negative-space
"Negative space" is a term from photography that I feel like stealing and applying to interactions with people/systems.
There are two themes to this article.
- Identifying negative space.
- Negative space is important.
Positive space is where things are good, things just work. Someone with a deep understanding of something clearly explains something to you, your train departs and arrives on time, you get along really well with someone. This all belongs to positive space.
One way I like to understand this space is by picturing a one-hour journey from my home to someplace. At any point in this journey, you could either be in positive space or in negative space. It is probably easiest to describe a journey with negative space. It begins to rain on my way to the bus stop, despite the forecast indicating that it would be dry, the first bus that arrives is too full, with no space for me, so I must wait for the second bus which arrives 20 (instead of 10) minutes later, the person beside me on this bus is watching TikToks on their phone aloud...
The points of frustration on this journey are negative space. On encountering the moment, you feel impacted by them in a negative or non-neutral way, they are blocking your progress, or making your experience worse. Why is the weather forecast not correct? Why couldn't my app tell me the bus was too full, why could the bus not be on time? Why could the person beside me not understand that I feel impacted by them? These in-the-moment feelings are what Hume would describe as "impressions", as opposed to thinking about the "idea" of these interactions occurring to you.
The difference betwixt impressions and ideas consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind
I want to emphasize that frustration is a subset of negative space, there are other aspects which also belong in negative space. Had we been more patient with the bus times and enjoyed the rain and TikToks, these frustrations would not register in negative space but part of what makes the journey. These moments register at different levels (or depths) of negative space depending on patience, tolerance, empathy and openness to experience (etc.) thresholds (these are just example thresholds, there could be other more important ones depending on the scenario).
A tourist is also on our bus, they experience no frustration at all but quickly acknowledge the worse air quality and that the ride is a lot more bumpier than their home city, these issues may have not been in your personal negative space. The tourists' negative space would contain the comfort of the ride, despite no frustration felt, just via introspection/noticing. This introspecting is helped by the fact that they know a different/better world exists, but it may not be a necessary condition.
Identifying and acknowledging the negative space is difficult. A non-exhaustive list on the elusiveness of negative space:
- Had you not made this journey/interaction, you would probably not know the extent of these problems. (Lacking knowledge, lacking skin in the game)
- The more often you make this interaction the more accustomed you become, which could reduce the "degree of force" of the negative space felt (learned helplessness). This could lead to undervaluing the negative space.
- These interactions may have just been a means to your end. You actually care about the event that was at your destination, so you can withstand a problematic journey, and don't think about the journey, so long as you got there.
- If you ever have go to this destination again, you may "hack" your way around it, perhaps taking a different route.
- It may be that you don't need to go in that direction in the near future, so you can just forget about the experience.
- It may not be your responsibility to think about the negative space of the systems we interact with.
- Societal or political pressures. For instance, you may come across as "critical" or "negative" by raising the negative spaces. Or the powers at be may not appreciate the viewpoints. I would bundle psychological safety into this point too.
- Not knowing you can report it. This point is separate from 7, the environment and technology exists to be able to report problems but the explicit thought "I should report this problem" is not thought of. For example the local bus system et al may not know of delays, air quality or passenger behavior as something that is a problem. So why would they do anything about it?
- Distractions, cognitive biases, logical fallacies and internal imbalances. Often your ideas and preferences get updated from new evidence, during this high-intensity moment, various things could distract you from the negative space.
It seems, that despite a journey with negative space, many factors could prevent us from directly identifying or addressing it. We also seems to have very few opportunities to identify negative spaces as there are barriers and incentives to avert the negative spaces we know about.
Negative space is defined relative to positive space. It is the place from which actions could be taken to move towards positive space. I think moving from negative to positive space is desirable and it has the interesting side effect of sometimes showing others how they could identify and move towards positive space in other domains!
So how do we address the elusiveness of negative space? These do not all need to be applied at once, but per scenario I have seen these be applicable:
Listening to other people's problems with the intent of deeply understanding their preferences and experience. If someone is complaining to you, it means they experienced a negative space! The way others express these negative spaces could be strange. It could be anger, frustration, lack of comment, or pride. It could be via a meme or a common joke. If something is a meme it almost certainly implies some hidden truth/anomaly which could be the negative space. Similarly, you would never completely understand if you do not experience it for yourself, or run experiments of your own, or spend time to understand something deeply. Taking new paths requires you to be adventurous/curious/ambitious, negative space often exists at the frontiers, where few people have gone before. Listening to and reflecting on yourself also fits into this.
Dealing with learned helplessness is challenging, especially if you are interacting with a system as a means to an end, there is also a common confounder of creating workarounds or hacks which work just for you. One way to address this is to record the first negative space interactions, this gives a good reference point for how things change over time. You could try generally noticing the taste of Lotus or understanding the gears.
It is understandable why people may not care about the systems they are interacting with, the systems should just work, and the burden of making things work well may not be on the consumer. But I think that if you are interacting with systems and especially people, it is your duty to care about the interactions (the same applies to points 5 and 6). Interacting with systems which are a means to an end (many systems), could lead to overlooking the negative space as most of your focus and attention is on the task at hand. It probably makes sense to focus more on the goal than your interactions with systems, but reflecting on your experience could help locate the negative space. As would being open to re-attempting the experience when you are under less stress. Perhaps numerous times.
Notice when you create special workarounds or hacks, or if you feel stuck without such a hack or motivational boost. This is an obvious sign that there is negative space somewhere.
Raising the negative space with others, in my opinion is one of the most forward optimistic things you could do. However, the manner in which this is communicated is super important (and out of scope for this article).
Similar to 7, however in many cases people do not know that they can report their problems to someone who cares about them. Finding out who or where you can report problems to effectively is often an overlooked high impact prerequisite skill to reporting problems.
There is lots to say about biases, fallacies, imbalances and distractions, mostly out of scope of this article, I feel that they contribute to many things besides negative space. That said, reflecting on moments which introduced new evidence after the moment has passed can help with this.
There is a meta case with negative space being elusive. A negative feedback loop could form each time you miss the negative space. Finding one negative space can help you find more, similarly, the fact that negative space is elusive and potentially time-sensitive means that it becomes marginally harder on each encounter to identify it. The elusive properties do not always work in isolation and can combine. Some systems are specifically operated in ways to keep the status quo.
Negative space is the scarce resource that fuels the future. The story should not stop at identifying the negative space.