I want to share some concrete design principles to help the metaverse support human potential.

After my last blog proposing — The Metaverse — a Growth Triangle for Billions? — I received several emails and comments requesting more details.

Designers can:

1- Allow us to see human emotion regardless of the shape of the avatar.

We’re wired to pick up one another’s emotions through a variety of senses.

The sooner we bring emotion to the digital the faster our pro-social evolutionary wiring kicks in and helps lower toxicity.

This looks like:

• Hyper-realistic facial expressions (even if you are a starfish – think Pixar faces)
• Prioritizing richer expression i.e. voice > text or always allowing emojis in text
• Encouraging self-expression through avatar-building options

2- Allow us to experience the digital with human senses.

We are not brains in jars.

We are consciousnesses that have brains as well as a massive sensory input system.

If we want to stay human in the digital realms, we must bring our sensory capacity with us.

This looks like digitized:

• Sight – Color (Brainbo), Images etc.
• Sound – Spatial , Breathscape
• Touch – Emerge.io
• Smell – OVR
• Taste – Norimaki Synthesizer

**(If you should be on my list please hit me back)**

3- Allow us to learn social and emotional fluency.

I believe that the reason why we don’t see more tech supporting our kinder/better natures is simply that as humans we haven’t yet focused on integrating that into design.

While our founders live this principle, the wider tech community doesn’t yet consider it with every product.

This looks like:

• Win-Tracks (i.e. how to you win or succeed in a game) that have at least one prosocial element. An example would be ensuring that every raiding party has a healer and that the team literally cannot succeed without one. Then make them rarer than others so that teams have to woo them.
• Using Color as an emotional language to help people begin to name emotions.
• Your idea. 😉

4- Allow learning to be in community and foster the building of bonds.

Being on the back-end of World of Warcraft, I literally saw the bonds of community and friendship in the data.

In fact, this was one of the reasons that I believed that tech and the inner landscape could be positively merged.

This looks like:

• Thoughtful Friending Mechanics i.e. tools for connection that supporting bonds vs. stressing them
• Team creator mechanics i.e. tools that allow groups of people to start team businesses together with the tools to manage that business consciously integrated
• Toxicity controls i.e. there’s significant research showing that banning for toxic behavior doesn’t work as well as an education process that uses community and social influence (just like in real life)

5- Allow us to bring digital skill development gained enjoyably back to the real.

This looks like explicit digital to IRL skill transfer.

This is an entire post on its own that I will cover in a few weeks.

To summarize, I’m very optimistic about our ability to improve technology and make it serve us more.

The thing about humans is that once we decide to do something, we poke it until we figure it out.

Yes, we make mistakes.

Yes, we have unintended consequences.

But the experimentation and curiosity that I believe is embedded in our nature eventually gets us there.

This is why I’m excited about the cultural shifts that have moved wellness, wellbeing, and transformation into the mainstream.

P.S. If you’ve missed the original thread, in which I explain the Growth Triangle here is where to find it.

Love,
Nichol