Designing for Perspectives

We in the west have long had the bad habit of confusing our individual perspective with objective truth. This often shows up in design as “perspective collision” – when something that has been designed reveals the designer’s limitations and biases. This also shows up inside organizations as the “quantification bias” – valuing the measurable over the immeasurable. Global tech ethnographer Tricia Wang traces the roots of perspective collision from 16th century Venice to the Oculus Rift, and shows that in the age of Big Data, designers have to break out from the single-perspective mindset to generate perspective rich contexts, and one way to do do this is to integrate Big Data with what she calls, Thick Data.