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    <h1>Data isn’t oil, so what is it?</h1>
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  <p>In 2011, Stanford researchers Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/is-crime-a-virus-or-a-beast-how-metaphors-shape-our-thoughts-and-decisions">published research</a> that showed how the way we talk about crime changes our ideas about what to do about it. They asked two groups of students to read reports about crime in their area - one using a metaphor of crime as a ‘beast’ that was rampaging through the neighbourhood, and one describing crime as a ‘virus’ that had to be stopped. Their research showed that students shown the ‘virus’ metaphor were more likely to favour policy that looked at the root causes of crime, such as social deprivation, whilst students who read the ‘beast’ metaphor story favoured enforcement policies.</p>

 <p>In <a href="https://storythings.com">my day job</a>, we spend a lot of time thinking about the metaphors we use to help shape people’s understanding of complex issues, and hopefully drive change. In fact, I know about the study above from a podcast we produced a few years ago called <em><a href="https://diffusion.network/2019/06/02/episode-01-a-paintbrush-is-a-pump/">This Will Change Your Mind</a></em>, looking at how the ideas that shape public thinking are developed and adopted. In <a href="https://diffusion.network/2019/06/10/episode-02-not-actually-a-hole/">my favourite episode</a>, the hosts try and find out how the phrase ‘hole in the ozone layer’ emerged, a particularly successful climate metaphor that drove global efforts to cut CFC emissions.</p>

 <p>It’s an odd metaphor, as there isn’t really an ozone layer, and the hole wasn’t really a hole, but the metaphor caught on with scientists, policy makers and the public. One of the reasons for its success might have been the visceral image of a hole in the earth’s atmosphere, and the associations of breached defences that created. This was the era of early video games like Space Invaders and Missile Command, where the player had to defend the earth by stopping alien attacks raining down. I was a kid in the 80s, and the hole in the ozone layer felt as terrifying as these pixellated invaders.</p>

 <p><hr></p>

 <p>Back in the early 2000s, I was working at the BBC on a project to imagine what the organisation would do with our user’s personal data. At the time, there were only a few websites that asked you to create personal accounts, and most of the data we captured was relatively anonymous server logs. I developed a <a href="https://test.org.uk/2007/05/04/a-manifesto-for-data-literacy/">list of principles</a> that I thought should inform the BBC’s approach to managing user data, and commissioned a <a href="https://www.liveworkstudio.com">service design agency</a> to develop prototypes of what this might look like as products or services.</p>

 <p>I was then asked to present this to the BBC’s executive committee, and gave probably the worst presentation of my life. It didn’t help that I started the presentation by explaining that this work might be important in a ‘post licence fee world’, before being softly chided by then Director General Mark Thompson that this wasn’t the place to discuss that kind of idea.</p>

 <p>But more than that gaffe, I think the biggest problem was that I couldn’t really describe what personal data actually <em>was</em>. Not in a technical sense - the BBC ExCo in the mid-2000s wasn’t very technically savvy anyway - but as something that <em>mattered</em>, and was important to a vision of what public media could do in this new century. I had lots of fine statements about what we could do with data, and how it could bring value to our audiences, but the thing itself was immaterial, a poltergeist only visible through the things it moved.</p>

 <p>Over the next decade, the most dominant metaphor for personal data ended up being ‘<a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data">oil</a>’. As the platform giants of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple built empires of products and services that tracked our every activity, data has been discussed as a vast, untapped resource, ideal for extraction and processing into cold, hard cash.</p>

 <p>But in the last few years, there has been a backlash against this extractive metaphor. In 2018 Cory Doctorow described Facebook’s data as an empire of low quality ‘<a href="https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/">oily rags</a>’, recasting the metaphor to one of industrial waste, not liquid gold. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/DigitalEU/status/1390660489261330440">recent speech</a>, EU Vice President Margrethe Vestager tried to reposition data as a ‘reusable resource’, a more ecological metaphor that suggests ways of extracting value that doesn’t pollute the public sphere.</p>

 <p>All these metaphors imagine public data as a huge, passive, untapped resources - lakes of stuff that only has value when it is extracted and processed. But this framing completely removes the individual agency that created the stuff in the first place. Oil is formed by millions of years of compression and chemical transformation of algae and tiny marine animals (<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z27thyc/revision/1">sorry, not dinosaurs</a>). Data is created in real time, as we click and swipe around the internet. The metaphor might work in an economic sense, but it fails to describe what data is as a material. It’s not oil, it’s <em>people</em>. </p>

 <p><hr></p>

 <p>At the moment the big platforms and governments are ramping up the battle over our personal data - <a href="https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/the-apple-att-edition?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNjMsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM0OTMxMjk4LCJfIjoiVGlXUkMiLCJpYXQiOjE2MjEwOTM3ODUsImV4cCI6MTYyMTA5NzM4NSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTcwMDAiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.2zQKhes6JmkNlPLp5YuQHWv5b-xBZw16zjTRtyohhck">who can collect it</a>, <a href="https://gdpr.eu">what they can do with it</a>, and <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/markscott82/status/1393203850560032770">where they can send it</a>. But this is happening at a level far above our individual experience of data. The battle rages above us, like the missiles and aliens in the video games of my 80s youth.</p>

 <p>The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s <em>us</em>.</p>

 <p>If you’ve been on the internet for a while - let’s say 5-10 years - you’ve probably felt the visceral kick of seeing someone or something in your data history that caused you pain. It could be Facebook’s ‘on this day’ feature sending you a memory of a traumatic event, or scrolling through your photo library to find a photo of a deceased relative or friend. Or it could be a moment of joy - the  online store where you bough a much loved item of clothing, or that perfect gift for a friend.</p>

 <p>After a year of lockdown, seeing reminders of life before the pandemic in our camera rolls and social media updates has felt especially melancholic. Groups of us cramming together in a bar or park to get into the shot, or hugging each other at a football game. That intimacy is what our personal data records, an intimacy that seems doubly ironic when it is played back to us, isolated in our homes, through the same devices we’ve relied on to connect us during the lockdown. </p>

 <p>This is not a passive archive - these are records of how we live now, and how people live in our memories. They can be recalled with a touch, and brought back to life, even if they are bittersweet memories. We need metaphors for data that capture the agency and visceral emotions that our personal data can generate. Metaphors that link it directly into our lives and relationships, that help us recognise that this is <em>us</em> - <em>we’re</em> the ones being traded and sold and stored and analysed and processed.</p>

 <p>Perhaps then we’d understand how we can handle this data in a more responsible way. A metaphor that puts our personal experience at the forefront will help us find out where to draw lines in how our lives are stored and processed, and to understand that the lines will need to be different for different people. I don’t know what the right metaphor is - memory and history are the concepts I’ve been mulling over, but they have already been used in computing in ways that blur and dull them.</p>

 <p>Maybe we should be very explicit, and refer to data as our <em>lives</em>. Imagine if a service had to ask you permission to ‘track your life’ or ‘share information about your life with other providers’. Already that feels grittier, more visceral, than just ‘data’.</p>

 <p>We urgently need to come up with metaphors like this, that bring the discussion over data down from the skies above us and locate it in the minutiae of our everyday lives. Because that, after all, is what this data actually is.</p>
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    <h1>I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today disturbs me</h1>
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  <div><p>When user experience design broke out of the research labs and into a full-blown industry 20 years ago, the future looked so bright. UX went from the obscure interest of a handful of practitioners to a burgeoning industry demanding thousands of new recruits seemingly overnight. And ever since, the story has been one of more success, ever-increasing influence, and, most important, happier users.</p></div>

 <div><p>I was there for some big parts of that story. In 2001, I cofounded a design agency, Adaptive Path, that turned out to be on the forefront of a huge wave of change for digital products: the arrival of user experience and user-centered design. Many of the tools and concepts we developed became a standard part of the many UX programs that have sprung up since. These days, as a coach to UX leaders, I am having continual conversations with them about the direction of the field. And over and over again, the question I hear is: Where did we go wrong?</p><p>That might sound strange, because in some ways things have never been better for UX. The field is huge and growing. And much of the actual design work is higher quality than it’s ever been. But to those who have been in the field a while, there’s a cloud behind all those silver linings.</p><p>The implicit promise of UX for many of us was a burgeoning philosophy of management by inquiry and insight, in which new creative explorations would lead to new questions about human behavior, which in turn would drive the definition of new product and value opportunities. The culture of UX also seemed to necessitate a degree of respect, compassion, and simple humility toward the people who use what we make, and the ways in which their lives and experiences may shape their behavior to look very different from our own. More exposure to this kind of thinking, the theory went, would lead to more demand for it, and the rising tide of human-centered design would pave the way for human-centered enterprises.</p></div>

 <div><p>That, to put it bluntly, did not happen.</p><p>Instead of challenging teams to stretch their thinking to address deeper and subtler user needs, product design practices have become increasingly less insight-driven. UX processes in many organizations these days amount to little more than <a href="https://www.spydergrrl.com/2020/05/ux-theatre-poster.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“UX Theatre”</a> (an idea developed by Tanya Snook in 2018): creating the appearance of due diligence and a patina of legitimacy that’s just enough to look like a robust design process to uninformed business leaders and hopeful UX recruits alike.</p><p>Too many UX leaders have seen the field’s language and ideas co-opted and corrupted by outsiders who never knew or cared about the principles underlying the practices. We thought we were winning hearts and minds, but we were really setting ourselves up for exploitation, as businesses cherry-picked the bits of UX most compatible with their existing agendas and eschewed the parts that might lead to uncomfortable questions that could influence more than the color of a button on a screen.</p></div>

 <div><p>One such agenda is that of “agile transformation,” which promises to remake organizations to optimize their processes for developer efficiency. This is a win for developers tired of businesses that can’t articulate what they want, but, perhaps more important, it’s a win for businesses trying to wring maximum productivity out of their growing armies of engineers. However, in the rush toward transformation, something has been lost.</p><p>What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.</p><p>Talk to any highly experienced UX practitioner these days, and most have a favorite method or practice that they’d like to see revived (or restored to its former glory). Research-driven persona development. Concept models. Cocreation sessions. Task flows. These things didn’t get cut out of UX processes because they were unnecessary. They simply didn’t fit a development process that demands clear accountability for every activity and has no space for foundational work that can’t be predictably packaged up into two-week units.</p></div>

 <div><p>Agile’s success at the expense of UX is just one manifestation of a deeper truth: Businesses want scaling. And foundational UX work doesn’t scale. It doesn’t lend itself to predictable, repeatable processes and generic cookie-cutter roles. It can’t, because by definition it deals with unknown, slippery, hard-to-define problems that characterize the leading edge of an organically evolving business.</p><p>The same things that make agile a great fit for scaling engineering work—regular sprint tempos; clearly articulated outcomes to be produced; breaking down the complex, unfolding experience of users into concrete elements that can be tied to code—are the very things that make it a terrible fit for foundational UX work. The holism necessary to do foundational UX is antithetical to the assembly-line chunks of user behavior agile requires.</p><p>Focusing on production-level UX allows organizations to check the “UX” box without having to deal with the messiness that sometimes results when you hire people who are charged with asking questions that have never been asked—questions senior leaders may not know the answers to, or may not want to. The factory floor prefers interchangeable, replaceable parts.</p></div>

 <div><p>Foundational UX is where the stuff that makes people really care about UX happens: the human insights, the collaborative exploration, the creative experimentation. For people joining the field, the disjunction between the dream and the reality can feel like a terrible bait and switch. Sold in school on UX as a noble and creative pursuit, they hit the job market to find roles where every chance for nobility and creativity has been carved out and cleaned away in the name of shipping product.</p><p>It would be fair to say the blame for the current state lies squarely at the doorstep of UX practitioners themselves, who have been slow to create the room for foundational UX by failing to tell a compelling story about the value of that work and build the necessary credibility to get it funded. If UX has failed to live up to its promise to deliver more than production-level value, maybe it was a bad promise in the first place. In other words, what if—just hear me out—what if we were all wrong?</p><p>Or UX’s current malaise could simply be the product of the collective midcareer burnout of its first generation of practitioners, who may have underestimated how slow and messy a grassroots revolution can be. The disgruntlement seems to go up the longer someone has been in the field: The more seasoned and experienced a UX person is, the more likely they are to be asking whether realizing user-centered values is even possible under capitalism. These are definitely questions worth asking and conversations worth having as a community.</p></div>

 <div><p>What no one is saying, interestingly enough, is that UX is struggling because all of the juicy problems have been solved. Despite the accumulation of standards, best practices, and conventional wisdom that comes with any field growing up—not to mention the continual pressure from business to make UX practices simpler and more digestible—the messy complexity of humanity continues to challenge us around the edges. And the organizations looking for more than UX theater are still creating new opportunities there.</p><p>For those new to the field, it’s surely disconcerting to see its elders handwringing over its direction, like an airline pilot announcing that maybe Albuquerque isn’t the best destination for this flight after all. But it’s a sign of the field’s health that questions of its values and intentions are even being raised from within. An actual erosion of the field’s values would be marked by considerably less self-awareness.</p><p>The truth is that UX is now far too big to be considered a single community or even a single set of methods or practices. It used to sort of mean something about an organization that it even had a UX team. Now it can mean anything, or nothing at all. UX now means whatever organizations choose it to mean, for better or worse. For those still fighting the good fight for hearts and minds, influencing how that meaning gets defined is now the heart of the challenge.</p>
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