#166 Performative humanity
+ an iconic coffee maker and lots of links ☕️
Hello! This week I am sharing some thoughts on the emerging design problem of proving human-ness in a world bursting at the seams with AI. We are also admiring a beautiful (and highly caffeinated) mid-century Italian design icon.
As always lot of great design links to get stuck into at the end of the newsletter 🤲
Something to think about: Performative humanity
AI is everywhere these days but the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more unpopular it seems to get. Caught in a grudging embrace with the technology, in turns reliant, frustrated and anxious, the crowd of our all-too-human emotions surrounding it is shaping culture, design very much included.
One of the interesting side-effects of our antipathy towards AI is a design trend I’m calling performative humanity. Simply put, this is the use of design choices to overtly perform the human-ness of a product or brand. Now, every company will already tell you that it wants to come across as human, but with synthetic content now everywhere human-ness has to be performed in a more outlandish and theatrical way than was necessary in the past. A friendly typeface and a conversational tone of voice just don’t cut it any more. Instead, like trendy East London bakery Jolene, you need to think about getting a child to draw your logo or blowing your Times Square billboard budget on something like this.
Performative humanity is easier to perform in the real world, not least because this is where actual flesh and blood humans can be found. Among IRL products this trend often manifests sensuously, in heavier material choices that have a handmade touch, even deliberate production mistakes. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many thousands of dollars BODE will charge you for a quilted jacket that looks like it has been repeatedly (and rather scrappily) repaired.
The performance of human-ness gets much harder however the moment you slide over into the digital realm. We’re all trained now to sniff out anything with the gelatinous smoothness of an AI image, or the trademark negative parallelisms of AI writing. Online we have been taught to trust no-one and nothing and so people, brands and products must perform even more extravagantly to persuade us there are real humans on the other side of the pixels. There’s a fascinating micro-trend on TikTok for example of creators making videos that overtly show their hands because these body parts are so hard for AI video creation tools to accurately depict.
To perform their human-ness, some digital products have also leant into the handmade and personal like the legitimately charming One Year app does, or the raw and unpolished like Are.na has. I wrote earlier this year in more detail about the range of moves software designers have been making to bring personality back to our screens. This digital performance of human-ness, of course, is somewhat of an arms race, with our best efforts quickly copied by the machines and thereby made redundant. I expect to see ever more wild experimentation over the coming year to keep ahead.
Design takeaway: How does your design perform its human-ness?
💥 For the complete opposite, see ‘Slopcore’
Something nice: Moka Express
Before the Moka Express arrived in 1933, home coffee-making was a patchwork of slow, cumbersome rituals. Italians used the Neapolitan flip pot, a charming but awkward device that required heating, flipping, and waiting for gravity to drip water through the grounds. It made a gentle, often weak brew and left sediment at the bottom of the cup. Percolators, common elsewhere, boiled water repeatedly through the grounds, producing scorched, bitter coffee. Turkish-style brewing demanded constant attention and skill, and early espresso machines—already beloved in cafés—were enormous industrial contraptions, far beyond the reach of domestic life.
The engineer Alfonso Bialetti was inspired to tackle the challenge of espresso quality coffee for the home by a laundry device used by his wife Ada called a Lessiveuse. This featured a tub with a central steel tube through which water would rise once boiling, ensuring soap was distributed evenly throughout the clothes. Bialetti realised his own engineering problem was similar and worked for several years to make a miniature stovetop version from aluminum that would work with coffee grounds instead of soap.
He called his invention the Moka Express, named after the Yemeni city of Mokha and its celebrated coffee. Working by simple steam pressure alone it required no flipping, no watching, no finesse at all in fact. Its octagonal shape made it durable and cheap to cast, bringing the beloved espresso into working-class kitchens across Italy. It is a testament to the strength of the design that it has changed so little in nearly one hundred years of manufacture.
Design takeaway: Does your design problem look similar to one from another domain?
🥢 In Design Lobster #150 we explored examples of humble but timeless Japanese design
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What I’ve been reading
I’ve lived through a few major shifts in how we design products, but this moment feels different. It directly addresses a frustration I’ve carried for years: design systems made it easier to ship UI, but not necessarily better experiences. Back in 2020, I wrote that a design system that helps you efficiently ship a confusing interface has no value, and that our foundations weren’t enough to support truly user-centered experiences. At the time, that felt more aspirational than practical.
Today, it finally feels possible.
This is quite a technical read but probably the most concrete thinking I’ve seen about how a contextually driven interface powered by AI might actually work (and why we might want it). I welcome how down-to-earth Perez-Cruz’s writing is on a topic which tends to get incredibly hand-wavey.
Are we just “solving problems”? Are we just fixing things? I don’t view design as a plumbing profession. What we deal with goes far beyond only black-on-white areas; in fact, it’s mostly grey. Design evolves in countless ways, and reducing it to mere problem-solving is far too shallow.
I really enjoyed this zine by Itay Dreyfuss which features interviews with loads of niche software creators. Loads of cool projects and thoughtful meditations on craft.
As I experiment more with AI tools, what strikes me most is how short the distance has become between conception and completion. An idea flickers in your mind, you type a few prompts, and voilà: an image, a song, a poem, a video, even a book.
Why does this bother me? Because creativity should pull and push you. It needs friction.
In the last issue of Design Lobster I lamented the way that chatbot conversations often felt like a battle to keep the AI from doing the rest of a task for you (badly). Botsman’s essay is very articulate on this and related issues and worth reading.
Have a performatively human week,
Ben 🦞
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I think an existential threat every now and again is good for us as a species 😆