How Your Strange Loop Is Affecting The Future Of Marketing, Understanding + Design

Key Takeaways

• DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS: Try to use objective data to make most decisions, not subjective preference.
• GET PERSONAL: More and more user-experiences are tailored to be personal by gender, goals, age, location, etc. Who is your market?
• BLACK MIRROR: As we continue to innovate, think of the potential negative uses for these advances, not just the positive.

Lecture Outline:

What is a Strange Loop?

• ”...not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction…to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.”
• The psychological equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting
• In essence what people are trying to clarify through relationships
• You Are A Strange Loop

Why do Strange Loops matter as designers?

• As designer’s, you’re constantly trying to design and market things that appeal to other people’s loops.
• Because you don’t die twice anymore. Your strange loop became immortal about 10 years ago, and it’s only getting clearer day by day to tech companies.
• Google’s The Selfish Ledger (leaked internal video)

Understand Your Market:

• Understanding who you’re marketing to will make understanding what you say and how you communicate to them easier.
• Think over how something that benefits one group could be applied to others.