Designing Relationships (Web3 edition)
Value / Utility / Synthetic
Web3 is dynamic and adaptable, like mycelial networks. In a mycelial network, fungal fibers grow, divide, and merge as needed, creating new connections. Likewise, in Web3, nodes can join when needed, opening the door to spontaneous associations. ‘Spontaneous’ implies organic, swift, and everchanging fun compared to Web2. Yet its effect on behaviors and the relationship between brands, users, and communities suggests a massive change in our discipline.
I have previously written about the relationship being the ultimate goal for design and that our role is staging and minding two-way flows between business, user, and communities. Web3 makes that perspective even more significant, and here’s why:
Tangible Value
A decentralized network allows its players to generate new value together without the facilitation of a central authority, furthering the relationship. So far, commercial experimentation online has focused on participation. Blockchain brings transparency and symmetry to brand-user relationships, opening the door to mutually profitable partnerships. There are already early applications that invite users to design, distribute and profit from sales of their creations (see Swoosh.Nike.)
Value generation is central to business, so this offshoot of Web3 impacts everything. Regarding design, it should drive us to fundamentally rethink our approach to business models, ‘user’ relationships, product design and production, media and content, distribution, etc. Most brands today are positioned around aspirations and ambition, which reflects where their value-added lies. Moving from participation to partnership demands a change in purpose. What will drive those relationships is currency: creds by association, but also ownership and profit.
Takeaway: More inclusive relationships, bonded by tangible value and purpose. The possibility of distributing profit among business, individual, and community.
Aggregated utility
In a decentralized web, meaningful aspects of the user experience will be beyond our control — read: channel, journey, timing. Without a central destination, interaction occurs when and where the users happen to be and more critically while doing whatever they happen to be doing.
As a stage, web3 is a place where everything becomes an adjacency, so everything must connect with anything else. Combined utility will become the onramp to relevance, value, and, ultimately, relationship.
I recently asked students to ideate a future where shopping happens without a shop. The ideas they generated reveal a potential for accelerating retail innovations and disruption. Shop while watching a movie, and Netflix, perhaps in collaboration with costume designers and fashion brands, becomes a retailer. Shop while people-watching and be credited for your mined data to become a community curator.
Crossing categories is a typical innovation method (e.g., Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or Nike and Apple.) However, the ability to cross any two, at any moment, anywhere, can lead us to substantially more individual-centric web experiences based on new use patterns.
Takeaway: Business — Individual partnerships centered around productivity. Those collaborations become the platform for innovation and growth.
Synthetic Systems
In a recent conference, Lauren Loprete presented their view that “Design systems are culture change disguised as a UI kit.” Behavior change is an aggregate of the quest for the next and the tools we create to make it happen.
The new associations discussed above will require new protocols and applications. They will also breed new behaviors and use patterns. But the most drastic that Web3 brings is the tilt toward generative design systems.
Generative design starts with language and processes rather than databases and objects. It can address the need for immediate/spontaneous design responses in a way that the hierarchical approaches in widespread use today never could.
In a decentralized web, our only alternative is to speak the machine’s language. Our main design challenge will be creating synthetic systems that allow us to retain authorship and direction, while the computer produces solutions. Programs that search for flexibility in brand design (e.g., Casa da Musica, Whitney Museum) are experiments that reveal the use of language and parameters to process design solutions in response to any given context.
Takeaway: Relationships rooted in new behaviors, facilitated by original, experimental, and open languages and mediated by AI. Algorithm-based, synthetic systems.
If you enjoyed reading this article, share it with a friend and follow the Bye Bye, Bauhaus publication here to find out about upcoming interviews and collaborations.
Designing Relationships (Web3 edition) was originally published in Bye bye, Bauhaus. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.