Humane Technology

A corrective to the arc of computing

Humane technology, as Evan Spiegel describes it, is technology designed to strengthen human connection, ground people in the present, and bring them into the physical world, rather than pulling them into ever more immersive single-player screen experiences. He frames it against a historical account of computing in which each generation drew people further from one another. In the mainframe era a person had to travel to a building to use a computer. In the desktop era they stayed home but sat indoors, alone: Spiegel recalls eating lunch in the computer lab rather than on the playground with friends. Laptops and smartphones made computing personal and portable but, in his telling, left users staring down at small screens and away from the people beside them.¹

Spiegel points to the end state of that arc: people spending seven or eight hours a day on screens, phones at the dinner table, and, in an anecdote he uses, a person nearly walking into someone on a beach because she was looking at her phone while passing the Pacific Ocean. His summary of the problem is that screens are pulling people out of the moment and away from friends.¹

The design brief

Spiegel translates the diagnosis into design principles. The first is to open into the world rather than a feed: Snapchat's home screen is a live camera view of the user's present surroundings, so the default action is creation rather than consumption. The second is to delete by default, on the argument that permanence encourages users to curate a record and pulls them out of the present, an argument developed further in ephemeral design. The third favors communication between close friends over broadcast to a public audience. The fourth is to bring the camera out of the pocket, so that capture becomes a tool for expression in the moment rather than a documentary chore.¹

He offers a heuristic to make the stakes vivid: if aliens were watching Earth, they might be alarmed that people spend their days tending to small glowing devices, and might send glasses to help. Spiegel presents this less as a joke than as the design brief for wearable computing, which he casts as the product a humane-technology designer would build, bringing the camera into the world and freeing the hands so a person can engage with what is in front of them while augmenting rather than replacing their surroundings.¹

Precedent and tension

Spiegel places the idea in a lineage. He cites Edwin Land, who treated the camera as something incredibly personal and designed instant photography so that a person could see a photo within a minute, fitting the technology into a moment of human experience rather than a trip to the darkroom. Spiegel presents his own work as the same instinct applied 70 years later, with technology serving presence, connection, and real-time expression.¹ This orientation is what situates him in the humane technology visionary pattern.

The approach carries a tension Spiegel acknowledges. Nearly every consumer technology company has an incentive to maximize engagement measured as time on platform, and humane technology treats that metric as misaligned. Its stated goal is to improve the quality of a person's experience while using the product, which may mean shorter sessions that leave the user feeling better. Spiegel claims that studies show Snapchat improving wellbeing where some other platforms do not, and attributes the difference to design.¹ The claim depends on the designer's interpretation of the evidence, and the incentive to maximize measured engagement remains a persistent counter-pressure on any company that adopts the principle.