No Smoking / No Scrolling

In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman defines the “fundamental psychological design concepts” of Affordances and Signifiers. 

• Affordances: the relationship between a product and a person; how a thing can be used; what it can be used for.
• Signifiers: clues about how the thing can be used; signs, marks, sounds, indicators that communicate the intended relationship between a product and person. 

For example, a door affords passage. A door’s signifier tells you whether to push or pull.

A lot has been written about the addictive properties of smartphones. We could draw an analogy to smoking: both can be addictive and harmful. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes how social media “even harms adolescents who do not use it.” Like second-hand smoke, but more prevalent: Haidt makes the point that at the peak of teen smoking, two-thirds of teens did not smoke; today, virtually three-thirds of teens smoke smartphones, with a high potency of social media.

When the public became aware of the dangers of smoking, and mobilized against its use in public places, No Smoking signs went up to communicate where that behavior was not permissible. Today, in the US, we don’t need (and typically no longer see) No Smoking signs. Norms are now well established. It would be a bizarre social faux pas to light up inside a public place.

We need to establish new norms of smartphone use in our shared spaces (especially the spaces teens live in every day). I look forward to the day when it will be a bizarre social faux pas to pull your phone out and thumb caress it in a public place, like a classroom, or the family dinner table, or a restaurant, or a church. In the meantime, we need signs, in places, that communicate what phone behavior is socially permissible, to everyone sharing that space.

The reason for Analog beacons is as much a design decision as it is a technical decision (more, actually).

Analog as a product is designed to govern the digital affordances of a place, the relationship between people and the analog properties of a physical space.

An Analog beacon signifies, through its visible presence (dimensions, light, sound, etc.) – and as a shared reference point for everyone in that space – an invitation to participate in and an enforcement of digital norms.