Those who do not intrinsically feel special or a strong sense of self-worth often look to others who appear to be special in some way, hoping that perhaps their inclusion in that group will subsequently make them special too. In most of these situations, however, those who appear to be important or powerful tend to not actually feel confident deep within; rather, they’ve figured out how to “play the system” and have built their entire lives on that premise. But such a foundation is shaky, for its building blocks are solely based on the perception of others. One wrong move is all it takes for everything to come crashing down.

Of course, this may seem a no-brainer, but the reality is that the feeling of self-worth comes from within, even though it has been so deeply routed in our biology the need to look to others for support and reassurance. But remember, that societal need was formed mostly from our need to protect ourselves from a harsh environment, one that no longer exists because of what society has built over time. Indeed, the threat of bears is not the main concern it once might have been. For many of us who live in a first world, so much of our fundamental physiological and safety needs are taken care of with excess that we are left almost bored and unsure what else to do with our time.

Happy dogs, cats or even human babies – given they are well nourished and kept safe – will do nothing other than play with one another. This is the fundamental love that comes from our communal adaptation; it is the biological change we have consequently made, allowing us to empathize with others and care for them. This is what it really means to love.

Why then, with all our basic needs taken care of, do we not just lay around and love one another? Is it our supposed intrinsic interest in domination and power? Indeed, history will show that all fearsome, powerful leaders of the past were, at the core, quite fearful of life, of death, of the Gods, of uncertainty. And yet, everyone has died, as we do. No one, no matter how powerful, lives forever. But they can change the way people behave, and we have been left so many lasting legacies that are rarely questioned or challenged. A deeper study of history evinces why things became as they are, and understanding of that narrative enables us to look at our situations with much more awareness and to question whether or not things need to be as they are now.

When we do look deeper, I believe we find that much of societal norms are in fact not the reality, but rather the culmination of thousands of years of the wrong people being in charge (wrong meaning fearful and not loving). And hence, when many complain that “life is complex” or that things are “a gray area” I have to disagree, for the reality is that while life in society is complex and life in society is a gray area because of all our collective fears over time, life in the universe is actually quite simple: to connect with yourself everything around you, to be included in anything and everything, to love and be loved. We have this ability within each of us, and how we love… that’s what makes us special.

Whatever kind of design you do – product design, interaction design, industrial design, graphic design, architectural design, social design – to be effective, the first place to start is the root of it all: design.

A binary fractal tree, starting at a single root and continually branching into two extremes. The number of leaves (endpoints) is 2^h where h = height of the tree. Thus, each branch grows the number of outcomes exponentially.

Design is the fulfillment of a need the environment elicits. I define it this way not just because it’s the most clear, but because it’s also the most natural. No matter where you go or what you do, you are always in some kind of environment which not only gives rise to the problems that need solving but also dictate the constraints.

But before you go putting pen to paper or pointer to Photoshop canvas, we need to start at the beginning: before computers, before paper, even before people, before the earth. Let’s look at our macro-environment: the universe in which we exist – or at least try to continue to. Yes, that is our primary need as living beings: simply the continuation of our existence. The very fact that you are reading this right now is because literally billions of years of evolution has lead you to this moment and provided you the ability to not only identify the dots on the screen but to categorize and define them.

Until I can transcribe this in full, here’s a recent video from a talk I gave on Social Design at IDEO in NYC.

Whether we describe a biological process, a math theory or even a personal experience, we love to tell and be told stories. We long for the meaning, the point – and often that point reveals something about ourselves that we can trust. Whether or not we know how the story ends, if we can understand the guiding principle, the underlying emotional value, we believe in the story.

Understanding this core idea provides a certainty that keeps us not only engaged in the story, but gives us something stable we can latch onto. That certainty is something we so desperately crave in life, for our biggest fear is actually “uncertainty” – not death as many have proclaimed. Even “death” is a certainty.

Life is unstable. The universe is unstable. Things are constantly evolving, constantly moving, constantly changing. And as a composition of “stable” elements in this universe, we inherently crave more stability. It’s how we got here in the first place. Molecules combined together to form more stable molecules, stronger as a group than individually. So here we are, billions upon billions of years later, a result of the constant process of molecules seeking out other molecules to bind them. It’s more than just in our DNA, it’s the very fabric that makes this universe possible.

Because this is who we are, we will innately grasp anything we can when we’re scared. Even if everything around us is also uncertain, we still grab onto something, like people grasping slippery logs when they cross rivers. Even if the wood is vibrating rapidly, you’ll still grasp it. Even if you’re both falling uncontrollably into a deep abyss, you will STILL grab onto it even if it’s just as uncertain as you. You must grab onto something else as you hurtle through the chaos, even if what you grab onto is just as uncertain as you. And as we seek partners in life – friends, spouses or other – we hope they will stabilize us even though we subconsciously know they are just as unstable as we are.

The only real fear as we evolve forward is that of the unstable molecules… the ones that hold us back from building something bigger and more stable. But the universe is chaotic – it’s never easy to tell which molecules are unstable. Chances are slim, really, unless you can learn and then know what you’re looking for – and in that case, your chances improve on deciding which molecules are the stable ones. Timothy Leary has this great quote that I often reference in my talks: “Throughout human history, our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos.” This is why understanding yourself is so important, for you are your own guiding principle in your life story. Know who you are and you know better how to approach life’s obstacles; it gives structure to an otherwise chaotic ocean.

In recent months, as I’ve moved into a new life for myself, I’ve become more aware of two different states of consciousness. I first discovered this one night in an altered state of consciousness in which I observed a conversation between two parts of my mind:

1) the analytical, logical side that was perceiving and analyzing the surroundings – the lights, the little noises, the movements, etc. – and was so desperately trying to figure out what was going on. To this side of me, it seemed imperative that I understand what was going on so I could then piece together what had been going on, so as to make a judgement call on how the story would play out so that I could make the right moves, so that I could feel some stability.

2) Then there was the other voice that I felt but didn’t logically recognize. It was my mind running on its own, free from the confines of the rational reality. I forget all logic and reason, fall lifeless into the hands of my own self and journey into my own psyche. This voice was pulling me away from my physical surroundings, away from my analytical mind and perceptions and dragging me down a wormhole in space (that’s, at least, how i perceived it).

More often than not, the logical/rational voice wins the battle. The universe is a scary place and without that logical, rational side, we would be completely susceptible to the hostilities of the environment. Consider, for a moment, that had you only the “dreamer” voice all the time, you’d be completely vulnerable to the hazards of the outside world. Unable to process anything other than the pure emotion within you – no logic, no reason – you would only feel the simplicity of joy, sadness and fear. In some ways, this simplicity seems positive, as it is unclouded by the complexities imposed by our own rational, fearful side which craves stability.

I’ve trained myself over time to be able to let myself drift into the dream-like state and maintain awareness of doing so. In letting go of my rational side, I forego whatever mental frameworks I have about the way the world is and how it works and am free to explore what could be. I go through biological experiments wherein I try to control my perception of the dream state. For example, I notice that I see double, so then I become aware that I’m seeing double and try to move the images closer and further apart. Then other times I notice strong colors so I try to control what color pattern I see.

And when I concentrate, I’m actually able to get myself to see what I had in mind. I can’t help but laugh, for it’s an amazing feeling to actually see yourself, feel yourself, and, for that moment, be content living entirely inside your own exciting world.

Every effective story is comprised of little details, all of which are crucial to the gestalt of the bigger picture. The creation of this perfection requires the utmost discipline, for if the whole story is to be focused, then so too must all the micro-stories be. Unfortunately for us, architecting such a system is extremely complicated. Driven by our somewhat unpredictable, complicated and fragile emotions, it’s not easy for us to be objective, maintain focus and articulate our thoughts, even when we do know just what we want to convey. Even this article, for example, is not nearly as clear as what I have in my head, despite the structuring and restructuring I’ve done to get it to where it is now.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this problem – I’ve talked with some friends who’ve helped me focus my thoughts. As I’ve written previously, social design works because it fills the gap between identity and community, helping one person connect with others. It does this by facilitating conversation. But it’s the storytelling in that conversation that really helps us communicate effectively. We tell stories to illustrate who we are, what we feel and what we want everyone to understand. It works because, as social beings, we relate to and empathize with each other through our experiences.

Storytelling has been used as a teaching method for thousands of years, yet despite its ubiquity, we are still unable to help each other tell our own stories. History shows us that we have continually struggled for the freedom of expression, the very thing which acknowledges our individualism. But now, many of us live in a modern world that not only allows this freedom, but encourages it to a fault. Storytelling requires focus, and we’re falling short.

Social technology aims to mimic real society, but real society may not be the best role model. These days, we’re allowed so many choices for so many things that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on what’s really important. Psychological research posits that we are the unhappiest generation yet, not because of some chemical imbalance, but simply because we are overwhelmed with the number of options we have, more paralyzed to make choices and more unhappy with our decisions. In many ways, it was easier to exist hundreds of years ago because we felt we needed less. The truth is, we need just as little now as we did then – we’re just distracted.

The same is true for communication. On Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the multitude of other social services, anything that might be thoughtful or meaningful gets lost among the dribble. Conversation is more boring or entertaining than it is helpful. At this point, even if someone can articulate some profound thoughts, do we even notice? Can we even hear it anymore?

Having the freedom of expression simply means that we have an outlet for all the emotions we are filled with and a community to listen. Naturally, our friends make up that community now, because they understand us, are quick to validate what we say and are forgiving when we aren’t clear on our thoughts. Outside that trusted group, however, communication isn’t working well. When you give everyone in the world an outlet for their emotions and make it public, you get what we have now: a chaotic collection of thoughts ranging from the most profound to the most dull, from the most humdrum to the most enraging. Furthermore, we see a spectrum of communal results, from new relationships and reunited families to murders, hate groups, riots and political strife. And you get it all louder and stronger because this is the first time people from all over the world can interact in the same rooms.

Despite the ubiquity of Internet communication, we don’t really understand each other any better. We tend to keep to our friends, maintain surface-level chatter and become lazier in our communication. In order for social technology to really help us, we must learn to be more thoughtful, understand and express ourselves better and to help others do the same. Undoubtedly we will find that when we can do this, we are, in fact, all on the same page: driven by the same causes, fearful of the same fears and hopeful of the same hopes. We are simply different versions of the same story.

“Society is commonly too cheap,” said Thoreau in Solitude (Walden), written in the 1800s. “We meet at very short intervals, not having the time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals, three times a day, and manage to give each other only another taste of the same, old moldy cheese that we are.” Even 150 years ago we tended towards the meaningless palaver, of which we only have more today. So as we embrace this new age, let’s strive to make our storytelling richer, more economical and more meaningful, exploring how it can help better us on the whole. It’s not about us as individuals, nor even our children – it’s about that greater story of humanity and how we pushed it forward.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I had never heard of the Strand Book Store in NYC until earlier this year when I was walking around with a friend and she pointed it out to me. She apparently goes all the time and told me I’d like it. And I did. I even bought a new book from an author I like.

With technology today, we can get answers to anything factual right away. I could have looked up on my phone for bookstores in New York just as I could have looked up how to get to the store and if they carry books by this author. But the value of social is when I don’t even know I’m looking for anything at all.

In these cases and when we are faced with more subjective questions such as, “Where’s a good Italian restaurant?” or “What movie should I see?” or “Where’s a great museum nearby?” we turn to a community of people to help us out. These decisions are emotional, and who better to understand than other people?

Communities can be very useful, almost like a buffer between us and the world. In the wild, they’re an evolutionary defense mechanism against danger: a larger group is more powerful than an individual and the individual can look to the group for social cues on what to do. For us as people, having a community is more of an emotional attachment: we define it by the close people we surround ourselves with—our friends and family. We know them, we like them, they know us and they like us. We share thoughts, feelings, experiences and we turn to them for love and support throughout our lives because we trust them.

And though we have all kinds of relationships in our lives—with coworkers, neighbors or brands, long-lasting or short-lived, formal or intimate—it’s with our strongest ties that our trust lies. And this is the foundation of why Social Design works—because of this trust.

So when my close friend in New York tells me about a place I should visit, I trust her opinion and that she knows me well. And when our experience matches recommendations we get—that is, when we actually enjoy ourselves and learn something new—we not only feel special and thankful for the experience, but we also feel prompted to talk about it and tell our friends about it as well. We do this because we’re expressing ourselves by sharing the things we like and we want our communities to hear.

Trust is built through these conversations and everyday, hundreds of millions of people are having these interactions on Facebook and other social platforms, sharing thoughts, feelings, places they’ve visited, articles they’ve read, movies they’ve watched, and on and on. Social Design aims to harness this conversation, enhance it and build more of these serendipitous and valuable social experiences for everyone.

The Three Elements of Social Design

If we break Social Design down into tactical core elements, we see clearly how it’s comprised of three very distinct components: identity, conversation and community. Put another way: ourselves, other people and the conversations we have with them.

I like to diagram this using concentric circles, with identity in the center, conversation in the middle and community on the outside. The reason for this is because conversation really serves as the glue between identity and community. Conversation is how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from it.

If we were to design a social product with this in mind, one idea might be to start from the center and work our way out. That is, allow people to create an identity, let them talk about it and build a community over time. This isn’t a bad idea at all – in fact, it’s how Facebook and a number of other social networks began.

When Facebook emerged in 2004, it was a simple site allowing college students to create and edit profiles of themselves. The editing was addictive; people kept logging in to see what had changed in friends’ profiles and to change things themselves. And, over time, this became a conversation—a timeline of life—and people built a strong identity and community of friends and family from it.

But now that this is in place – and used heavily by hundreds of millions of people everyday – it makes much more strategic (even practical) sense for social design to take the reverse approach and work from the outside in. That is, to utilize the existing community, define new kinds of conversation and let people continue to build their identities further.

A more iconic representation of the three elements of Social Design: Identity, Conversation and Community. Conversation is the glue between the identity and the community, binding the two together.

Utilizing Community

Facebook profiles have become people’s identities. They’ve spent countless hours curating them – adding friends, posting pictures, commenting on friends’ updates. This is their de facto representation of themselves, and they don’t want to recreate it from scratch every time they start a new product or service.

So rather than create an experience that starts with building a new identity, we should utilize what we can from what’s already on Facebook and build on top of it. Connect users to their friends when they sign up to a new service. Social apps aren’t social without other people and bringing a user’s friends automatically brings the established trust in a community. Use profile information to recommend content – people already know what they like and that’s why it’s on their profiles.

Rotten Tomatoes, for example, with the addition of Instant Personalization, shows users movies that their friends like as well as movies they might like based on the movies they already like, as listed in their profile.

Get the baseline in place so all that needs attention is the conversation – what they talk about and how they do so.

Building Conversation

Conversation builds trust. In fact, any real-time interactions associated with emotion build these strong bonds. It could be anything from sitting together and talking to dancing, protesting, jumping out of a plane, etc. Conversation is simply a generic term I’m using to describe the interactions between the self and the community and the stronger the associated emotion, the stronger the bond.

This is inherently a back-and-forth and therefore is comprised of two different experiences that play off each other. Generically, we can describe these as listening and speaking.

Listening

A listening experience is hypothetically if you were go to a restaurant you’ve never been to before and choose what to eat based on the recommendation of others. You’re essentially listening to the community’s thoughts and previous actions and using these to inform your decisions.

We already see this in many places online. People on Yelp, for example, can make comments on restaurants such as, “Try the hot chocolate.” And on YouTube, you can see ratings for each video that help you determine which ones to watch, since you probably don’t want to watch the bad ones. They say, “Watch this one; others liked it.” On many e-commerce sites such as Amazon, we see the same thing: reviews from people to help our decision-making.

But there’s a big problem here: we don’t always know these people. And they don’t know us. So how do they know what we like? How can we trust them to give a good rating? We can’t. There’s no established trust.

So what Facebook has done is remodel this same paradigm but scope it around your friends. Social plugins, for example, let people “like” things all over the Internet and then surface this activity to their friends. And because you see what your friends and trusted circle like, you’re more likely to care.

Again, because the value of “social” is when we don’t know what we want and we’re not really looking, showing activity spread throughout the experience constantly inundates us with potential conversation points and things of interest. We learn by watching others. It’s social encouragement and a form of mimicry if anything: if we see someone else we trust doing something, we’re likely to do the same.

Spotify, for example, shows a feed of all the songs that users are sharing and adding to their playlists. It’s a personalized way for users to browse some of the latest and most popular songs.

When you connect with your Facebook account to Huffington Post, you see an activity feed of all the articles your friends have been reading lately.

Speaking

The other half of the conversation—and perhaps the most important part—is the speaking and the sharing. People have to engage in the first place, and will do so when they have the right motivation. The good news is that if people are sharing with people they trust, they are more likely to share more often and be open and honest.

Facebook has a number of ways for users to engage, including a number of options in the publisher (status, links, photos, etc.) and multiple ways to provide input and feedback (likes, comments, answers to questions, wall posts, etc.). And all of this activity is surfaced to users’ friends constantly through various distribution channels. We can’t help but listen.

The more contributions that are made to the system, the more activity exists to listen to and engage with. And likewise, the more activity there is to engage with, the more contributions can be made to the system. And this creates a positive feedback loop—a “virtuous cycle of sharing” as we call it—that grows exponentially. This is really the sweet spot: conversation fueling more conversation.

To summarize, a great social experience depends on conversation between the community and the self. And this is based tactically in three main elements:

1. Utilizing personal information and connections to build a personalized experience
2. Showing conversations, social context and activity everywhere
3. Making it really easy to talk, share, give feedback and engage

Curating Identity

The beauty of Social Design is that it plays to the most powerful form of motivation: the self, the identity. We share and interact with others because we want to, because we learn more about ourselves and because we feel better when we feel heard.

Social Design is actually central to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I believe. After our physiological needs of food and water, and after our basic safety needs, we have a very interesting duality between needing love and belonging and our own sense of self-esteem. It stands to reason, given the diagram, that we base much of our own self-esteem in how the community sees us and how accepted we are. In other words, the community helps drive our identity. And it’s when we have that feeling of belonging and love that we can build our self-esteem and reach our full potential.

The experiences I mention already exist in the real world today; we’re not really trying to invent anything “new” here. But the Internet is becoming part of the real world and a reflection of it, a means by which we can communicate with one another more efficiently. With people at the center of the Web, more and more experiences that naturally happen in the real world are starting to happen online. With this in mind, as we design, we should take into account existing social truths, thinking carefully about the identities and respective communities we affect and building the best conversation tools for them.

Ultimately the value of social is bigger than anything material. It’s a way for us to close the gap between the self and the community, just as we’ve closed the gap between our other needs. We don’t have have to worry about food nor spend our lives hunting like other animals. Our ability to trust each other and work together as a species has built a safer environment in which to live. But individually, we do still worry about our futures, finding love, feeling heard, and knowing ourselves. Social Design starts us along this path.

For more information, check out the Facebook Social Design guidelines I wrote.

Like this article? You may also like these:

• One for All and All In One – How Simple Should Social Interfaces Really Be?
• Brand Devolution – A Logo Change Changes Our Trust

No one loves you. No one can. For what you deem as “real” is simply your own perception of the stimuli in the world around you. That perception of the senses leads to body changes that make you feel a certain way. But emotion is really nothing more than purely a reaction to and an awareness of your environment. This unfortunately means that everything you experience is fundamentally subjective and personal to you, no matter how objective it may seem on the outside.

There is no such thing as “being loved” – only feeling it. That is, “love” is not something given; it’s something received, an ability to perceive your environment in a way that makes it meaningful and comforting to you. Much of it is instinctual, ingrained from millions of years of evolution. But much of it is experience, for though we are born with the same basic needs, our instincts are put to the test in our first formative years as we figure out how to get those needs met in a tumultuous and confusing time. The love that you get as a child, from your parents, your friends and your surroundings, tends to define how you’re able to perceive it throughout the rest of your life (although this may be mostly unconscious).

I discovered some time ago that the meaning of life is simply “to love and be loved” but I use the term “love” in a way that is not commonly defined by society. It is not from a spouse or a sibling, a lover or a friend, nor is it even the intense craving of chocolate that causes you to buy every bag of candy at the end of the cereal aisle. “To love” is simply to be at peace with yourself and the world around you and to exude that energy as you journey through it. “To be loved,” is difficult, for it requires you to actually notice the beauty in your surroundings and take it personally. We so often get wrapped up in the idea that in order to be loved, we must be loved by other people, yet we are drastically limiting our scope. We can be loved by anything we perceive to be as such: a warm, sunny day, a piece of music, a bowl of ripe strawberries, a small gathering of friends for dinner… but because life is made to be more complicated than it needs to be, we are easily distracted and unable to see these moments for what they are.

We tend to strive for this “perfection” of love we have in our minds: some place, time, state of mind, group of people, career, etc. that puts us at ease, calms our anxiety and helps us make peace with the world and its instability. But there is no ultimate perfection; only moments of it. And being loved is learning how to appreciate them.

I’ve written before about how difficult it is to communicate who you are to people. Everyone is different, everyone hears things differently and everyone expects different things. Thus, it’s not surprising that we have difficulty communicating with everyone. The same is true of brands, except they need to communicate with everyone. So, as a company, if your voice isn’t providing the right messaging – or worse, if your brand isn’t fitting in – then you’d think it’s time for a change.

When companies change their logos, you have to figure that something prompted the redesign, something wrong within the soul of the business. But changing logos is more of a marketing thing; it’s a lot harder to change the core value.

You can usually find out a great deal about company logos if you just do a bit of research. Learning about the time period the logo was made – the political environment, the current state of affairs, etc. – and putting all the pieces together, you can get a much deeper understanding of what is going on here.

Take mayonnaise, for example. It first became popular in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. But ask someone from the west coast to name the brand of mayonnaise they use and then ask someone who grew up east and they’ll say different things. That’s because while Helmann’s mayonnaise was the staple brand on the east coast, Best Foods Inc. introduced and grew its mayonnaise business in the west. And although in the 1930s, Best Foods acquired Helmanns, to this day, they maintain the branding of Best Foods west of the Mississippi and Helmann’s east of it.

It’s the same brand, the same product, heck even the visuals of each logo are the same! But the marketing is different. And that’s because marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

Because the brand is at the heart, it’s important that the marketing clearly speaks to you, the user. And if the marketing is ineffectively communicating the brand, it’s time to change something. Often times, old logos convey only one area of focus but as companies expand, their brand may cover others as well. When the Sci Fi network, for example, started struggling as a science-fiction, typically male-oriented TV channel, they felt a good way to stay afloat was to expand. Now they offer social components, applications and a bunch of new programming that appeal to a broader audience. As such, they needed to redo their logo to be less about science fiction only. The new “SyFy” accomplishes this, losing its unique and overt galactic/spacey style – not to mention the obvious reference to science fiction – in favor of one that’s more generic, universal and a bit amorphous.

Sci Fi’s transition to SyFy

But simply changing the SyFy logo isn’t going to change the fact that their brand is clearly struggling as a small, targeted, “old-media” network (just like many other Hollywood / TV brands). The real success will be if they can figure out how to give people what they really want in a new world of technology that provides users with virtually anything they want whenever they want it.

Broadening a brand isn’t uncommon. Along the same lines as SyFy is Walmart, whose original logo design, a tad on the cliché and cheesy side, focused on cheapness and targeted low-income families. But lately, Walmart has started to sell higher quality items, more variety and targets more of the middle class. As such, their logo revision is more elegant, modern and extra curvy to convey a sense of friendliness. The logo graphic may remind you of an asterisk or otherwise, but maybe that’s a good thing (especially when you consider that asterisks can denote “mark as important”).

Walmart’s new friendly, modernized logo

Now let’s move to Gap, a global company which owns a variety of clothing lines, including Banana Republic – the upscale, high quality branch (that, incidentally used to be branded as tropical / Caribbean fashion) – as well as Old Navy. But when Gap first started as a small basic clothing line in the end of the 1960s, it was new, hip, stylish, clean and fun. And its logo represented that brand presence.

The original Gap logo from 1969

But these days, with the advent of many popular hip/stylish clothing lines, people tend see the Gap more as generic, poorly-made clothing. It’s not generic that’s bad – American Apparel is all about making generic clothing super cool. Although their clothes are well-made, they’re not really anything particularly special and its logo reflects that brand: basic, black, Helvetica. But just because Gap adapts a similar logo style doesn’t mean that its core essence as a brand has actually modernized and become more hip. The products and the experience have to show it.

The new Gap logo, very American Apparel.

I suppose we’ll see what happens, but in the meantime, the design of the Gap logo isn’t very effective. Among its poorer qualities is the black text over a blue square (that isn’t even fully saturated, the blue running like a bad dye job). What does this mean? What does its color and placement mean? And perhaps most importantly, how does this logo look in black and white, especially when it’s going to be woven into a clothing label that allows only one thread color, not to mention a resolution of only 72 dpi?

I should note that designs should never rely on color to help convey meaning. Rather, the color should just serve to enhance the structure or shapes that already exist. The only exception to this rule is when color is used to discriminate between sub-brands, which Gap has a chance to do here, potentially. Because sub-brands are geared towards a specific context and/or audience, they are aspects of marketing, the voice of the brand. Here, it’s okay to change the aesthetic, in the same way you might change what you say or what you wear depending on who you’re hanging out with. It doesn’t change who you are or what you believe in fundamentally, but it does help you be more effective at communicating with different people.

Good examples of this can be seen in the Huffington Post, USA Today, FedEx, Adobe and even milk. Milk is among the few food products where you accept its genericness. After all, the hugely popular “Got Milk” campaign isn’t about any specific brand of milk. Milk is milk. But there are different kinds of milk and for years, colors have been used to separate them out: red is whole milk, blue is fat free, etc.

Lucerne milk uses simple packaging with vibrant colors to differentiate the milk varieties.

The many different sub-brands of Fedex, separated by variations of color in their logos.

But while we accept milk as a generic food item, we don’t do the same with other staples. Take orange juice, for example. All orange juice isn’t the same; it depends on where the oranges are from, how they’re processed and when they were grown, among other things. Because of these unique characteristics, branding is much more important to distinguish one orange juice from the next.

Tropicana first emerged in the 1950s, back when it was especially difficult in mainstream society to have really good, fresh juice all the time. The founder developed flash pasteurization and it was the first time consumers could have the fresh taste of oranges from non-concentrated juice. It was new, exciting, exotic. And, as such, its logo reflected that. Giving the Tropicana wording an almost clichéd, decorative font made it stand out more and make a name for itself.

But when Tropicana recently modernized its logo and branding, there was an immense public outcry – so much so, in fact, that it is among the few redesigned logos to be recalled.

Although there were some good decisions in the Tropicana rebranding (such as picking a font that may be more universally understandable than its previous faux-Americana-tropical one), modernizing it just made it look more generic and basic. No one wanted generic orange juice; they wanted Tropicana. It lost its unique personality and with that, its trust from its customers.

Tropicana’s generic new design

A sudden branding redesign to a company you trust is like pulling out the rug from under you. It’s shocking, unexpected, uncertain. A logo and a brand implicitly tell a story and give an experience. Gap used to have a story and experience. They’ve changed the logo, but have they changed the experience? A logo change is simply just tricking people to think the whole company is different. If it really is, then great, but most brands have a hard time changing, just as most people have a hard time changing. Lest we forget, a pig with lipstick is still a pig.

Marketing, as a voice, is regional; it depends on context. Branding, on the other hand, is universal and timeless.

So why are we so big on trust? Why is the branding so important? And why do we tend to hate redesigns? It’s because it gives us a consistency, a constant to grab onto. And the more consistent a design, the better we understand it and the more we build expectation and come to trust it. As humans, our strongest emotional responses map to behavioral patterns learned before we could even form memories. The first few years of our lives are the most formative and we learn a slew of severe life lessons during this time, perhaps most importantly discovering that the world is made of things that can always change. Inherently craving stability, we learn to look for things that are constant and latch on as we develop heuristics to help us grow. We strongly desire a sense of place, of security, of safety in things we come to trust. It’s the second most basic tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right after food and shelter.

Just as you have experiences in life that affect your learning and perceptions, so too do you have them with brands. And if you want to form a bond through these experiences you have repeatedly, then they should be consistent and expected because trust is involved.

Even if you think some of these logo redesigns are better, the bottom line is that every one of them is really just a change in marketing, with many of these companies trying to be something they’re not [yet]. A logo and a design make a promise to its users of upholding an implicit experience and story. And when a company’s brand is undergoing a state of flux, the worst thing they can do is put out a bad logo that makes a promise they can’t actually keep.

Artists engage in the manipulation of a particular medium to produce an aesthetic and personal response. Art is valued for its originality and ability to express an idea. Some people get it, some don’t, and that’s okay. Design, on the other hand, must solve a specific problem relative to a particular user or task, and is evaluated simply by how effective it is at solving that problem. If it doesn’t work, then it failed—period.

Everything in nature is the way it is by design; evolution has no aesthetic or personal opinion. Like art, some people find bugs to be quite beautiful while others cringe at the sight of them. But like them or not, their design is the way it is because of their environment and the obstacles they face trying to survive. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you think; it has to work, or they die.

Design is inherently an objective process, yet when it comes to designing for people, we tend to cloud this truth. As emotional beings, our judgment is often greatly affected by how we feel, and how we feel is often unpredictable, uncertain, and complicated. Therefore, we can’t design for emotion; everyone experiences it differently. But we can design for the fundamental psychological underpinnings and biological traits that influence perception. When we do that, we find design to be much simpler. All we must do is define a core concept—a problem to solve—and make logical, subsequent decisions off it, maintaining focus and keeping in mind the psychology of how we learn and remember things.

How We Learn

Instinctually, we construct myriad mental models of concepts in the world, creating expectations of how objects work, which we learn more over time through our experiences. We’re naturally inclined to believe, for example, that round things are softer than square things, that blue is colder than orange, and that simpler things are, in general, more approachable.

Consider a person who’s never seen a mobile phone before presented with both an iPhone and a Blackberry. Then consider the range of first moves they can make with each product. By probability alone, there’s a higher chance that the person turns the iPhone on faster than the Blackberry. With less buttons and less clutter, the iPhone is much easier to approach and engage with, and that is its first, and perhaps most important, step to success.

In a battle of popular micro-blogging sites, Tumblr and Posterous take very different approaches to their landing pages. Posterous, a Silicon Valley tech company, showcases how it works and what people say about it. On the other hand, Tumblr, a New York design company, simply presents users with a big signup form and one line of text: “The easiest way to blog.” By focusing users’ attention and presenting them with few options, the product is far more approachable. As such, despite Posterous’s powerful functionality, Tumblr has won out in the size of its user base.

Users’ entire experience with a new product is a continual series of new experiences, making the approachability of those experiences key as they learn new facets and features of the product. But there’s a second, more powerful step to engagement: familiarity.

Recognition is among the most powerful forms of memory recall, so it’s no wonder that familiarity is a strong factor in good design. Because we carry with us all kinds of assumptions and schemas from our innate biology and prior experiences, we don’t approach products as a blank slate. The more a product can tap into users’ existing expectations, the easier it will be for them to learn its new features. Many basic calculator software applications, for example, mimic the look of a real calculator, even though a virtual calculator probably makes more sense as a simple textbox that parses expressions.

A product with a familiar interface gives users a tremendous leg up in the learning process, and meeting their expectations builds a valuable trusting relationship that greatly enhances the product’s quality and credibility.

How We Remember

This continual cycle of approachability and recognizability can be described as learnability—that is, how easy a product is to learn. Because this is a crucial component of a product’s success, more complex products will often put new users through a tutorial-like workflow to get them acquainted with the various features and facets. But this approach suggests that the product has an inherently flawed architecture. If the basic blueprint is not intuitive such that users have to be guided through it, the learning process becomes less internalized and less memorable; they are learning to rely on what you tell them, not what they experience.

Workflows designed with a focus on initial learnability can do more serious damage to a product’s usability in the long run. One of the most challenging aspects to selling a design to stakeholders is convincing them that its usability—the speed and efficiency of task completion—is more important than the initial gut reaction, which is all you get from a meeting. Stakeholders often like to see certain elements front and center from the beginning, never mind that those elements may become trivial—or worse, distracting —in the rest of the workflow. If a product doesn’t have a logical architecture from the start, users will lose their way.

In 2007, Microsoft revamped its suite of Office products with “The Ribbon,” a new interface that organizes related commands into a set of tabs. Years of research and iteration lead to this design, which was intended to optimize the user workflow. In PowerPoint (a product on which I briefly worked), research showed that the typical user workflow consisted primarily of creating a new slide, adding text, formatting that text, adding shapes, and formatting those shapes. As a result, the “Home” tab in The Ribbon includes all these apparently related actions together, with other tabs having names and action sets based on other workflows: “Design,” “Slideshow,” “Insert,” “Review,” and a contextual tab depending on what tool the user has selected.

The different toolbar structures for Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote

This structure starkly contrasts the way Apple designed Keynote, another slideshow/presentation application. While its interface also uses a tabbed approach, the tabs are divided by the various types of objects that can be included in presentations: slides, text, shapes, charts, tables, etc., each with its own set of related actions. Because of this more objective and logical grouping (as well as many of Keynote’s other features that obey principles of approachability and recognizability), the product is quite successful and easy to use.

Objective design doesn’t cater to a specific workflow. Rather, it simply provides a logical structure that plays into our innate psychology. This structure is also behind good writing, movies, music, and other widely successful products and experiences. People are inclined to seek out order and hierarchy as a way to categorize, identify, and define the objects and experiences they encounter and don’t respond well to deviations from this natural process.

If someone challenges a product’s design with aesthetically or emotionally based suggestions and changes, they must be reminded that design decisions are based in logical reasoning. It’s this highly disciplined, unemotional, and perceptive ability to break down gray areas into small, inarguable black-and-white building blocks that allow for the most effective communication and, more importantly, designs that just work.

It’s sort of an accident that I’m in the technology industry. When I was in grade-school, I never did anything technologically related: I didn’t program, I didn’t design websites, I didn’t read articles… I did teach myself the basics of a few Adobe programs, but mainly I used computers like the majority of people my age: I chatted with friends, I wrote documents and I played games. But now I find myself in the center of an industry that frustrates me and feel unlike many of my design colleagues. I’m not interested in the latest tech gadget or a new website or the visual subtleties in the iPhone. I don’t read the blogs online, I don’t make pixel-perfect mocks and I honestly don’t want to have to “check in” on a dozen versions of the same service. I just care about people and want to make things they like to use, especially if it makes them happier and feel more connected.

My mindset is one of people, not products. Only recently in the industry has there been a strong push for user-centric design, with dozens of these new roles emerging at tech companies. Before now, technology products mainly focused on productivity tools which helped us increase our efficiency at getting things done. Now, however, we’re focusing on people and their interactions with each other.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces.

We are experiencing a shift in the mental and social model; the world is becoming more open and connected. We can see this especially in the younger generation, which takes to computers like fish to water, and is extremely comfortable with the openness and ubiquity of social technology. But the vast majority of people find us moving too far, too fast and they can’t keep up. We’ve pushed to build simpler tools over the years to make them easier to understand, but are we getting too simple too soon?

Now I, like many a designer, advocate for simplicity. After all, Apple has built much of its success on designing interfaces that mimic real-world interactions, simple and to the point without too many complications. But on the Internet, we’ve seen a different trend, more along the lines of a single-service front-end. You can do everything you want from one text box on Google. You can post updates to any one of thousands of people from one text box on Facebook and Twitter. Engineers work tirelessly to build systems that give you supposedly exactly what you want up front. It’s magical, and there’s little under the hood explaining how it works. Productivity-wise, this is pretty good. But if we’re trying to connect people with each other, replacing the face-to-face medium that’s existed for centuries, I think this is approach is a bit ahead of its time.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces. The issue we are facing with social technology today is the lack of defined spaces. Technology and tools may grow leaps and bounds over the years, but we are still biologically limited. We are very context-dependent. In order to understand the world, we build mental schemas of how things work and are put together. We inherently recognize the difference between spaces and their respective functionalities – that’s a big part of how we learn about the world. But with the advent of technology, we’ve been able to conflate the mental model and give users the ability and desire for having everything in one place at their fingertips. Some love it, many don’t.

We have an issue that’s twofold: 1) How do we consume information across multiple social circles from potentially hundreds of people and still be able to give the same attention as we would in a face-to-face conversation, which occurs between only a handful of people at the most? And 2) how do we converse with our various social circles in only one online setting instead of what would otherwise be multiple independent groups at different times?

The answer is not really about simplifying, in fact it’s the opposite. We need to be building in a little more complexity and shape the structure of the products themselves to allow for contextual mental models that accurately affect the real world. The hard part is, the industry seems to be moving in a different direction. I find it pretty hard to design for other designers nowadays since expectations are so high. They’re higher in the industry than they are for the real world. Ask a product designer what the difference between two versions of the iPhone is and you’ll no doubt get a 20-page paper. But ask an average person and you’d barely get a paragraph. The fact is, the tech industry has ramped up considerably in the last decade but the rest of the world hasn’t yet.

With so many options in reach, it can be a bit paralyzing for anyone. The message in the book The Paradox of Choice suggests that people need choices to feel free, yet too many choices will have the reverse effect. It supposes that we actually feel better when we have limitations, so making a decision doesn’t feel as heavy. I’m confident that as technology becomes even more prominent in our day-to-day lives, we will shift to a more carefree, open mindset. But at least for now, let’s be a little cautious on the strides we take, a little sensitive to the consumers’ hesitations and let’s make sure people feel comfortable along the way.

We’re very big on numbers in social technology. From connections on Linkedin to followers on Twitter to friends on Facebook, we’ve been made very aware of quantity. And though it doesn’t really mean much, many of us – myself included – have developed a rather unnatural need to accumulate more and more for the sake of growth.

Society is judgmental, and we’re all aware. Oscar Wilde said that society is a “masked ball, where everyone hides his real character and reveals it by hiding.” If you have too few friends on Facebook, people might think you’re a lonesome loser. Too many and you might be deemed a shallow socialite. But the fact of the matter is that everyone’s actual social networks are small, having around the same number of friends at any given point in time (there’s actually a specific value of about 150, termed “Dunbar’s Number”). This is universally true and not surprising – we just have never had to examine it closely until recently when technology started keeping track. It’s biological: our brains can’t allow us to have deep, meaningful relationships with too many people. It’s just too much information. As it is, our short term memory can only hold an average of only six to seven elements.

In real life, we group our friends. On the Internet, everyone’s equal.

But even in that small subset of “real” friends, we hold everyone in a series of concentric circles of increasing size emanating out from the center of extreme intimacy towards an outer cliff of near indifference. And as we move throughout our lives, people move closer or further in orbit with some sticking to the center and many dropping off the outer edge. That’s how it is in the real world and we accept it. But in Internet-land, everyone’s equal. You’re all just “friends” and you always see everything each other has to say. Not only is that inorganic, it’s detrimental – both in privacy and quality.

Let’s take a step back. To be clear, I agree there’s value in maintaining connections to people you meet over the course of your life. After all, to quote A Streetcar Named Desire, a stranger is simply a friend you haven’t met yet. Even so much as a simple interaction with someone can do wonders for building general mutual respect. Perhaps one day we’ll live in a society where everyone is friends with everyone through only a few degrees and thus, we are more likely to treat each other better. Perhaps in the long run, this will allow us not only to glean a better understanding of ourselves but also the world and life itself.

But in the meantime, I worry that the technological focus on quantity has made many people quick to deem others as “friends” before – and perhaps without – ever getting to really know them. It cheapens the relationship and detracts from actual face-to-face interaction which has been the social norm until the last twenty years or so. I’m certainly at fault for adding coworkers as friends before getting to know them. And then, upon getting to know them and seeing the potential for a real friendship, part of me is disappointed that I’ve already added them, almost as if there’s nothing more I can do to grow the friendship.

I’d argue that how many connections you accrue is useful for your own eyes and personal growth but not when showcased publicly to the world. Perhaps if we used these various technology products more authentically, we could stop focusing on what we “show off” to everyone and spend more time engaging with the friends we really know. We’d be less likely to see posts we don’t care about from people with whom we hardly engage and we wouldn’t be as likely to worry about the information we share since our audience would be limited to only the closest of friends. Let’s not try to be something we’re not; let’s just find out and enjoy who we are.

Honestly, if no one knew how many friends or connections you had, would you really be so quick to send those invites? I think we shall find that the more natural and organic we can make social technology, the more useful it will be and the happier we will be for using it.