Designing for and against the manufactured normalcy field (2012)

5 hours ago

Venkatesh Rao's concept of the Manufactured Normalcy Field (MNF) describes how people maintain a sense of a static, continuous present when adopting new technology, changing their mental models minimally.
Two forms of minimal change in cultural practice: creating stories/metaphors to map new experiences to familiar ones (e.g., smartphone as phone metaphor) and intentional design choices to de-emphasize strangeness (e.g., air travel normalization).
User experience design's role is to manufacture normalcy for product success by reducing technological potential's disruption, rather than emphasizing radical innovation.
In a FOO camp brainstorming session, participants categorized items into 'Things That Feel Weird' (e.g., self-driving cars), 'Things That Feel Normal' (e.g., refrigerators), and 'Things That We Use To Feel About Things' (e.g., anthropomorphism).
The session explored design strategies: normalizing weird technologies by making them familiar and 'denormalizing' or 'weirding' normal things to make them exciting again (e.g., reimagining earth's orientation).
Ze Frank's episode and viewer comments demonstrated 'weirding' everyday objects (e.g., thermos, computers), aligning with Object-Oriented Ontology's flat ontology, where all materials exist equally.
Comments highlighted parallels to defamiliarization in literary theory and debates on balancing familiarity with novelty in design, emphasizing the humanities' role in technology insights.

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