“I’ve found that curiosity follows a very simple pattern….It follows this pattern and we can design around it… It starts with an invitation–something out there invites you to be curious.” ~ Cassini Nazir
Can curiosity be meaingfully infused into design processes? Cassini Nazir thinks so.
From curiosity journals to bookmarks and Valentine’s Day celebrations, he’s full of ideas about how to invite curiosity in, by design.
Cassini Nazir teaches interaction design and user experience courses in the College of Visual Arts and Design at University of North Texas. He’s interested in designing ways to welcome curiosity — and to help curiosity and care step up when empathy falters.
That connection between curiosity and care didn’t become really meaningful to me until my wife told me one day, “You’re not as curious about me as you once were” … Over time in our relationships, we often become less curious…We fill in the gaps of, “well, I’m not going to ask her a question. I know what she’s going to say.” But people have a way of surprising us.
LISTEN TO CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS #235: INVITING CURIOSITY BY DESIGN, WITH CASSINI NAZIR
Check out Cassini Nazir’s Designing Curiosity website.
Enjoy Cassini Nazir’s talk at the Center for BrainHealth.
Read Beyond Empathy: How curiosity promotes greater care. Cassini Nazir and co-author Meah Lin offer 16 ways empathy risks falling short – and 2 emotive capacities that might help: curiosity and care.
Take a look at Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion.
If you enjoyed this episode, try these C2BC Classics: Designing for Curiosity, with Hyunjoo Oh; In Praise of Distraction, with Tyson Lewis(Tyson is Cassini’s colleague at UNT); Narrative Medicine, with Dr. Raya Kheribek; Sounds of Caring, with Yoko Sen & Tammy Beaulieu; and Architecting Curiosity, with Pim Schachtschabel, Monica Canfield-Lenfest & Anthony Rocco.
Theme music by Sean Balick; “Purple Light” by Marble Run, via Blue Dot Sessions.
You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
uh-oh! THE CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS SHOP IS UNDER (RE)CONSTRUCTION.
INVITING CURIOSITY BY DESIGN, WITH CASSINI NAZIR
Cassini Nazir: I’ve found that curiosity follows a very simple pattern….It follows this pattern, we can design around it… It starts with an invitation. Something out there invites you to be curious.
(theme music)
Lynn Borton: This is Choose to be Curious, a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about curiosity shows up. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Welcome!
Come, choose to be curious with us…
Is “choose” enough of a welcome mat, enough of a call to action? Do you feel encouraged, empowered?
I’ve been reflecting on that a lot lately since reading and thinking about Cassini Nazir’s work on inviting curiosity. Cassini Nazir teaches Interaction Design and User Experience courses in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. His [00:01:00] research explores how curiosity can be meaningfully infused into design processes.
He’s come to use the language of invitation when he talks about curiosity which, for me, connotes a very intentional set of actions to draw people in, and maybe more than just people. I say “more than just people”, because Cassini has also been looking at empathy. Or maybe more specifically, the limitations of empathy.
In their paper, Beyond Empathy, How Curiosity Promotes Greater Care, Cassini Nazir and co-author Meah Lin offer 16 ways empathy risks falling short — and two emotive capacities that might help. Empathy, they write, can have the effect of shutting off question-asking. Both care and curiosity widen the circle of understanding in ways that [00:02:00] empathy cannot.
It’s this appreciation of curiosity’s scope and duality, inward/outward, micro/ macro, that I find so interesting here.
So, what is interaction design, and what does it mean to infuse its processes or anything with curiosity? And how might all of us invite curiosity into our work and lives? I’m delighted to have Cassini Nazir join me for that and more…so welcome, Cassini!
CN: Thank you very much. So happy to be here.
LB: Oh, this is very exciting. As I said before we got going, I’ve been following your work for a long time, so it’s fun to finally be in conversation. So, okay, we have to start at the beginning: What is interaction design, for those of us who are not in that space?
CN: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, when we think about design itself — if you look around the room that you’re in, the car you’re driving, [00:03:00] if you’re listening to this podcast on some kind of exercise device — everything around you has been designed, right? From the clothes that you’re wearing, to the objects that are in the room, to the sort of furnishings and pieces of art that are around you.
Interaction design is a specific type of design that focuses generally on interfaces. It’s grown more and more to include things that don’t include interfaces — by “interfaces” I mean screens.
A lot of people sort of reduce interaction design to apps or websites, increasingly voice systems as well, but I think of it really as designing experiences. And maybe if we think about it sort of another way, in terms of what are the takeaways, we’re really, in some ways, designing memories.
What’s the memory we want people to have and retain long after they’ve interacted with the thing that we’ve created?
LB: You know, I think it was the moment that I [00:04:00] heard you say that in a talk of yours recently where I thought, I really have to get this guy on the show, why, why have I been waiting? Because I think this idea of being very intentional about the things that we take away — which is what memory is, right? — from an experience is really interesting to me.
And it suddenly dawned on me, I think of curiosity that way! Which I think is where you and I have these really interesting intersections and parallels.
CN: Yeah. And, you know, in my research, if you can invite curiosity – and, as you said in your intro, that’s an intentionally spoken word — and an individual brings that curiosity forward, right? It’s something that they have to summon up themselves.
You can make things more memorable that way, because they’ve made a connection in their brain to something that’s intrinsic to them. And you’ve just sort of offered it to them, as an invitation of something to try out, to [00:05:00] experiment with, to do again. And, and it’s a powerful way to make interactions more meaningful.
LB: Yeah. Okay, so for context, do you have a working definition of curiosity?
CN: You know, there’s one, from Hans Georg-Voss, which is three words: motivation to explore.
LB: Uh huh.
CN: Which I just love, right? That “motivation” speaks to that inward part of it. “Explore” speaks to sort of the outward part of the world that we’re exploring.
But I also like Todd Kashdan’s and his colleagues’ definition, which is curiosity is the inclination, desire… I’m forgetting the third word… and sort of the execution of exploring the novel, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous events or situations, as well.
But I think Voss’s definition of motivation to explore is just so well put. [00:06:00]
LB: Yeah. Well, you know, I ask that question of all sorts of people, and I get all sorts of answers — and I don’t really have any skin in the game and about what the right answer is. It’s just always interesting to me how individuals think of it, because it informs the rest of the conversation, right? So…
CN: Yeah. Before you move on from that, you know, it occurs to me that when you ask the question also has meaning,
LB: Yes!
CN: If you look in the Oxford English dictionary, I think there are 31 definitions, plus or minus — six of which are currently used. So over time, curiosity has lost 25 definitions, at least according to the OED. So, you know, what it means in the present age,.. it’s an ongoing conversation, it’s shifting…
LB: I think that’s actually a really interesting observation. I need to go look at the OED! But I will say, you know, in the eight years that I’ve been having these conversations, it’s moved in that time as well. So I see that [00:07:00] too. Interesting. Oh, that’s cool.
I really like the work that you’ve been doing in terms of inviting curiosity — and I don’t know if you see it this way — but I see your work in empathy as this, this sort of micro/macro question of curiosity, both inward and outward. And sometimes these conversations go one direction or the other. It’s about sort of inward curiosity or it’s about outward curiosity. But you seem to me to present an opportunity for both, and maybe to be in that stretchy, weird place where you’re trying to accommodate things that are sometimes working in opposition to one another, inward and outward, you know, macro and micro.
And I wonder if you might reflect on that a little bit. I mean, do you think about it that way?
CN: Yeah, you know, that’s, that’s a wonderful way of putting it.
So when, when we talk about inviting curiosity, I’ve found that curiosity follows a very [00:08:00]simple pattern. Because it follows this pattern, we can design around it. It starts with an invitation. Something out there invites you to be curious.
My research has uncovered about 10 different approaches that you can use to invite people to be curious. a challenge, to humor, to novelty, to delay, playfulness. There’s others that are probably out there, but these are sort of 10 first principles.
So an invitation is made, you (the individual) have to respond. And in some cases, this is where curiosity may end. You may not choose to respond. But if we do, there’s this inflection point where that emotion of surprise begins to be felt. That’s where the opportunity for that reward to occur.
So it’s an invitation response reward pattern that we see. Of course, not everything will be rewarded. Our curiosity isn’t always rewarded. But when we’re designing experiences, we want it to be [00:09:00]positive.
And that’s the choice for that word there.
I like to think of liminal spaces between sort of the edges and borders of things. And I think curiosity is really that, right? It’s something that we obtain through our senses. Everything we know about the world is through our human senses.
And so our senses are really the edge of the experience we can understand around us. So we leverage those senses that we have in order to understand the world and, you know, whether it’s a strange feeling inside of room — why does my stomach feel this way after I’ve eaten, you know, something that maybe, maybe didn’t sit with me well, or what is that thing or person over there?
I think curiosity almost shortens the distance between the in and the out. And I think that’s hugely powerful when you think of it as a [00:10:00] designer.
That I really want to focus on creating meaningful experience, experiences that matter, experiences that people can reflect on. And maybe if they reflect on it again, they see something slightly different than they did the first time.
Those are the types of things that are difficult to build and often quite rare, but that’s where I like to sort of keep my attention.
LB: So can you give us an example? What’s such an experience that you’ve done?
CN: Yeah. So this semester, my students were working with CVS Health and Signify Health, one of their subsidiaries, looking at how can we build trust during an in home health evaluation?
LB: Oh, interesting.
CN: And curiosity is very much an important part of that. Many of the people that my students spoke with that we interviewed were folks who may not have been able to make it to hospitals in order to get their care. [00:11:00] And you know the idea that a medical professional can come inside your home requires a great deal of trust. In Robert Plutchik’s model, trust is the necessary element for curiosity to begin. And so, you know, for me, that the meaningfulness there is we can build more trust during those early moments and even before sort of the service period begins. Maybe it’s also about bringing curiosity into the space. So that’s one example.
I worked at another university for 10 years before coming to University of North Carolina, and my partner in crime was an astrophysicist…
LB: Oh, that’s fun!
CN: Designers and artists had to collaborate with scientists and researchers in order to achieve the goal. If either could do it alone, we [00:12:00] wouldn’t continue the project.
We looked at — and we’re not necessarily the first to do this — but we looked at a large set of fMRI data of individuals, roughly 20 to 90. And we took that data that neuroscientists would use, statistical modeling for tools like R, or spreadsheets and things like that, and we sonified that data. We made it meaningful through sound so that you could hear the data.
LB: So, what did that sound like?
CN: Well, that’s it, right? You could hear differences between sort of parts of the brain that are connected.
LB: Oh, wow.
CN: We sonified how the visual cortex is connected to hearing and that sounds different as you age, right? Numerically, that looks different as well, but it’s just another way to sort of bring about this data. I think you had talked about this, if I’m remembering correctly, in a podcast, [00:13:00] like one of your early podcasts: use the term “strange making”, right? We’re making the data strange,
LB: huh. Uh huh.
CN: That, well, you’re used to looking at something, or, in this case, used to hearing something as well. How can we bring a new perspective on that and make it strange as well?
And that’s one of the things that designers can do. It’s, if designers are doing their job right, they can give you a new perspective that maybe you didn’t have.
LB: Yeah. Yeah. Well… interesting!
So, you have a couple of kind of tips and tricks, ways that people can invite curiosity into their every-day: curiosity journal… do something new. But I also heard you speak about borrowing and lending curiosity, which I loved for so many reasons. You know, Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett talk about curiosity obviously as [00:14:00] something that’s about connection and relationship and it’s something that we do collectively.
So the idea of lending and borrowing and having a curiosity community, which is how I think about these things all the time, really resonates. Or Elizabeth Gilbert, you know, who talks about don’t worry about passion. Isn’t there just something you find just a little bit interesting and like you, you can kind of borrow that or lend it to somebody else. And then maybe you discover that there’s a curiosity there. Maybe not. But it doesn’t cost much.
Do you have some favorites in your toolbox that you would like to share?
CN: Yeah, I’ll start with the lending and borrowing. It literally started with something physical, which — this isn’t going to make for great radio, but I’m holding up a prototype of a bookmark that has…
LB: We’ll put it on the website.
CN: We can definitely take some photos of this in the back.
The bookmark has single sheets of paper that [00:15:00] one can take out. … And the idea here is that this bookmark could be used in libraries where people lend and borrow the books. And, if one is so inclined to take notes, they could do that. If they are also so inclined, they can keep bookmark sort of the physical component, but the thing that they wrote on — that smaller sheet of paper — that was set in the bookmark, they can leave this behind in the book so that you can literally lend and borrow your curiosity.
LB: Uh huh.
CN: “This made me curious.”
LB: You also mentioned something –and maybe this was in the same talk that you did for the Center for Brain Health — on being curious as in a new courtship. In our relationships, we’re less curious with one another over time. And I love this idea of thinking about returning the relationship to its courtship phase. Tell me more about that, [00:16:00] it’s lovely.
CN: So this ties into the notion of care as well, in that, you know, what we talked earlier about the 31 or so definitions that the Oxford English Dictionary has for curiosity, but if you trace it back to its original roots in English, it comes from our, the Latin word cura, which means to care.
Cura was a goddess in the Roman cosmology who, by one account, created humans… As well had help from others, the Earth Hummus, by Zeus, and then by another one that I’m forgetting in the story, but because the Earth gave most of the materials — the raw materials — we were called humans because we came from the Hummus, the Earth, you know. If care were more physical of a thing, perhaps we’d be called curans rather than humans, you know, who knows?
LB: Who knows?
CN: But I think [00:17:00] making that connection between curiosity and care didn’t become really meaningful to me until my wife told me one day, you’re not as curious about me as you once were. When you first got to know me, is what she meant, you were just intensely curious. You had this passion…
LB: As one does, right?
CN: Right! And over time in our relationships, we often become less curious. In fact, we do the opposite: we fill in the gaps of, well, I’m not going to ask her a question. I know what she’s going to say, what have you, but people have a way of surprising us.
I’m working on something for Valentine’s Day, 2025, which has 12 questions — rather than giving your love a dozen roses, here are 12 questions that you can ask them…
LB: Nice.
CN: …and one of those questions is: what surprised you today? You know, we get into a rut of [00:18:00] well, you know this person at work or this thing or what have you? But when we talk about surprise, which is again going back to Plutchik’s model, trust and surprise are the two things that bring curiosity about it. It can open up that space for us to maybe be a little bit more curious about each other.
LB: Yeah, so that’s a great segue to your work on the limitations of empathy, where curiosity and care sort of pick up where empathy leaves off. What got you there? How does empathy fit in the designer process — because I’m assuming that was the entry, the portal for this — and what are the implications for designers and design process?
If this is something you think of as foundational, like, are you poking the bear? I mean, how radical is this? I’m trying to understand!
CN: You know, maybe poking the dragon, [00:19:00] to, to sort of make it larger, you know!
When design literature, academic design literature, sought to differentiate the field of design from other fields, it really differentiated itself by saying that empathy is an essential part of who we are as a designer.
Your tax accountant, they may have empathy for you, but it’s not built into the processes of doing their accounting. Your mechanic.
Listeners might be saying, well, what about medical professions? Empathy is built in there as well — but it’s one to one. The doctor that sees you sees one patient, generally speaking.
When designers empathize, it’s one to many. We have to have a capacity to empathize with people, yes, who are like us, because that’s sort of the perspective that’s easy for us to take. But we have to be able to take the perspective of people who are unlike us. [00:20:00] That can be in a variety of perspectives from our age, how tall we are, how physically abled we are, our ability to perceive the world around us; do we have our eyesight, things like that… All of these things are limitations of our empathy, where we may have trouble empathizing with individuals who maybe experiencing the world in different ways than we’ve ever encountered.
I’ll give you one example. This fall, my students will be working with a company called Glide, this company has created a device for blind individuals. (One of my master’s students is blind.) Imagine, if all of the sensors on the vehicle that sort of tell the vehicle where it is, what are objects around you? Oh, don’t, bump into that. If you took that and you put them into a smaller device at the [00:21:00] end of a cane and could help blind individuals navigate the world around them. Now imagine that as well also had GPS and, you know, you could connect it to maps. So that’s what this wonderful company has done.
I can close my eyes — we can all do this –and we can pretend to think that, oh, well, this is what it’s like to be blind. But we had an interesting interaction where my student — his name’s Ethan — was testing out the device and we were having him basically make a lap around a circle — around a table, excuse me! –And as he was, you know, orienting to the device, he was much more daring with the device than I was. I was struggling with, okay, I’m feeling what a blind person feels mentally, so I have to square that with myself.
LB: Uh huh.
CN: I couldn’t empathize. Right?
LB: Yeah.
CN: I couldn’t fully place my feet into his shoes. One of the things that surprised me [00:22:00] was when he came back around to the spot where he started, he said that out loud.
“And here we are! Right where I started.” I don’t know that I would have known, you know, that. They’re embedded things that…
Empathy is perspective-taking, but it’s also imagination. You know, my imagination hasn’t been stretched that far to be able to do that.
And so, designers talk about empathy and it often starts the design processes. We talk about human centered design, and that’s been a long-standing sort of aspect, because we primarily designed for humans, but can sometimes fool us into thinking, yeah, I understand you. So, I don’t need to ask any more questions. I got you.
LB: Yeah.
CN: And I think that’s one of the challenges — and it really changes when we may empathize more with people who are similar to us people who are dissimilar to us, because [00:23:00] in many ways, there’s a shared understanding of, when we say words, we know what they mean.
Our empathy changes when we go to society as well. And we may be less understanding to society-as-a-whole. And so, you know, designers — as I said, in contrast to doctors, where there’s a one-on-one situation — we’re designing many things for many people. We really have to confront these limitations and find ways around them.
Your audience knows that curiosity, it takes persistence. But you know, podcasts like this, designed objects that I hope to create in the future, can, reduce that friction of being curious. That’s really where I want to see my work in the future is to help people to reduce that friction, make it easier to sort of , physically embody curiosity.[00:24:00]
LB: I love it. I love it.
I have an invitation to a designed activity for you. Are you game for my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies?
CN: I’ve been looking forward to this.
LB: Good. Okay. Okay. All right. So here it is, a literal big jar. I have slips of paper in here. I’m going to take out one for you, one for me, one for the audience. And we’re going to make an analogy to curiosity with whatever is on these slips of paper.
Okay. Mine is square dancing. How is curiosity like square dancing? Yours is an octopus. And I have one for the audience. So do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?
CN: I’m kind of curious to hear how you’re going to connect square dancing.
LB: Me too! Well, okay. So here, to our earlier conversation about it being something we do in partnership, [00:25:00] and borrowing and lending: square dancing is all about borrowing and lending partners. And kind of the joy of this combination of trust and surprise, right? You trust the process, you know the steps, but there’s sort of the surprise of whoever you’re paired up with.
And, and it’s square dancing — which I haven’t done in a long time — but I will say that when I did it, it was most fun when I was fully engaged in body, just like what we were talking about. Right? And I think that’s true of curiosity as well. So that’s how curiosity is like square dancing.
Okay, how is curiosity like an octopus?
CN: You know, I, I think in many ways, curiosity is about ways to get to things that we may look physically impossible. The octopus can squeeze through tiny, tiny spaces, so long as its [00:26:00] beak can make its way through… and to me, that’s what curiosity is, right? It’s … sometimes it’s an impossibility… seeming impossibility.
If you and I were to design a shirt, we’d probably design it for a two arm. You know…like an octopus, curiosity sort of forces us to think about maybe more than just this or that, right? It sprouts limbs in order for us to think about other possibilities. Else could we do?
LB: What else? I love it. Oh, that’s great. Okay. And audience, yours is tornado. How is curiosity like a tornado? Let me know. Social media, #analogy.
Well, Cassini, thank you so much for this. What fun!
CN: This has been wonderful, Lynn. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it so much.
(music)
LB: You’ve [00:27:00] been listening to Choose to be Curious. I’m your host, Lynne Borton. Thanks for joining us here today.
You can find all my shows on my website at choosetobecurious.com. I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on Facebook and Instagram at @choosetobecurious, where you can share your tornado analogy, #analogy.
Many thanks to my delightful guest, Cassini Nazir. Links to his work on my website.
Thanks, too, to Sean Ballack for our theme music. And this is “Purple Light” by Marble Run via Blue Dot Sessions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I invite curiosity in myself or others as much as I really can or want.
What about you?
I think a lot about how we—I—might do more and where and why I retreat from it.
In fact, it’s turned into a bit of a theme. I hope you’ll join us again next week when it comes back up in a whole new way.
Until then, choose to be curious.
Listening to the Universe 