PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGNING WITH CARE
What we learnt through our comparative research with astrologers and financial forecasters on making predictions.
We propose, five principles for designing with care:
Design for Flexibility and Adaptability through ongoing communication.
Individualised Analysis and person-centric Prediction.
Designing whilst taking into account the biases that are underpinning design decisions.
Design for Active Contribution, Responsibility, and Empowerment.
Design for increasing transparency around the human knowledge involved in building the product or service.
We took these principles to MozFest and got folks to apply them to existing apps. Have a look at some early ideas of what they came up with here. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to write about the different ways in which we can apply these principles and we would love to learn about how you may be applying these to your own practice.
Uncertainty is a given. No one really knows what's going to happen but we do try and we try by collecting past experiences, to help give us a flavour of what may happen in the future.
Whilst working at a financial technology company, that sold market data software to other financial institutions, I noticed that any forecasts that were made, had a level of uncertainty to them too. Whilst progress within data collection, storage and analysis has made leaps and bounds, uncertainty still exists and it may exist as a risk score or statistical significance.
In all honesty, uncertainty scares me too. I know that for others it can be seen as an unexplored opportunity but for me, it's something that I need to prepare for. So, when faced with uncertainty in my personal life, I booked to see an astrologer because I’d always been interested in the occult and alternative viewpoints for understanding/co-existing within the world.
I had hoped that they would tell me all about what was due to come up in my life, when I would fall in love, when my business would boom, whether there were any bad things that were going to happen and what I could then do to prepare for them. Lets just say, things didn’t go quite how i imagined, I mean when do they ever?
My first astrology reading was data driven, the practitioner had asked me for my birth date, time and location. They did a bit of pre-analysis and came to our session with questions for me and a multitude of charts that were a map of being. I found the charts fascinating and reminiscent of the charts that I had seen at the fintech I’d worked in and what I mean by that is that neither of them really made sense to me.
What I also found fascinating was that my astrologer was absolutely not trying to “predict” things in the way that I had imagined (no crystal ball vibes here) but instead, they asked me a lot of questions about myself and what I wanted to get out of our meeting. Over the course of our conversations, they alluded to how things may play out but I discovered that we were making meaning together.
Sometime around 2019 I had this eureka moment that perhaps Astrology is also a data science. If financial data scientists were trying to make sense of vast amounts of data, then how are Astrologers, who also try to make sense and meaning of the movement of celestial bodies and their impact on the people and society, both on a meta and individual level?
At 100kicks we’re always exploring how we can implement an interdisciplinary approach to not only research but also in trying to understand how two very different areas can inform each other's practice.
So, as a fun experiment, we decided to do our own research and explore the idea that Astrology is a type of data science. To take a peek at the research brief we prepared, look here.
Overtime, we interviewed a multitude of Astrologers and also folks that work within finance who deal with both data and a level of forecasting decisions in their roles. The main areas we wanted to explore were centered around:
How practitioners in both these areas develop their expertise and practices.
What tools are used across both these practices and how these have evolved over time.
Thoughts and opinions of folks about each other's practices.
Post conducting these interviews, the analysis started on Miro, its still very much a WIP but you can start checking out some emerging themes here.
A big area that came up for us again and again however, was care and as a result, we made the principles above. Astrology has been around for millennia and gone through many evolutions, with its roots in Astronomy to now having become a tool for self development. So, what can we learn from a tool that was used by Babylonians to predict the best time for war and has tripped over itself enough to learn about the power of prediction?
