I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
In the digital world, you can always go back. There are undo and back buttons everywhere.
For over thirty years, it’s been common wisdom that every digital system needs an undo function. As far as I can tell, this is due to the influence of Jakob Nielsen, the usability pioneer who is most famous for his ten usability heuristics.
The heuristics are best practices or rules of thumb for good design, which Nielsen first wrote about in a paper with Rolf Molich in 1990. The names and definitions of the heuristics have shifted over the years, but at present, number three states:
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
This is true, of course, and for users it is undeniably helpful to be able to undo. While I wrote this article, I used undo (and its neighbors delete, copy and paste) innumerable times. We appreciate being able to resubmit documents, edit social media posts, undo send on an email and so on.
And lately, not only do we have undo for individual actions, but we have robust version control systems for many of our document systems. More than once it’s saved me to be able to jump back to the version of a document from months ago.
Undo is ubiquitous in the digital world—in stark contrast to the physical world, where most of the things we do are irreversible. Time goes in one direction, and you cannot unbreak a glass.
What’s really interesting to me is how undo comes into play in the activities we can do either analog or digital. Take painting, for example. You can paint on canvas or on your iPad. And while you can to some extent “undo” your painting on canvas by wiping, scraping, diluting, etc., it’s harder and less of a sure thing than on the iPad. Wiping, scraping and diluting are not so much going back as going forward in a different direction.
Undo and Human Agency
The Danish artist Marco Evaristti made waves at the turn of the century for his piece Helena. Just the photo of it makes me wriggle a little bit. (You can see it above.)
The work is very simple: a blender, plugged in, filled with water, with a goldfish inside. As it stands, it’s really just an expensive fishbowl. But pressing the button, of course, is lethal to the creature inside.
Helena was first exhibited exactly as described, and visitors could, if they wanted, push the button. At least one did, and then the police came, the museum was fined, and artist was charged with animal cruelty. (Nowadays, if you see Helena in a museum, it’s unplugged.)
The simplicity of this piece belies its moral depth. Just by confronting the piece, a visitor’s own moral agency is highlighted. Anything you do is a choice. Do you push the button, or do you watch as someone else does, or do you moralize about the cruelty of the very existence of the piece, or do you unplug the blender?
Helena makes us wonder what exactly about this piece makes us uneasy (or not). And it invites us to consider other permutations: What if a different creature was in the blender? What if instead of a blender it was a loaded gun?
I like this piece because it highlights our agency by forcing it. We are moral actors, whether we like it or not—most (perhaps all) things we do have moral weight. Many matter very little, sure, but little things add up.
The key fact in Helena is that there is no undo for killing a goldfish. It’s the irreversibility of the action that gives the piece its moral power.
This makes me wonder about undo in our digital systems. According to Nielsen, the availability of undo protects human freedom and agency. It allows users to do what they really want to do, and to change their minds.
But on the other hand, perhaps the availability of undo eviscerates human freedom and agency. If everything can be undone, then all actions are meaningless.
The more we inhabit the digital world, then, the more we may feel that what we do matters very little.
Irreversibility as a Design Decision
So what if there was no undo? What new creative or experiential possibilities could that unlock for digital design?
Creative technologist Beat Rossmy and colleagues at LMU Munich and elsewhere in Germany explored this question in a paper published this year at the CHI conference.
In the paper, they present three speculative digital systems where the user is confronted with the irreversibility of their actions:
A music-making tool inspired by the board game Connect 4, where users drop tokens into slots in a vertical board to compose a track, and the tokens cannot be removed
A social media platform hooked up to a paper shredder preloaded with a photo of the user, where every time the user likes a post on the site, the shredder destroys a little bit of their image, symbolizing that they are giving away bits of their behavioral data
A spider-looking robot that users must punish when it makes an error by physically removing one of its legs
The researchers invited people to use each of these systems and then discuss their experience, and the paper summarizes their takeaways.
Broadly, the researchers found that these systems enable new ways of thinking about the digital world. People immediately grasp what is going on—they apply their understanding of irreversibility in the physical world—as well as its implications. And just like with Evaristti’s Helena, human agency comes to the surface.
These irreversible designs were found to provide opportunities for:
slowing down the user, making them really think before they do an action, thereby increasing mindfulness
sometimes having more fun, at least in the case of music-making
increasing the user’s sense of meaning, seeing as these designs emphasize the finite character of any action
creating narrative—as stories go in one direction and emphasize change over time
considering reuse and repair as we use digital objects—this reminds me of my post from a few months back on products that last
The Illusion of Undo
Besides the inspiration for future irreversible designs, this work reveals another insight. Sometimes when we think there’s an undo in the digital world, there really isn’t.
For instance, you can like a post on social media, and then you can unlike it. It seems to be a clear case of undo. But in the background, hidden from your view, both those interactions have been logged by the platform and will be used to serve ads, train algorithms and so on. These traces of your behavior are bits of personal data that you cannot undo or take back, even if the interface makes it look like you can.
Much of human social life occurs online now, and I wonder what implications undo—and the illusion of undo—will have. We can unsend messages and edit our posts, we can mark things as unread and we can often undelete.
But the reality is that in human interactions, there is no undo. You cannot unsay something you said. I wonder if the generation of people growing up today will struggle with when undo is possible.
Part of living is learning that we will all say things that are stupid or poorly worded sometimes. We will all send an email we shouldn’t have, and we will all hold false beliefs. We will all embarrass ourselves sooner or later. There is no undo. We can only step forward, hopefully with a measure of grace for each other.
Ports of Call
The Musk Biography: I read Walter Isaacson’s new biography, which you’ve probably heard of by now—Elon Musk. The first half was boring and cringe—it smacked of excusing someone’s asinine behavior because he had a difficult childhood and makes a lot of money—and the second half was like rereading the news from the past two years. In my opinion, this review from The Guardian pretty much captures it. But your mileage may vary.
Museum Theft: If you assumed it was difficult or impossible to steal from an art museum, this piece from The Economist will disabuse you of that assumption. Apparently the British Museum in London is experiencing a crisis of thefts (which some point out as poetic justice). I would guess they are not alone!
Running GPS-less: I’m fascinated by cases where people refuse to use a technology that others accept or take as the status quo. One recent example of this is elite runners foregoing GPS watches.
Have a good week!