I’m re-visiting old notes and previously saved links at the moment and finding so many threads [too many] that connect and overlap.

A load of them are things that I found and thought were fantastic, yet never got round to sharing. This issue feels like a topic in its own right, a sort of sibling of FOMO. A fear of not sharing, but that’s for another post.

This post is about this video on the Rashomon effect. It asks the question ‘how do you know what’s true?’ and a number of the points that it raises really resonate with other thoughts and topics in my mind. Firstly, the concept itself, named after the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film, Rashomon.

The Rashomon effect describes a situation in which individuals give significantly different but equally conceivable accounts of the same event.

I imagine we all know this effect. It’s something that most parents of young siblings will be very familiar with, but more specifically in my mind at the moment, it relates to how design teams and clients react to research findings and past experience, and how decisions are made in reaction.

…our interpretation of visual information is influenced by our previous experiences and internal biases. Some of these biases are unique to individuals but some are more universal. 

We assume in a team that we are learning the same facts and share the same information, but these hidden biases are also critically important to acknowledge.

Anthropologists regularly grapple with the impact personal background can have on an experts perception. In one famous case, two anthropologists visited the Mexican village of Tepoztlan. The first researcher describes life in the town as happy and contented, while the second recorded residents as paranoid and disgruntled. 

The problem here is that both researches were technically correct. To their minds, and therefore, to other minds like theirs, the descriptions are of what was honestly observed.

It’s tempting to fixate on why we have competing perceptions. But, perhaps the more important question that the Rashomon effect raises, is ‘what is truth anyway?’. Are there situations when an objective truth doesn’t exist? What can different versions of the same event tell us about the time, place, and people involved? And how can we make group decisions if we’re all working with different information, backgrounds and biases? 

From a design perspective, this boils down to one of the biggest question of all: What is good design? I like that the Rashomon effect supports the possibility that an objective answer doesn’t actually exist. It’s a perspective that I think would help every design team. Rather than working toward ‘the’ right solution, trying instead to uncover each others biases, agreeing to disagree, and moving on with a shared understanding of each other.