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Method 10 X10
Method The importance of contextual information in design

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The Art of Noise

Noise plays an integral role in the patterns that drive human perception. Make sure your target audience research doesn’t remove it.

If you were forced to rely on only two target audiences to guide all your future design work, I’d strongly recommend using astronauts and toddlers.Fortunately, the connection between them goes beyond the design of their underwear to the nature of perception and expertise, and in what we treat as valid data, and what we choose to ignore as “noise”—the extraneous details, out-of-category input, the anecdotal tidbits. As it turns out, noise is much more valuable to the generation of useful design insights than you might think.

The Art of Noise

Theimportance of contextual information in design

Method 10 X 10

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First the astronauts. One little-known quirk of the Apollo moon landings was the difficulty the astronauts had with judging distances on the Moon. The most dramatic example of this difficulty occurred in 1971 during Apollo 14, in which Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell were tasked with examining the 1,000foot-wide Cone Crater, after they had landed their spacecraft less than a mile away. But after a long, exhausting uphill walk in their awkward space suits, they just couldn’t identify the rim of the crater. Finally, perplexed and frustrated, the declining oxygen levels in their suits forced them to turn back. Forty years later, high-resolution images from new lunar satellites showed they had indeed comeclose; the trail of their footprints, still perfectly preserved in the soil, stop less than 100 feet from the rim of the crater. A huge, 1,000-foot wide crater, and they couldn’t tell they were practically right on top of it. Why? It should have been easy for them, right? These guys were trained as Navy test pilots; landing jets on aircraft carriers requires some expertise in distance judgment.They also had detailed plans and maps for their mission and had the support of an entire team of engineers on Earth. But their expertise was actually part of the core problem. The data their minds were trying to process was too good. All of the “noise” essential to creating the patterns their minds needed to accurately process the data was missing. And patterns are the key to human perception,especially for experts.

Consider everything that was missing up there. First, there’s no air on the Moon, so there’s no atmospheric haze either. Eyes that grew up on Earth expect more distant objects to appear lighter in color and have softer edges than closer things. Yet everything on the Moon looks tack-sharp, regardless of distance. Second, the lack of trees, telephone poles and other familiarobjects left no reference points for comparison. Third, since the Moon is much smaller than the Earth, the horizon is closer, thus ruining another reliable benchmark. Finally, the odd combination of harsh, brilliant sunshine with a pitch-black sky created cognitive dissonance, causing the brain to doubt the validity of everything it saw. Ironically, that kind of truthful, distortion-free data isusually what experience designers want to have as input for their decision-making, no matter what they’re trying to do. We tend to believe that complex systems are the tidy, linear sum of the individual variables that create them. But despite the pristine environment of the Moon, the Apollo astronauts were repeatedly baffled when it came to simple distance and size perceptions, even after each teamcame back from the Moon and told the next team to be aware of it.

Apollo 14 Lunar Path: 1. Landing Site 2. Turnaround point

The Art of Noise

The importance of contextual information in design

Method 10 X 10

The effect of stripping out too much noise.

Meanwhile, the toddlers I mentioned earlier provide a corresponding example of the power of patterns in perception. When my...