I was six years old when the film Titanic was released into the world for the mass audiences. I clearly remember going to a local theatre with my parents to watch it, my first ever English film. The experience was surely unforgettable. The screenplay was something that I had never seen before, and I found myself empathizing with the joys and sorrows of the characters played by the profound actors. That early experience, in a way, has shaped my media consumption habits of today. I found interest in story-telling and started appreciating nicely crafted human stories. There is another habit that gradually developed over time. It’s the habit of paying attention to the credits.
When a designer creates a product, she/he focusses on its experience that the intended people find useful, usable, and delightful. Likewise, when a movie gets made, the maker’s focus is on the audience’s experience of thrill, entertainment, joy, or awareness. The same goes for creating songs, podcasts, articles, and other media that’s made for people’s consumption. The creators of the artifacts think of us and for us. They work for our most optimal experience of the products. When creators can think for users, isn’t it natural for the users to start thinking for the creators, too?
“But tools must be made by appropriate experts, who are themselves advised and guided by the tools’ destined users.” - Plato’s Cratylus
As users, we have plenty of experiences to contribute to the products that are getting made for us. To effectively do that, it is imperative that we understand the contexts of the artifacts that are being made. A step further would be exactly understanding what goes into making the artifacts. Once we begin decoding the creation processes, we’ll know the crannies that can be bridged with our suggestive additions or find ways to create better products.
Thus, users become product makers, and the product makers are users too.
Consider these three scenarios:
1. You watch a movie, talk to your friends about it and go about your way.
2. You watch a movie and its behind the scenes featurettes, bloopers, press conferences, online reviews and end up writing a new review of your own.
3. You watch a movie, understand its global gist, and get into the little details of the whys and hows of the maker’s contexts and processes.
All of the three choices are valid, but there are differences between them. The first scenario is what I call passive perception. We take things at face value, overlooking the intent and context behind something. It’s like experiencing a product and never thinking about it again. For example, using an alternative payment application for a one time purpose. Even if the experience is bad, we don’t care much about it as we don’t use it often.
In the second and third scenarios, we perceive the world around us with activated senses and thus with active perception—for example, a user taking the time to review a store or a cab driver.
In the third scenario, we become more than just contributors. We become creators ourselves. In Sue Khim’s case, she founded a new learning app for ambitious people by learning to code by herself and realizing the gaps in online courses on the internet.
“Brilliant has a very different approach to teaching maths, one that I find quite efficient: you are supposed to build up solutions to complicated problems by solving a series of other increasingly complicated problems that force you to derive certain properties/laws/theorems yourself.” - A Quora user
When you recreate something that’s already been done before, you are not just replicating the artifact, you also understand the process that was taken in generating the artifact.
Depending on the goals of our consumption, we choose number 1 or 2 or 3 of the scenarios. Artists and creators (aspiring or otherwise) will indulge themselves with number 3 often enough. Cultivating the art of active perception is the creator’s approach to life. The ability to turn on and off the active senses is an essential skill that anyone of us can develop over time. I hope we do, as that’s the different way of looking at the world.
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