A Brief Survey of the Unintended Social Consequences of Design
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
ME120 - History and Philosophy of Design |
2019
Stanford, CA |
In our final project for ME120, we were to use design research to investigate a design artifact. Given my extracurricular interest in personal finance and the ubiquity of Venmo, I chose to use Venmo as a case study for the unintended social consequences of design. Three criticisms of Venmo as it is used today are:
- Nickel-and-diming: Teddy Wayne, in his New York Times style column, argues that “not only does [Venmo] encourage pettiness, distilling the messiness of human experience down to a digitally precise data point, but by making it so easy to pay someone back for purchases as trifling as a coffee, the app arguably promotes the libertarian, every-user-for-himself ethos of Silicon Valley” (hint to my fellow Silicon Valley friends: that's not a compliment!)
- Confrontation avoidance: A Fox Business article suggests that Venmo has made millennials “less capable of dealing with problems and relationships because these devices ‘eliminate the amount of vulnerability and connections people have in real life.’”
- FOMO (fear of missing out): the same article criticizes Venmo’s newsfeed, suggesting that Venmo contributes to the negative feeling of FOMO. FOMO through Venmo has become so common that one article describes “Venvy,” a subset of FOMO that results from exclusively from Venmo.
Skills Developed: user surveys, data analysis, data visualization, visual communication, quick turnarounds (all of this was completed in a week!)
Greatest Failure: if I were to reconduct this study, I'd give myself more time so that I could interview people in person and get a responses from a wider population. Most users were in their young 20s - I'd love to compare their responses to those of older Venmo users in the future.
Greatest Moment: having spent time at the beginning to think about the questions I was asking and how to gather the data through a survey, I was happy to see that by the time I was analyzing the data, I wasn't sad to be missing any information. Taking time at the beginning paid off in the end!
Greatest Failure: if I were to reconduct this study, I'd give myself more time so that I could interview people in person and get a responses from a wider population. Most users were in their young 20s - I'd love to compare their responses to those of older Venmo users in the future.
Greatest Moment: having spent time at the beginning to think about the questions I was asking and how to gather the data through a survey, I was happy to see that by the time I was analyzing the data, I wasn't sad to be missing any information. Taking time at the beginning paid off in the end!