What we can learn from Ancient City Design

Tom Seiple makes a good case for considering ancient city design as we move forward trying to resolve today’s design problems (2023, “Ancient Cities Have Lessons UX/UI Designers Can use Right Now, Fast Company, https://www.fastcompany.com/90927779/ancient-cities-have-lessons-ux-ui-designers-can-use-right-now).

Wonder how city design and product design can be tied together?  Seiple does just that: “Regardless of size, age, or country, urban spaces share . . . five elements. . . . cities primarily focusing on human mobility in the physical world while digital services transcend the physical world to ‘travel’ through the metaphysical world of cyberspace. Buttons, clicks, drop downs, and menus are the streets, highways, buildings, and open spaces of our metaphorical city. . . . The lines connecting objects in a blueprint or journey map represent a ‘pathway taken’ often from one ‘district’ to another. . . . Cities move our physical bodies from place to place, service to service, and task to task. Applications move our virtual ‘bodies’ from various digital places, services and tasks in the exact same manner. Through the use of paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks applications move us through the digital world in a perfect reflection of our built world.”