Learning to Speak a New Language

The most amazing experience for me is coming into a new awareness in how to express my ideas with others. Recently, a friend of ours invited us to attend a "Nonviolent Communication," or NVC Session with his practice group. I am always open to new exploration and ideas so we joined him. But, I couldn't help but wonder what nonviolent communication had to do with us. I have never thought of myself as a violent communicator, nor anyone I know.

What I have since come to realize is that the very structure of our language is static. We rarely use our emotions to describe our true needs, nor can we hear others. When we combine observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism. Although we spend our time with other people, we rarely stop to think about the defining characteristic of their behavior or our own. While this has great implications in our personal lives, I am focusing on relationships at work. In observation, our criteria for judging an event as behavior is not just about the complexity, but on the context. It is through the differences that we can view contrast.

As Semanticist Wendall Johnson points out, "We create many problems for ourselves by using static language to capture a reality that ever changing." Our language has conditioned us to speak about constants, similarities, quick fixes to simple problems with complete and final solutions." Yet, our world is quite different from all of this. The reality is the opposite. It is about process, change, differences, interaction, complexity of relationships and learning. The root of the problem is this mismatch in communication.

NVC is like learning to think and speak in a different language. A perfect application in user experience is to think about the ways we deliver design critiques. Design critiques can be exhausting if done in the wrong way. They can immediately become personal. In applying the NVC language, the first step is to separate our observations from our evaluations. The goal of a critique is to identify what we are building and secondly to figure out how close we are to finishing it. User experience evaluations and critiques are done in the spirit of the end user, trying to match intent of the design with the behavior of the end user. It is also done within the perspective of another designer.

I think the best critiques will happen in separating observation from the evaluation. We must identify and observe the strengths of how close the design is from meeting the goal and secondly, raising more questions to inspire directions and paths to get to the final goal.