WhatBurningManShowedMe:WeHearYou,WeSeeYou,DoWeLoveYou?
Whether in digital concepts or everyday life: The simplest solutions are often the most difficult. Two simple questions kept running through my mind on the way to Burning Man: How do you live for ten days in the desert? And what will this life look like without a smartphone, internet, and sense of time? The first answer was simple: Always piss clear. The second was even more surprising: I missed nothing. But when you've fished the last bite of bacon from the ashes of Burning Man, another question arises: What of all this do you carry over into life, into everyday life?
There's an insight that many misunderstand: Although at Burning Man every second person is doing something with Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Sandbox, or the next start-up venture stuff, the event is as analog as a punch in the face. The Black Rock City TedX won't deliver any best-case blah-blah. Sure, you can fly in from San Francisco for 300 dollars, try to network in an air-conditioned tent, and bring home photos with great filters. But the real insights for your life and work lie beneath the surface. They come unexpectedly, like a sandstorm, where suddenly you see nothing around you and feel as if someone has unplugged your world.
When reporting on Burning Man, you can't really share experiences or impressions. And yet, I found the principles very relevant for working on digital projects. Because it's also about connecting, interacting, and creating unique, inspiring experiences for people.
Radical Inclusion
Anyone can be a part of Burning Man. No prerequisites exist for participation in the community.
An analogy to the potentially infinite user target group of digital products. It forces us to focus without excluding people. Therefore, we should always conceptualize the user as the Product Owner of our solutions. Being radical here means analyzing to the core. Resisting our own dogmas. Validating ideas.
Giving
Burning Man is devoted to acts of giving. The value of giving is unconditional. Giving does not contemplate a return or an exchange.
Such a simple thought, so often disregarded. How often does a website promise much and deliver almost nothing? How often does boring, redundant content waste our time? How often do we give away our user data for nothing but a boring newsletter?
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of giving our community seeks to create environments that are unmediated by sponsorships, transactions, and advertising.
A statement, especially towards online media and advertising that steal our time without giving anything valuable back. Corporate sites should also be examined under this principle.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover,moving their body and rely upon inner strengths.
The learning here? No matter what you do, the users of your site, app, or digital installation will always be alone. No matter how great a 'call-to-action' can help you. Enabling (and making it attractive for) the user to explore and discover things is the fundamental task.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine the content.
You will not truly reach a user if you do not understand which product and experience best suit their needs. And truly respect them.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art and various methods of communication. Okay, we don't need to emphasize the insights provided by this rule, do we?
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate those responsibilities
No digital solution exists in a vacuum. Do the right thing - but what could that be? We should remember that technological progress is at the heart of our job. And sometimes it even has the potential to influence society. We should appreciate that - and not neglect it.
Leaving No Trace
We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Oh dear. We could design with fewer bright pixels to save electricity. But otherwise, leaving no trace in the digital realm, what could that mean? I think it's again a mix of a structured user experience and a design that delights users and doesn't add to the digital landfill.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation.
Involvement is the keyword. Involving people in product development and iterative prototyping. Participation is agile; it is not done once and then checked off. It's more a matter of dosage, which should be decided based on one's strategy and objectives: An inspiring persona? A focus group? Qualitative analysis or representative user study? At its core, measuring and adapting must be cyclical components of every project. Unfortunately, this is usually the hardest to convey to the client - as you start with more questions than answers.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
To put it bluntly: We should design the digital world in such a way that we overcome barriers instead of erecting new ones. We should reflect and enhance reality to create immediate, exciting experiences. Yes, in the end, the simplest things are the hardest to achieve.
Photos: axelkippenberg.de