The big flattening
Our digital experiences have lost their senses
Hey Internet friends,
Our (maybe) bi-weekly rendezvous is here again.
I’ve been calling it digital gardening, though I’m not the most consistent gardener. But maybe that’s okay.
Your precious inputs on the Google Form really stayed with me. It made me reflect on the urgency of embracing a slower, more conscious approach, not just with AI, but with technology in general.
Lately, I’ve been haunted by a post on social media.
It caught my attention.
As the image suggests, I began speculating about how we engage with the physical world through touch, listening, movement, and hearing, realizing that our digital experiences have drifted from that.
Everything now feels…flatter. Muted. Filtered through glass. Reduced to text, buttons, pixels.
Sure, our interfaces have become more elegant, minimal, and sleek. But what did we lose along the way? I'm not here to dismiss the progress design has made, or deny the quiet beauty of a less-is-more approach. I resonate with it, too. But I want to ask you and myself this question as pure design speculation:
What is the end goal of any digital product? Is it just to convert? To guide us to a call to action? To sell? Or is there a deeper meaning related to our emotional intelligence and the way we perceive these experiences as human beings?
As a non-professional digital designer, I’d really love to hear from product designers on this. Drop a comment if you have thoughts. And I’m not just talking about websites here, I would like to open the conversation to the ecosystem of digital artifacts.
Instead of obsessing over reducing everything down, we should start thinking about our digital experiences as reflections of our physical lives.
And those lives? They’re anything but minimal. They’re chaotic constellations of emotion, people, relationships, and sensations.
How can you possibly flatten that? And more importantly, should we even try? Because life is messy. It contradicts itself. It surprises you.
And I wonder why we are still trying to simplify that into grids and clean animations?
The interface is supposed to be the bridge between humans and machines.
And yet lately, it feels like we’re shaping ourselves to fit the machine, shrinking to meet its logic, instead of designing the interface to reflect how we move, think, and feel. And I'm not just talking about UI. This goes for everything: storytelling, photography, visuals, motion.
Design has become obsessed with perfectionism. With the right layout, the right tone, the right crop. We stopped asking:
What was the intention?
Where are we in this? Our contradictions? Our bodies? Once, using a computer was a full-body experience. You punched cards, flipped switches. You choreographed logic with your hands.
Then came the terminal typed commands, less touch, more abstraction.
Then GUIs gave us some tactility back: sliders, buttons, folders. We peeked into the digital from the edge of the physical. We still pushed disks into drives. Hit the big power buttons.
Then came touchscreens. We poked. We pinched. We zoomed. Beautiful. But now? `I think we’re stuck in the Flatland again. Behind glass. And now we’re letting AI do the flattening even more.
We type prompts. No more dragging sliders or trying things out.
Just describe what you want and ✨poof✨ perfect image. Perfect text.
No friction. No effort. No disagreement. No one is telling you, “Hmm, that doesn’t quite work” or even “I don’t know.”AI always knows.
But real experiences require effort. Time. Discomfort. Trial. Error. Mistakes.
Think about using a real pencil. It’s not just the line, it’s the feel of graphite on paper. The pressure. The sound. The ache in your wrist. The shifting of your body. That’s what’s disappearing. That’s what we need to bring back. Not to romanticize analog, but to re-embody the digital.
To create space for getting it wrong. For awkward keyframes. For weird transitions. For the joy of surprise. Of deviation. Because beauty often lives in those odd moments. And yet our digital tools, powered by AI, are actively erasing that. Smooth curves. Soft gradients. No noise. No friction.
But what if we left that one weird frame in the animation, just to see where it might lead? What if we built tools that sometimes decided to stop?
To breathe? To think?
What if software could be introverted?
Just got this lovely newsletter in my inbox, and I think it brings an interesting point from a writer's perspective.
Human expression is not one-dimensional.
We speak in double meanings. Our tone carries subtext. Our bodies communicate what words don’t. Our gestures say more than our syntax. And AI is trying to flatten all of that into one precise response.
But what if we fed it differently?
To rebuild our digital world, we need to investigate, speculate, and design with the awareness that we are never separate from context. We’re not isolated users, we’re sensing beings, embedded in layered environments, both physical and digital.
Even online, we respond with more than just our eyes.
We listen while we look. We feel while we read. Our senses overlap, bleed into one another. Sometimes we even smell a memory while speaking a thought.
Digital experiences shouldn’t flatten that; they should hold it.
Design should acknowledge that we’re not just clicking, we’re perceiving, associating, and intuiting.
Here are three practices I’m trying to follow while speculating around our relationship with AI and technology, and maybe they’ll resonate with you too:
Feed AI inputs coming from different disciplines.
Don’t limit it to clean prompts or ephemeral chats.
Feed it fragments from books, dreams, and overheard conversations. Let it misinterpret. That’s where magic starts: metaphors, mistakes, unexpected bridges. But keep in mind to never ask AI for advice on something you are not familiar with, because you need to be able to evaluate its output and stimulate a conversation. AI can also learn from you.Read the design like a landscape
When you interact with a digital artifact, whether it’s a film, an image, or a website, try to tune into the ambient signals behind it. What context was it created in? Where was the movie shot? What’s the background of the designer, the photographer, the team behind it?Ask AI about the people and processes that shaped these works, not just to extract facts, but to open up different angles of interpretation. Let your context, your curiosity, guide the way you explore.
Start from the senses, not the structure
When you design an interface, or any layered digital experience, start by thinking in a multisensory way, even before you get to structure or layout. Components aren’t just buttons. They’re digital echoes of physical actions, responses to imagined gestures in an imagined space. They carry weight, texture, and rhythm. Some respond with a vibration. Others create a pause.
Ask yourself:
What’s my emotional response to this?
Until next time
L