Subtitles and how tech adapts
This post incorporates extracts from Multiplied.
This recent Opinion piece in the Guardian reminded me of an important concept. It focuses on how technology and use cases evolve and shape new social norms. In this case, subtitles.
“I thought needing subtitles on TV just meant I was getting old. Turns out it is all the rage among the kids.”
Living with hearing loss, I also have subtitles on the TV at home, but I had already noticed my own kids doing the same. I’ve also noticed how people increasingly use subtitles, or audio captioning, in a variety of situations. Such as viewing videos on their smartphones with the audio turned down or even switched off completely.
In the book Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, the author Kat Holmes notes:
“Many inclusive innovations don’t require a dramatic reinvention of technology. They don’t require tearing down existing solutions to create new ones. Often, it’s just applying a new lens to the resources that already exist, and forming new combinations of existing solutions. It starts by employing new perspectives to reframe the problems we aim to solve.”
Mismatch includes many good examples of technology extending its value in this way. This includes captioning: originally designed for the hard of hearing, subtitles and captioning have subsequently become essential tools for making information more readily accessible.
It’s how in noisy airports and crowded pubs, people rely on captioning to access sports and news, the increasingly common scenario I described, where social media users can’t always turn up the volume on their smartphones. And in a media world increasingly dominated by multinational streaming services such as Netflix, captions also open up content from all corners of the planet, letting a viewer in Spain watch a programme made in Norway.
This is not a reinvention of technology, it’s a reinvention of context. It’s also what gave us sing-along Encanto earlier this year.
The important point to recognise is that this type of adaptation of technology to new contexts is often the result of diversity and inclusion – work driven by pioneers of inclusive design (which is the focus of Kat Holmes’ book). It’s why the diversity of our teams and the reach of research is pivotal to what we eventually start to recognise as innovation: not about making something new, but technology that disrupts the existing order of things.
How technology adapts also takes time. Subtitles aren’t new. Use cases for future uses for a technology like captioning can’t and won’t always be predefined either. But we need ways to evaluate and recognise where and how technology starts to create value in new ways.
This is design that has to be responsive to changes in human behaviour. To see how people adapt technology to work in their own situations and circumstances. And what we can learn from that. It’s the ability we have to look at how society adapts and recognises new norms in the use of technology as they become recognisable in our lives.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.