Delight: what if we were to design for it deliberately?

The following is a meditation on design, and what might happen if enticing delight were a deliberate goal rather than a rare accident of our software and systems designs.

I recently had the pleasure of setting a man's watch for him.

The man was delighted by this act, expressing a joy that might have seemed out of proportion with the result. He told his friends throughout that day that his watch was now fixed and running with the correct time. Each time he retold the story, it was accompanied with this same animated delight.

The watch was only off by four minutes, so not hugely wrong. Apparently, however, it had been wrong for three years. And for three years this man had shared the story of his chronographic offset with colleagues and friends alike. Many, the story went, had tried to fix this watch and reclaim the lost four minutes. The record of hopes raised only once again to be dashed had grown long. But amazingly, this man had not abandoned hope: he kept *wearing* this watch despite the fact that each time he glanced it he had to be mentally adjusted by four. It was not as if he could not afford a replacement. It was almost as if it had become more important to continue to believe in the possibility that one day someone would fix this watch than to find its replacement. Until that day he would continue to offer the watch to anyone who would have a go, just so that *if* that person did succeed, he would be there to savour the delight in having it work again.

Now, since it has been reset, each time he looks at this watch he can re-animate that delight for himself by remembering how long he had carried it with this offset and how happiness could now be felt in such a simple thing as accurate time-keeping. He can also tell his friends his problem has been solved, and they too will share the joy of their good friend's relief. After all, some of them had been there to experience this regular tiny desolation in their colleague's life.

So the delight has not simply been in a watch running with the correct time - that is common - but that *this* watch now runs on time. The surprise and delight tied within the satisfaction that the man's hope or belief in the possibility of restoration of that which was lost was not misplaced all contribute to the delight in the re-set time piece. Such is perhaps the nature of delight: an internal state that is ready to be surprised by the unexpected becoming possible.

The trouble is, that with digital systems it seems that the unexpected is usually to do what should be normal.

Why is being able to set a watch to run on time (what one would hope to be normal) experienced here as extraordinary? What would happen, therefore, if we designed with delight as deliberate goal rather than if we experienced it as a side effect?

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Consider the parable of the watch: the repetition of the mistimed watch left open the possibility of delight and surprise should what was accepted as "normal" - the wrong time - become the very simple "right."

Computing is filled with examples of coping with the wrong time all too often being the normal.

Imagine the delight in changing that normal-ness of the wrong thing to the right thing. For instance, how frustrating it normally is when trying to get shipping information from an online store, where one has to add the thing to one's cart, register on the site, even provide payment information etc etc all just to find out shipping costs and times - something that will determine whether or not we wish to purchase from that site. Imagine how *delighted* a potential customer would be if the shipping quote was simply available at any point the person wished to know it? Changing the normal expectation of the online store hassle to the right action of giving the customer what they want when they want it may lead to delight and loyalty. They, like the man with the watch, may tell all their friends about their terrific experience with this store, this digital system.

In work we've been doing between MIT and Southampton in projects like Jourknow, we've been looking at imagining a world where one doesn't have to fill in a form to create a note about a phone call or a meeting or the name of a friend or any other kind of information. They simply jot it down, however they like to jot "meeting @ 3 c mc" or "3pm remember to get to meeting with mc" - the note is there; it's also now in the calendar. No forms with clicking and tabbing through 16 fields just to record one event.

It may be that as this potentially delightful way of doing things becomes the new norm, the delight may diminish. For those who would know no other way of interacting with a computer (once we get there) such natural interaction may not invoke delight - it will only be retrospective for those of us who have suffered with previous wrong time "normal."

So, are there attributes where delight may not be dependent on challenging normal so that a design might delight constantly? When was the last time a computer delighted you? Did it keep delighting you? or did what was once delightful become mundane? or did it continue to fold between the mundane and the delightful? I imagine that there will be times when the man looks at his watch and sees the time; at others remembers how it used to be and how it is, and re-kindles that delight for himself - hence a folding between the mundane of a proper normal and the delightful.

For me, my most profound and enduring moment of computer delight was witnessing the Flying Toasters screen saver. Toasters. With wings. Wings that flapped. And made thwap thwap thwap thwap thwap wing flapping sounds against the Ride of the Valkyrie as sountrack. Utterly absurdly gratuitous graphics and absolutely delightful. I remember about five of us huddled around a prof's computer just starring and laughing and poking each other watching the infinite progression of flying toasters across a computer screen.

The normal of the computer was work-based applications; the occasional game. This screen saver used the computer in a completely non-utilitarian, or non-computer or non-normal way. It turned a several thousand dollar piece of hardware into something whimsical. So even when flying toasters were no longer new - we had our own copies of the software - they did not lose their capacity to delight. At any point in the day, if things got a little too intense, well, there was always always flying toasters. There was always this reminder of the difference between the mundane and the unordinary as possible.

Flying toaster moments are all too rare with digital systems.

Why is that?

What would it be like to design deliberately to achieve delight? At least some of the components of delight are afforded by contrast between the expected and the actual; between the normal and the other. Delight takes the expected out of context. The watch that never tells the correct time, tells the correct time. The computer that's meant to be serious does whimsy. Delight is also pleasurable.

With these traits of difference from the expected, the norm, can we use them as motivators for design? Can we construct reverie? It seems that while the perhaps purer delight of flying toasters may be the harder kind of delight to design deliberately, that of addressing the more all-too-common wrong-normals are legion enough to provide an ecstatic revery of delight if only a few of them were tackled with intent. Let us not forget the classic example of the frustration of machines: setting of the VCR to record a program. Was not the delight of the first TIVO not only that commercials could be skipped but that what once was an horrendous process of setting the time on a vcr and then setting the parameters for recording a show became absolutely trivial: here's a program guide; click the show you want right in that guide. Voila - recorded. One may argue that well, we had to arrive at a place where we could get online program guides to be able to click them and send the correct info to a system to translate that into recording information. Right. So what. There are squillions of opportunities for better design where we do indeed have all the technology we could want to make effective systems possible, and just don't do it. It's easier to fill in a form than eliminate it.

Indeed, it's rather sad that there are SO MANY opportunities for this kind of delight in our regular daily interactions in our world. Why, after all, was the man's watch such a gordian knot to those who attempted to fix it? It's just a WATCH. Like filling in forms are what make things simple for computers, crappy watch setting design is what makes setting the time simple for the digital device, not the person using the device.

This is not to say that everything has to be simple. As designer and ACM CHI Fellow Bill Buxton has said, the piano has a very simple interface but it is not "easy" to master. The cost/benefit relationship of learning to master the device can be great, however. But a watch is a watch. The result is simply that it tells the time; it is not a direct intermediary to the muses. It should be simpler to set a digital watch than learning to play a Prokofiev symphony, no?

The moral of the story seems to be that the source of our delight around are devices is all to often when the wrong normal for a fleeting moment behaves as we would hope and expect such a device to behave. And while in part when such behaviour results we have a story of hope fulfilled, as in the man and his watch, that same story is also one of failure: failure of design, of imagination to produce technology that supports us rather than requires us to support it.

Perhaps if we designed with delight as a goal, we would be more likely to achieve something as simple as a digital watch that a human could set without having to be a phd in computer science.