On Infantilization in Digital Environments (2015)

I&#x27;m halfway through reading this and, and so far, the main argument I&#x27;m seeing amounts to this: the use of visual art and attention to design is increasing. Making use of artistry in your products or caring about attractive design is infantilization, since kids also happen to potentially find the art and design nice looking because it&#x27;s known that kids like pictures and color (and adults should like something else?). He mentions that making things less offputting to use is infantilization.<p>Does this apply to cars as well? Does adding design elements and any sort of color for reasons other than making it more aerodynamic or road safe equate to infantilization? Does using an automatic over a manual? Does using an auto-starting engine over a wind up engine? Does using a car over your own two legs?<p>I also find the argument that flat design is childish bizarre. I hate flat design, but it&#x27;s not any more or less childish than what preceded it. Things can actually be more abstract with heavy reliance on text-only elements and icons without immediately apparent meaning, but the author seems to think that&#x27;s infantilization, and what preceded was also meant for children, and absolutely anything other than what the status quo was in some undefined point in time is too infantilized.<p>It seems more that the author has a resistance to change, and framed it as everything new being too immature.

There is some interesting stuff there, but the article doesn&#x27;t really examine its own premises for declaring some styles and designs infantile and others not.<p>For example &quot;bright colors&quot; are infantile. Is a subway map infantile because it uses simplification and bright colors to communicate complex information clearly? Is a red&#x2F;yellow&#x2F;green traffic light infantile, while a grown up traffic light would use say beige&#x2F;gray&#x2F;eggshell?<p>The attitude is a throwback to when GUI&#x27;s where considered for kids while real men used a green-on-black command line. But now skeuomorphic and &quot;drop shadows&quot; are grown up, while &quot;lighter, brighter and simpler&quot; is infantile? Isn&#x27;t is just that &quot;new&quot; is infantile?<p>The article builds a whole societal analysis on these unexamined premises.

I find the subject very interesting, but I feel like the author is undermining the argument with every example.<p>She (?) appears to consider shadows, 3d and other features of skeuomorphic design to be grown up, while more graphic, iconic flat design is childish.<p>That is a fairly unique interpretation...

Interesting to see this put into words and so well formulated. I agree with the author on many points. We are being talked down to in troves and we seem to accept it as a group.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed though, that some people like this, when they use some serious software, they will complain that the software didn&#x27;t do X for them, or didn&#x27;t remind them of Y, and I&#x27;ve often thought &quot;gee? I&#x27;d get fairly offended if it did! I&#x27;m a grown up, I want to do that myself. Why do you want to be treated like a child?&quot;

This is a good article, but I want to warn the author that the owner of the .tk gtld takes away its &quot;free&quot; domains and redirects them to advertisers when it feels doing so would be profitable.

Allegedly the new democratized Internet allows anyone to publish. Yet, if this is true and the goal is to empower users, why are there so many walls around these walled gardens?<p>The design elements the author observes are only a symptom of the theme of centralization. The unwashed masses will be given information technology, but only as much as they need.<p>Where there are walls, there are gates and gatekeepers. It isn&#x27;t enough to have an infantile design. Condescending &#x27;fact checks&#x27; from trusted sources and manually ranked search results are there to keep the children from going astray. After all, you can&#x27;t be trusted to examine and digest information without some parental guidance.<p>For severe offenders who peddle wrong-think, deplatforming is an option. Of course those who have been banished from the grace of the walled garden can always set up their own website. Users need only enter the URL.<p>Again, we&#x27;ve seen the minimization of the address bar as unfriendly and overly complex by Chrome. Better to turn everything into a Google search. Google will help you arrive at the safest destination.

Hmmm... design fashions change over time and are also affected by technological limitations.<p>I’m the beginning we had text only terminals. Font designs were about it.<p>Business machines stayed that way for quite a while.<p>8 bit machines came along and allowed a rudimentary windowing environment. The “desktop” metaphor with its “files” was extremely popular and arguably very successful.<p>Roll on 16 and 32 bit machines and the windows and Mac “desktop” windowing systems added some colour but no whimsy.<p>Macs got some smiles. Good god - it’s the end of grown ups.<p>iPhones (not iPads as the article asserts) introduced a heavily skeumorphic interface for two reasons: it was technologically possible on that platform and it was a design that someone with enough influence had chosen.<p>No surprises there: a wildly successful product that introduced a new design idea sparked a new fashion in UI design.<p>But skeumorphism in web design turned out to be less than great for reasons presented in the article.<p>So we retreat from skeumorphism and end up with: flat and colourful. UX (not just UI) experts discover that fast-loading and simple to comprehend websites convert to more sales and more profit.<p>Simple and easy is king on the web for obvious reasons.<p>If simple and easy looks like infantile there’s an excellent reason: it’s because they share many things. But not all.<p>Online gambling and share trading platforms my look infantile because they want to be appealing but they are fundamentally not infantile.<p>It’s easy enough to make a point if one only presents facts that support it. So much is skipped in this article that I feel like it might well be possible to cherry-pick enough opposing examples to argue exactly the opposite.

The author seems to have a very narrow view on how adults can &#x2F; should communicate, almost a child&#x27;s view of an adult &quot;Grown ups should be boring and convoluted&quot;<p>The British Legion example they give is odd, they have an interactive story that explains what the British Legion is about on their website. Seems fair enough to me, but the author has a problem with it? I don&#x27;t get it.<p>People like consuming information in story form, should stories be reserved for kids?<p>The web is an interactive medium should we not make things interactive unless they are for kids?<p>I don&#x27;t get it.<p>I see a lot of people with this narrow view point, people who get upset at south park because it&#x27;s a cartoon or GTA because it&#x27;s a video game.

That reminds me of when a new scrum master joined the company and he was setting up meetings as &quot;games&quot;. One time he was throwing around a ball and only the person who held the ball was allowed to speak. Everyone was looking at each other like WTF is this... It&#x27;s clear to me that the scrum master was training us to become docile office cattle; making us receptive to the increasingly rigorous daily prodding and milking at the hands of our corporate masters.<p>I quit the company not long after.

An interesting article.<p>It seems to neglect the implications that UI infantilization has for trust between the user and what is being used. If the UI is presented as toy-like, and the user goes into play mode, how does this shape their willingness to trust the thing being used (and so, the company providing it).<p>I suspect that engendering trust in the user is a big motivator here these days.

I think the childish design serves another purpose: to make the user feel safe about how their data is stored and used (whether this is justified or not).

This really strikes a chord with me, so many things just feels patronizing these days. Is brutalism a reaction to this trend of infantilization?

There were a lot of words in small text and no pictures so I didn&#x27;t read it.

The google logo.

Something else that freaks me out is when I went to a sports club once and the trainer was telling people what movement to make every 10 seconds or so... It just doesn&#x27;t feel right that I&#x27;m paying someone to boss me around. I&#x27;m pretty sure that this kind of activity in the long term makes people more docile and compliant and is bad for them.