Most modern institutions are designed to be navigated by individuals but most humans actually navigate institutional landscapes in packs of 2-15. Making institutions ‘impersonal’ is hard because of this unit size impedance mismatch
Conversation
This thought hit me pondering the very specific ways impersonal civic infrastructure and public behaviors fail in India: the impersonal institution (from plane-boarding norms to shopping) neither reflect the very strong pack structure of patterns of life, nor accommodate it well
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The biggest thing social UX designers fail to grok about packs is that the pack is the user, not the individual. The individual is hidden to some extent behind how the pack chooses to navigate. This is most obvious with say children or babies.
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There is some rudimentary support like "authorized account user" or norms around serving couples eating/shopping together, but generally commingling life logistics is a set of hacks even for this most common unit, and even inside an institutional form like marriage.
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For other kinds of packs (group of dining friends, business colleagues on a work trip together, etc) it's a mess
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