Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna

Today’s online is not always a welcoming location. Websites greet you with a popover that requires assent to their muffin coverage, and leave you with Taboola advertising promising” One Crazy Trick”! to treat your problems. Social media sites are tuned for wedding, and some things are more interesting than a duel. I’ve witnessed light war among birders now, and it seems like everyone wants to get into a fight.

These conflicts are often at conflict with a site’s objectives. We don’t like those customers to tussle with each other if we are offering customer support and advice. If we offer information about the latest study, we want visitors to feel at ease, if we promote approaching marches, we want our core followers to feel comfortable and we want wondering newcomers to experience welcome.

I looked at the origins of computer science in Vienna ( 1928-1934 ) for a case study of the significance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous effects of its demise in a study for a conference on the History of the Web. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult ( and sometimes disagreeable ) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna. In the absence of divine authority, the people who developed the theory had no desire to construct machines. They were trying to understand what the limits of reason were. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be certain that mathematics is accurate? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language?

The group known as the Vienna Circle held weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 6:00. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. This Vienna department’s focus on the intersection of physics and philosophy had long been one of the most important achievements. Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, the brother of physicist Frederick Neurath, the creator of infographics, Otto Neurath, the architect, and Josef Frank, the brother of his physicist brother, were among the frequent participants. Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger group of participants when Schlick’s office became too dim. This convivial circle was far from unique. The Austrian School of free-market economics was founded by an intersecting circle: Neurath, von Mises, and Oskar Morgenstern. There were theatrical circles ( Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt ), and literary circles. Things actually happened in the café.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were frequently difficult. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Josef Frank, an architect, relied on contracts for public housing, which Mises argued was wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath would interrupt a speaker with a shouted” Metaphysics” and was eager to find muddled thought! The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. With the collapse of the Empire, the cafés found themselves with too little space and fewer customers than they could have anticipated. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. They might order another cup of coffee, or perhaps one of their friends might stop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. In a time when most water was still considered unsafe to drink, coffee was frequently served with a glass of pure spring water. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely.

The poet Jura Soyfer performed” The End Of The World,” a musical comedy about Professor Peep discovering a comet that is headed for earth in the basement of one cafe.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!
Hitler: It’s my business to destroy everyone.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. The café was transformed into a warm and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a cup of coffee would be welcome. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, resulted in the establishment of the café. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters also gave regular customers titles, but they were careful to address their customers with titles a notch or two more than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor. Due to the fact that Carnap and Gödel from Wuppertal, von Neumann from Budapest, and many other Viennese people also came from elsewhere, this assurance was even more important. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. The pram in the hall wouldn’t bother your friends. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The café circle’s openness increased its friendliness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops served as an improvised and accessible blackboard, making them a useful surface for pencil sketches.

Comedies like” The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that a parody of one’s remarks might soon appear in Neue Freie Presse if one got carried away was surely a big help from Professor Schlick in keeping things in order.

The End Of Red Vienna

Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, focused on user-centered design, and supported ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education, even though Austria’s government had veered to the right after the War. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, and Carnap to Chicago were the Circle’s most frequent members who left in less than a month. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews. The End of the World author, Julie Soyfer, passed away in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay significant fines before moving abroad. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career, his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can us create a user-friendly design? This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I think we might find eight distinct design constraints that go in a lot of useful ways.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. Instead of just making money off of debate, they were concerned with long-term issues. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels —help promote amity.

Empiricism: The Vienna Circle’s distinctive approach required that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. The dispute couldn’t be resolved if neither appeared ready to take the situation. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: When a disagreement becomes unresolved, the argument escalates to a point where the opponent loses their face or their jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Abstraction could have been merely academic without seriousness, but it was obvious that mathematics had strict rules of reason and consistency.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This contrasts favorably with the contemptuous sneer that currently dominates social media.

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. However, this was Vienna, at the edge of Europe: it was dated, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. A tinge of the absurd and a lingering sense of the absurd helped to control tempers among the majority or all. The director of” The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: Anyone could join in the discussion because there were all kinds of people present. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders lessen tension and give people the opportunity to expand the scope of discussion and terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists, and permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to ease up awkward situations. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The University Office and Café were unmistakably public areas of the Circle. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The possibility of having one’s bad behavior or taste be derided in print kept discussion in check. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction, even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: Although the subject matter was significant to the participants, it was esoteric: neither their mothers nor their siblings were particularly interested in it. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I think it’s noteworthy that this setting was created to promote amiability among various voices. The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schickel and other regulars kept the conversation moving and on topic. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous. You could understand why each of these voices was human, naturally speaking. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. No Moderator or central authority was present in the café circles, allowing everyone’s anger to be focused on her. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.