The Holofence is a platform and consultancy that creates dialogues to make inconveniences of designs that have been modernised for modernisations sake more visible and to discuss as well as improve them.
I’m sure you know the feeling: You buy a new cool gadget and are excited to go home and test it out. As soon as you unpack it you notice the sleek new design. However, the newness comes with hidden social costs — a mass of objects without meaning.
Newness, without considering the hidden social and environmental costs have become inconvenient modernisation, focusing on selling features over functionality.
By making such changes visible, generating thought and discussion we can create a more empathetic, sustainable, user-friendly, and accessible design for the future.
What is the Holographic Fence?
The Holographic Fence has its roots in the Chesterton's Fence theorem. Whilst the latter concerns itself with removing features and is mostly used in software development , the Holographic Fence concerns itself with adding/replacing features and states as follows:
Brosi’s Holographic Fence
Adding a feature to a product or service without understanding why or only doing it for marketing/modernisation purposes will likely cause more harm than good.
Social Costs
A lot of modernised products are updated to serve the newest technology, yet often times this tech-innovations are leaving out an already marginalised group of people. As an example, take a look at all the touchscreens everywhere, where buttons used to be, and how blind people are supposed to navigate this.
Environmental Costs
It is well known that modern technologies have a huge negative environmental impact, such as touch screens using rare earths, or AI being reliant on datacentres that destroy the livability of whole communities. So changes in a design should consider these impacts.
Safety Costs
Often times technological redesigns don't consider their impact on safety measures. Take cars with a touchscreen interface, where the driver has to look down and navigate the radio, AC, or anything whilst driving, whereas before they could do it whilst looking at the street and navigating physical buttons blindly.
So what now?
Join the Holofence!
Help rid the world of holographic fence products, tools, and services and help create more meaningful designs to this planet by:
- Booking a workshop!
- Following the Instagram-channel!
- Telling others about the Holofence!
