What does it mean to create something that seems authentic? I’ve been pondering that since listening to an episode of The Allusionist podcast that was titled Verisimilitude. In it, Helen Zaltzman interviewed David Peterson about the languages he created for Game of Thrones. This wasn’t my first encounter with Peterson — a niece had gifted me a much appreciated copy of The Art of Language Invention a few years ago (go read it). Besides the fact that learning more about language always entices me, this podcast focused on what makes constructed languages seem “real.” They key, according to Peterson, is that what makes something real isn’t making it perfect, it is in fact the flaws that make it real.
The idea that reality is imperfect should not be surprising to anyone. But it made me wonder why we aim for perfect design and perfect solutions. No matter what we do it will always be flawed for someone anyway. And then at EPIC2019, ken anderson took the stage to talk about AI, and asked “it is an imperfect world, when did we start expecting technology to be perfect?” He was riffing on a paper he wrote with Carl DiSalvo, Maria Bezaitis, and Sue Faulkner in which they explicitly call out the limitations of these systems, highlighting it with a story of how a particular sheriff’s department uses facial recognition software by algorithmically creating a limited set of suspects that is reviewed by detectives, which they note, “assumes the system isn’t perfect, just as the sheriff’s deputies aren’t perfect,
and so sets in place a series of procedures to account for [non]human frailties.”
If imperfection and inconsistency is part of our world, why do we create idealized images? Who hasn’t seen a TV episode set in the 1960’s that shows everyone in tie dye? I was impressed that in the parts of the recent Captain Marvel movie that were set in the 1990’s, people were also driving cars from the 70’s and 80’s (perhaps it is easier to recreate a remembered past). But even in recreating the past humans tend to idealize. When I did my Master’s degree I took courses on the archaeology of buildings that focused on understanding the “accretions of history” that combined to bring a structure into the present day. And yet people want to rebuild or recreate buildings to appear as they were at an arbitrarily presumed perfect point in time.
We arguably do this even more when looking to the future. Most science fiction movies set in the future (dystopia aside) present us with smooth, consistent architecture and technology. And yet every day we are creating the future, in big and small ways. Giant immediate leaps are rare, and as I type on my computer and look around my office there are also pens and pencils, notebooks and even a few business cards. Evolution and change happen but these inconsistencies are real. And there is power in them as well, though I admit I don’t always know how to best harness and combine the old and the new, the human and machine, or even which imperfections we should design “with” rather than design “out.”
Designing with imperfections means acknowledging them. At times, this means truly making them part of the system, as I’ve argued for in terms of positive friction. But it can also mean designing so that the imperfections are accounted for, such as the sheriff’s office balancing the use of human and computer intelligences. In my current role working with government digital services, it is acceptance that no system will easily address all the needs of every user, and making informed decisions both about the prioritizes for the system, and about how those not as well served by that system will be taken care of. The inevitability of imperfection is not an excuse for bad design — it is a stimulus to be more creative and inclusive and to think outside the constraints of the system.