Perspectives from the tech industry: designer Geof Stead on Iteration as a built-in goal of mobile app design

Abstract

A symposium was held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge on June 12th 2019, ‘Rethinking Repetition in a Digital Age’, at which Geoff Stead, a leading mobile tech designer, was a keynote speaker (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28053). The focus of the Cambridge UK event was on how the potentials of digital technologies—whose harms have received widespread attention—could be redirected for the social good. For Stead, this is precisely what Babbel are doing in their approach to commercial digital language learning. Stead spoke to the idea of reversing our personal relationships to mechanical affordances, and finding empowerment in understanding their designed logics. The transcript of the interview below, made in October 2021, revisits some of the main points he raised at that event.