Architecting digital spaces
Discover more from Tender Buttons by Rebecca Mqamelo
When I was 17, I was lucky enough to attend an international debate competition in Ploiești (“ploy-esh-tee”), a small-ish town in southern Romania whose chief economic activity is oil production. Odd memories from the trip: a McDonald’s security guard carrying what looked like an AK47; my team and I walking the streets in the dead of night, tired and irritable from the day’s heat, the N-word delivered doppler-style from a screeching car; the bewildered faces of the hotel staff shortly after check-in, when it was discovered one of our rooms had shit smeared all over the walls; the impressive smoking habit of most of the participants at our debate tournament. In other words, the whole trip was peak Eastern Europe.
I remember Ploiești as a maze of grey concrete blocks separated by too-wide streets, everywhere the signs of modernization fighting the oppressive presence of old Soviet architecture. It felt like Orwellian doublespeak in material form – those monolithic apartment blocks were designed to homogenize and alienate, the state buildings a constant reminder of those in charge.
Sometimes, as is often the case with brutalist Soviet architecture, we look around and suddenly realize that the constructed space around us is just frighteningly ugly. We think, “how on earth was this allowed to happen?” Say what you want about the merits of brutalism, but scenes like this do not inspire the better nature of our souls:
Increasingly, I have found myself asking the same question about our constructed digital spaces. How did our online public forums become so thoroughly, irrevocably, enshittified? There’s a general air of misery about what the internet has become, a healthy dose of anger, and a slither of hope that this all means things must surely change.
Why the architectural metaphor is important
Philosophers and practitioners of architecture have long studied the relationship between physical spaces and ritual, ritual and the creation of culture, culture and the embodiment of thought.
It’s why, as a complete novice to the field, one of the first things you learn is that architecture is an irreducible mode of thinking in its own right. It’s not just about spatial representation, symbols and pretty buildings, but a literal medium for sensemaking.
This point is crucial if anything that follows is to make sense. For most of us, our experience of the aesthetics of technology – what a website looks like or the design of our VR headset – is limited to how things look. The age of user-centered design got us thinking about how things are experienced, albeit in a rather two-dimensional way. “Experience” is often defined through the lens of a single user whose raison d’etre, according to (or in spite of) the so-called “digital architects” somehow always ends up being customer lifetime value.
Today, we increasingly turn to community-centered design, where digital architecture is primarily concerned with network effects.
Architecting responsibly
Digital spaces are an urban geography in their own right. The trouble is, most of our online spaces are monopolized by entities ultimately trying to sell us a product. As a result, those spaces similarly embody the same Orwellian doublespeak that characterized the Soviet era. We are told we can use them for building connection and community, but we are simultaneously asked to pay to prove our reputational worth and affronted with advertising we don’t want to see. There are too many competing agendas – what should be public space really serves private interests, and as a result the architecture feels oppressively deceptive.
“What I’m interested in is deep aesthetics: the universal or near-universal forms that elicit deep, subconscious positive or negative emotional responses. These deep aesthetics are changing, too, but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with rapid technological, political, and social upheaval around us.”
– Lane Rettig, on the importance of studying digital aesthetics
But the good news is that something akin to urban planning is seeping its way into the digital realm. For example, Lane Rettig explores what it will take to design for trust in an age where we have been jaded by aesthetic deception – who is and isn’t human, how do we bring high fidelity to online reputation, what are appropriate symbols for shared values, and to what degree should we be able to assert ownership and customization over our online spaces?
Towards beauty
I think a large part of why we’re so unhappy with our digital spaces is that the people designing them don’t really see themselves as urban planners. It’s a metaphor that occasionally floats around without much acknowledgment that it has altogether ceased to be a metaphor.
If designers, product managers and engineers are really digital urban planners, this calls for a totally different way of relating to the work.
And so we must ask ourselves, where are the landscape architects, the gardeners, the urban designers of our digital geographies? What will it take to make these spaces beautiful once more?
Some resources
If, like me, you’re interested in architectural philosophy, I cannot recommend The Architectural Imagination by HarvardX highly enough. Spend a week or a month going through the courses, you won’t regret it.
Kernel’s open source curriculum is an incredible resource for anyone interested in how designing digital spaces will change with the introduction of decentralized data storage and economics. From studying money through the lens of linguistics and culture to understanding, truly, how trust is constructed in complex systems, it’s the most sincere, philosophical exploration of web3 there is.
Are.na has been described as playground of ideas, a garden for your brains, Pinterest for intellectuals. Whatever it is, it’s well worth exploring (and using).