Some Things Need a Soul

On efficiency, human-centred design and what happens when we optimise the person out of the experience.

I have a bit of a vendetta against the modern supermarket.

Actually, that's a lie. It's a fairly substantial red-hot rage. I could write an entire article about Coles and Woolworths alone, but for everyone's sake I won't. The whole experience just feels a bit shit.

You walk in, and the music is too loud, the store is messy, the produce has seen better days, and somehow four things for dinner have cost you $87. Then you arrive at the checkout and begin what can only be described as your unpaid shift.

You scan your own groceries, pack your own bags and try not to look suspicious while a tiny security camera provides a lovely little live stream of your face from the least flattering angle imaginable. There are security tags on meat, nappies and baby formula. The dog food needs to be scanned first, there are people monitoring the self-checkouts, sensors monitoring the bags and gates monitoring the exit. The machine inevitably decides something is wrong, starts flashing and yelling thief, thief, thief, okay maybe not that last bit, I digress, you then stand there waiting for someone to come over and confirm that yes, you have in fact paid for the avocado. You get the picture.

And after all of that, I can't help wondering: who exactly is this experience efficient for? I think about things like this a lot more since studying service design.

I was drawn to service design because I was already interested in the human side of design. I love graphic design - I love making things, colour, typography, getting overly invested in whether something should move three millimetres to the left - but I've always really enjoyed the problem-solving part too. Give me something complicated, let me work out the best way forward, and I'm pretty happy.

Once I started studying it, I realised service design wasn't actually as far removed from graphic design as I'd imagined. You're still solving a problem; you've just zoomed out. Instead of asking how something should look or how an idea should be communicated, you might be asking how an entire service should work. Now there are policies and procedures and people and technology and about seventeen things that can potentially go wrong.

Which, apparently, I find exciting.

In my second class, we talked about the rollout of new Myki strategies across Melbourne. The scale of it made my brain light up. You have the technology itself, then the software, the installation, legal requirements, communication, accessibility, risk, and thousands of people who all need to understand and use the thing without Melbourne collectively losing its mind on a Monday morning.

I remember thinking, ohhhh. This is design too.

Even my event management degree - which had been sitting in a dark, dusty corner of my brain - suddenly started making sense again. All that risk analysis, contingency planning and thinking through everything that could possibly go wrong with an event was useful here too. Where will people go? What happens if this fails? What's Plan B when Plan A goes completely to shit?

Apparently, I have accidentally spent years studying different ways to worry about things professionally.

But that's also where all these seemingly different disciplines started to overlap. The thing I was worrying about might change - an event, a design brief, an entire service - but there was always a person at the other end of it. Someone had to understand it, use it, move through it or, ideally, not be completely frustrated by it.

And I think that's probably the simplest way I understand human-centred design now. It considers the human. Revolutionary, I know. More specifically, it considers how being inside an experience actually feels.

I really don't think everything needs to be effortless. In fact, I'm starting to think our obsession with making everything frictionless can be part of the problem. Sometimes things take a few steps. That's okay, that's life, that’s real. I recently renewed my passport, and there was nothing particularly exciting about it… It took a few days, and I had to leave my house. Tragic.

But it was a genuinely good experience. Everything worked the way I expected it to, the instructions made sense, and nothing made me want to throw my laptop out the window. I filled out the forms, went to the post office, paid the eye-watering amount a new passport apparently costs these days, and a few days later I had a new passport. Lovely.

I've had the same little revelation selling clothes on Vinted recently. Someone buys something, they pay the postage, I get the mailing slip, pack the order and send it. Done. The technology takes care of the annoying little logistical bit in the background and lets me get on with my life.That's the kind of efficiency I love.

Take away the boring bit. Please. Take all of it.

But there are other moments where the supposedly unnecessary bit is actually the bit I want to keep.When I order clothes from Zara, for example, they arrive wrapped in tissue paper. It's completely unnecessary. It takes somebody longer to pack it, it uses another material, and I'm sure there's a spreadsheet somewhere that would happily tell us how many seconds could be saved by getting rid of it.

But I love opening it.

The thing I've paid $100 for suddenly feels like I've paid $1,000 for it. There's a tiny moment of theatre. Somebody thought beyond getting the product from the warehouse to the front door and considered what happens when I actually open the box.

Our local greengrocer gives me a similar feeling in a completely different way. They play classical music. Everything is clean. The produce is beautiful. There are interesting little brands and good specials tucked around the shop, and then - wild concept incoming - an actual person serves you.

We walk out with a 1kg bag of oranges that cost four dollars, and I'm delighted with myself. Hell yes. Look at my oranges.Nothing about that experience is groundbreaking. There isn't an app, nobody is scanning my face, a robot hasn't selected the perfect zucchini for me.

It's just nice, and I think we've started undervaluing nice. Which is why the supermarket example bothers me so much. It's not because I hate technology or think we should smash every self-checkout with a hammer and return to bartering for turnips. It's because the system seems to have been designed around one kind of efficiency while creating a worse experience for the person actually using it.

Reduce cashiers. Introduce self-checkout. Theft goes up. Add cameras. Add sensors. Add security tags. Add gates. Add staff to supervise the machines that replaced the staff. At some point you have to wonder whether we're still solving the original problem or just building increasingly elaborate solutions to the problems created by the previous solution.

And perhaps the question we should have asked somewhere in the middle was: how do people feel using this? I find myself thinking about that beyond services too. I love looking at old shops, homes, clothing, packaging and objects from the 1950s and 60s. And no, before anyone panics, I am not suggesting society peaked in 1956. There is plenty we can leave firmly in the past, thank you.

But there is something about the care that fascinates me. A beautiful shop window didn't need to exist. Someone designed it anyway. Stock could simply be placed on a shelf, but somebody arranged it beautifully. Clothes had strange little details and trims. Homes had built-in shelves, odd corners and things designed specifically for the people who would use them.

There seemed to be room for design for design's sake. Now everything feels increasingly measured against speed. Can we make it faster? Can we automate it? Can we reduce the labour? Can we generate it? Can we scale it? Can you design that in five minutes?

And look, I am absolutely implicated here, I'm a commercial designer, I have deadlines, I have budgets, I work with suppliers. Sometimes I have an idea I adore and discover it costs an obscene amount to manufacture, so back to reality I go. Sometimes I need to make a decision quickly because there simply isn't another week to lovingly stare at it.

That's work. That's life. But I don't want fast to become synonymous with good. And with AI now sitting somewhere inside practically every conversation about creativity and efficiency, I find myself thinking about this even more.

I use AI. I know even admitting that as a creative can sometimes feel like an invitation to prepare for the pitchforks, but I genuinely love using it to better my own understanding of something. If I'm trying to learn a new program, untangle a ridiculous coding problem, or I've got one incredibly specific Illustrator issue and somehow there isn't a book, YouTube video or twelve-year-old forum post on the internet that can give me the answer, it's brilliant.

That's where I love it. I use it as another tool for learning - a way into a subject, a second explanation when the first one hasn't clicked, or a helping hand when I've hit a technical roadblock. The thinking, questioning and deciding what to do with that information is still mine. If anything, it gives me more room to do that.

Do I need it everywhere? God, no, I don't need an AI assistant popping up in every app I open, and I certainly don't need one helping me navigate Bunnings, I am quite capable of finding the paint aisle myself, thank you very much. I think this is where the conversation around efficiency gets interesting, because some friction is actually quite good.

Wrapping something beautifully takes longer, talking to an actual person takes longer, wandering around a shop and finding something you weren't looking for isn't particularly efficient either, but I don't want to rush through every experience just because we can.

What are we actually saving all this time for? maybe those aren't problems waiting to be solved.

I'm becoming much more interested in which friction we're removing, and what disappears along with it. If technology saves me three hours of tedious admin or helps me through something I've been banging my head against, fantasti, give me those three hours back so I can think, draw, make something, talk to someone or ideally;  lie in the sun reading a book.

That feels like progress to me.

But - If it saves me three hours only for the expectation to become that I should now produce another three hours' worth of stuff, I'm less convinced we've achieved anything, and if we're removing the slower, stranger, slightly inconvenient parts of life that give us creativity, conversation, discovery, craft or care, perhaps they weren't inefficiencies in the first place, i think maybe we've misunderstood what the good bit actually was.

Maybe that's what studying service design has changed most for me. I still think like a graphic designer, I still want the moodboard first because obviously that's the fun bit,  I still care enormously about colour and typography and whether something is beautiful.

I've just started looking further around it. What happens before someone gets here? What happens afterwards? What problem are we actually solving? Did we accidentally create another one? Does the technology help the person or the business? Could this be easier? Should it be easier? And, perhaps most importantly, how does it feel?

I don't think everything needs to be slow, handmade or wrapped in tissue paper. God knows I don't have the time for that either.I just don't want us to get so good at making things faster that we forget to ask whether we're making them better. Because when I think about the objects, places and experiences I really love, they almost always have one thing in common.

Somewhere along the way, somebody cared.

And I think you can feel when they didn't.