to connect instead of isolating them into filter bubbles.

H: Unfortunately, most of the patterns in interaction design reinforce familiarity or consistency. So it’s just like when you see a light switch in a world, you’ve built these mental models by reducing error rates. You know that if you switch the thing, it turns on, switch it again, it turns off, and no matter where you go in the world, it sort of behaves the same. That’s consistency. For interaction design, I do think that’s very outdated. I do think we need to break that. I think there’s this other term that I really like called coherence, which allows you to find that greater goal. It’s more like a commitment. So it’s this thing that along with consistency allows you to build something I call that style. I’m gonna get to your question in a moment. But by following consistency, I would never ever have had the possibility to wear a skirt or high heels or pink, because of the culture in which I was born. I decided not to follow the norm, which got me in a lot of trouble. But I’m here. So that breaking out causes a few things. One, in the short term, it produced a lot of inefficiencies – people didn’t want to hang out with me or play with me, or reminded me that I was worse at playing soccer because I was wearing something that was not really conducive for soccer. In the long term, breaking those norms produced this expansion of possibilities. So that expansion is what we need to bring into interaction design. Filter bubbles are caused through consistency and conformity. What is nice about consistency and familiarity is that it makes you comfortable. So now imagine you walk into a room and the light switch doesn’t conform to your mental model of a light switch. It will cause a lot of confusion and discomfort, but might open new possibilities.

So I do believe most of the industry is built on this familiarity and consistency. So I will totally offer an anti-pattern which is coherence and more as a promise, which will cause growing pains, and that’s okay. But I think if we are able to frame the pain in terms of long-term gain, then it’s manageable. I guess I lost a soccer game today but tomorrow I might look like a badass.

C/C: I think this is especially relevant in the context of cultural exchange, and how, on social media for example, you’re only encouraged to engage with content and people that are likely to fit within your current worldview, tastes, and interests.

H: That drives comfort. The things I learned when I traveled and moved to different places came through the most mundane tasks, like where to get my hair cut. It’s a very superficial thing, but you learn a lot about what the culture values. What do they aspire to do when they cut your hair, what kind of information do they exchange? Who else hangs out there? What kind of magazines are around? Paying attention to all of this really reveals this heartbeat of the community. And I think with technology and social media, where language and images are so low bandwidth, they just capture a tiny bit of that heartbeat. I would love for innovation around capturing that. How do you capture that in a digital format?

C/C: A somewhat related, but a bit divergent question I had is about information and what you envision for the future of information?

H: It’s funny because I’ve been studying this for a while. Historically speaking, we thought in terms of knowledge until around the 1950s when the storage and retrieval of information enabled by computing machines became a science. At the very, very beginning knowledge was very authoritarian. There were a few people that could have knowledge because very few people had access to have their books produced and distributed, and they were usually tied to organizations that had power, like the church or the state. Over time, that authoritarian model state started to crack with the advent of the printing press. Now anyone could print their own writing if they could afford it. Fast forward to today, and it’s no longer about who can print but who can distribute. The Instagrams, the Snapchats, the Googles or the Facebooks, they all have their own distribution channels. So we’ve gone from a very authoritative to a very egalitarian way of producing information, which has big ramifications. What is truth? Previously only a select few determined what was truth. And that truth, in terms of the alignment was a commitment. Now, everybody can say whatever they want, and if you have engagement, people will believe it, will make it their own truth. I think that we have to be able to find a new grounding. It’s not like the truth used to exist is gone. I think it’s important. I think we just need to bind this new lowercase-t truth to this capital-T Truth when we can. To your earlier question, these filter bubbles are hard because when it’s comfortable just to keep having this lowercase-t truth, I think very few people do the hard work to ask why, and why and why and challenge what they see. So today we have an egalitarian, multifaceted, decentralized way of doing information and we need to find a way to manage it.

C/C: Can you say a little bit more about what building Google Search was like and what things that you learned during that process that have stuck with you?

H: I think the most impressive part is scale. I never understood what scale meant. When you go to the beach and grab like a handful of sand and ask how many grains of sand you have, you can’t really conceptualize that huge of an amount. Search has over a billion people using it. I have this metaphor that at least helps me, and it comes from the movie about Freddie Mercury. At the end, Freddie is about to enter Wembley Stadium and you see the back of his head and the whole stadium of people, shouting and screaming and jumping. With Search, when you join, your mission is to make every person in that stadium find what they’re looking every second. And every second you help somebody find a loved one, find a cure to something, find the right destination, find something every second – it’s daunting. That daunting notion of scale and how useful it is for people to have it is what I took away.

C/C: What’s one bet you can make about the future?

H: So when I was in MIT, one of my clients was one of the biggest fashion trade shows in the world. They’re based in Florence. So I get to meet these people, and they taught me how to dress and they were horrible. They were really tough with me. I thought I had style, they destroyed that. Anyway, what I got access to was how trends are set in the world. And sadly, it is predetermined and sadly it’s in the minds and hands of very few. Another insight is that everything is cyclical, what goes up, goes down, left goes right. Like the egalitarian aspect of information that I was talking about earlier, more people create more stuff when more people have access to more stuff. We see styling, or the notion of style expanding in a nice way. The norms that were there before are being dissolved; men used to be just men or women just women of this. I’m not talking gender, but just the norms or expectations around colors or fit or texture that were associated with one category. So we see this multicultural soup. So I think my prediction is there will be more of this soup-like existence, people will be embedding themselves in different kinds of soups and enjoying it. I think there will be less and less of a notion of belonging to one big pot. I don’t know how I got so deep in the soup metaphor, but it will be very fluid to go from one soup to the other. People won’t be bound to the nation state, but just to affinity that is abstracted from location.