I have been thinking about thrownness ever since I’ve learned about it from Winograd and Flores’s Understanding Computers and Cognition1.
Wikipedia defines thrownness as the following:
Thrownness (German: Geworfenheit) is a concept introduced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to describe humans’ individual existences as being ‘thrown’ (geworfen) into the world.
As I get older, I am starting to believe that we often experience things first, then we make up stories to justify our behaviors. We weave in our felt sensations, our internal motivations, and subconsciously or not our desires as well.
Design, by its contemplative nature really likes constructing stories. Stories like user journeys, especially when stripped of contradictions, become alluring totems that we use to burnish the glean of our designs.
We build flows and interfaces with our perfect information of what we want the user to do. People, on the other hand, experience our designs with what they know and want to accomplish. They do not have knowledge of or care for the frameworks that we attempt to ruthlessly simplify into. Real life is messy and people are thrown into the rhythms of life and have lots of things to worry about other than clicking through our perfectly constructed contraptions.
I am not arguing for abandoning stories or frameworks. They work for a reason. What we need to do is to have less faith in stories but consider them sufficiently so that we can deliver good outcomes, and not so much such that we become prisoners to them.
Sometimes, the best we can do is to watch other people use our software and we’ll realize that how broken everything is.