A Push and a Pull

My jujutsu instructors would remind us frequently that every effective technique has a push and a pull. Only pushing against a joint for a lock or a throw can get you most of the way there, but it’s clumsy and requires too much force. Only pulling on your opponent’s body, whether his limb or his uniform is simply futile most of the time. Ideally, both forces need to be applied with the correct timing to produce the desired effect.

I think the same concept is useful to help solve the problem of how we might re-embody our lives: technology is the push, design is the pull.

Technology has been used to make things nearly effortless. Driving my Honda CRV is nothing like driving the '65 Ford pickup my grandpa had. (And I don’t want to give up the improvements in safety...) Driving the '65 Ford required engagement and effort due to the manual steering and manual transmission. I think we’re at a point now where we could allow the user to select a little more resistance in the steering and I know that some cars allow you to enter a mode where you “shift manually”. We have riding lawnmowers, of course, and almost all of the walk-behind models are self-propelled. But what if those devices were re-engineered so that a moderate amount of effort was required to use them?

The second example doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? I think that’s where design comes in: inviting the user to play. Take, for example the Qwerkywriter USB keyboard:

It’s retro, yes, but it has 2 knobs! And a carriage return lever! The knobs and carriage return lever can be programmed to do different useful things—they’re not just quaint decorations.

These are just a couple of quick examples to illustrate the larger principles: we can change the way that work shapes us by re-engineering our tools to require a little more physical work and making the design attractive enough to outweigh the perceived inconvenience.

Redesign the effort and invite people to play: a push and a pull.