We shape our products and our products shape us

Early adopters are the most passionate about technology, but also the most wary of its potential impact. In this talk from Mind the Product 2015, Josh Brewer, formerly Principal Designer at Twitter and Director of UX at Socialcast, starts from Marshall McLuhan’s line: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Brewer argues that product people are responsible for the ramifications of the decisions they make, yet rarely talk about the consequences of the behaviours they create and promote. Quoting Bret Victor, he notes that the technical properties of a medium shape social practice, but we can’t just blame the medium, because human hands created it.

His call is to pay attention and be mindful of the products we build and the effect they might have on users, or as R. Buckminster Fuller put it, to be “the architects of the future, not its victims.”