Children need a daily challenge intellectually, socially, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Experiences that lead to failure offer lessons about the way the world works and how one fits into it. Those that lead to success provide confidence and trust in one’s intuition. We learn by attaching words and concepts to personal experiences, so anything that serves to inhibit our opportunities to experience things also inhibits learning.
That isn’t to say that children thrive without limits. Some limits are vital. Crossing a busy highway on foot doesn’t have the same consequence for failure as balancing on the top rung of a jungle gym. Stirring a hot kettle full of gasoline holds a different degree of outcome than does a concoction of baking powder and vinegar. The trick for a parent or teacher is in figuring about where the threats are real, and presenting the other challenges in a way the child perceives a bigger risk and reward. In other words, you can keep children safe without prohibiting chance.
The alternative to perceived risk is fear. Bev Bos offers two acronyms for the word:
False Evidence Appearing Real
Future Events Already Realized
In other words, perceived risk avoidance—the visible constraints that keep us from attempting uncertain outcomes—becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to avoid getting hurt, we prevent the situations that might lead to pain. Without those opportunities to try and fail, we lose our ability to differentiate real danger from possible danger. We stop asking questions for fear of what that says about our intelligence. We bottle up emotional reactions for fear of being perceived as weak or needy. We take the safe path because it is known, never exposing ourselves to new ideas. Worse, we pass along that culture of fear to others by standing still in anticipation of the horrors that can be imagined laying in wait around the corner.
Does risk have a role in interface design?
Perhaps not in terms of user experience. Conventional wisdom in web design speaks of minimizing errors and simplifying challenge. We don’t want someone clicking a button to make an online bill payment and getting unpredictable results, like suddenly transferring her life’s savings to a political campaign. However, where learning is a goal risk provides opportunities to discriminate outcomes, make choices, and learn through failure. This is especially true in the rising domain of serious games. The social lessons learned through a gaming experience are made effective because not every result leads to a “right” answer or a desired outcome. Perceived risk is embedded in gaming.
Risk is also part of the design process, in the form of iteration and accountability. Iterating a design is not just the act of making changes through versioning. It also requires evaluation by placing the new ideas into the world and incorporating that experience into future changes. Doing so is to risk failure, perhaps even an expectation of failure. Traditional IT fears failure as a judgment of ability of the developer and idiocy of an idea. Designers, though, must be able to perceive risk as a means of improvement. Designers learn through risk.
Business models are based on risk, too. The licensing agreement is not just a way to create stable income by forcing users to continue to buy the right to use software. It is also a means of controlling damages and protecting against liability. Whereas a “many hands” approach, while making it more difficult to avoid error also makes it much easier to correct mistakes. Opening the source shifts the business model to one based on service or monetization of the information created by many users. Open source also increases the number of concurrent iterations that can occur, speeding development and allowing the best ideas to survive.
The hygiene hypothesis posits that big families have less chronic sickness than small ones because of the early-and-often exposure to various bio bugs in early development of the immune system. It is the criticism of our anti-bacterial hand-washing obsessions, that by eliminating germs we eliminate opportunities to strengthen our immunity. By avoiding sickness, we become sicker. We make the world more dangerous through our attempts to make it “safer.” Applied to design, we make our interfaces sterile and ineffective by avoiding risk.
For more applications of Bev Bos’ conditions for growing wiser, see .
