Applying McLuhan’s Tetrad To The UX Business Model Design

UX Interaction via Medium

Today’s modernists have been led to make a decision with multiple choices in a complex situation. Namely, it becomes ambiguous to distinguish whether this decision is right (fit) or not. I, as a creator, provide commodities with a point of view that I am a customer/user/end-user. Therefore, the fundamental meaning of McLuhan’s Tetrad is what will we offer our contents (=medium) to viewers (=customers/users).

McLuhan’s Tetrad Model is famously applied to analyze the functions and benefits of a medium, such as television or the telegraph. His main argument was that a medium does not just cover a message, but that a medium IS a message itself. Naturally, this does not just apply to traditional media, but also applies to every product, platform, and service to some extent. Therefore, this article explains how we can use McLuhan’s Tetrad Model to analyze and understand the effects a product brings to consumers, i.e., to design business models.

McLuhan’s Tetrad: Medium effects
(adapt from McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988)

McLuhan’s Tetrad (Marshall McLuhan, 1988); describes tetrad of media effects. Applied in a tetrad to examine the effects on society of any technology/medium by categorising its influences into four dimensions and displaying them at the same time.

Four axises: (1) Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies – What does the medium enhance? (2) Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence – What does the medium make obsolete? (3) Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost – What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? (4) Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits – What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?

Digital Prophecies – The Medium as the Internet
Marshall McLuhan, 1977, “Medium is Message”

Enhances

What it amplifies?

The preliminary assumption; ‘My life quality will be better via ‘this’ service (or product, platform itself, etc)‘ is one of the decisive factors finalised by the level of its quality. For instance, current social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram) allow for people to reflect and share their living artifacts into a small digital screen. Every content is collected via hashtags leading automatic positionings, a core value. Re-defining the term “platform” in the author’s knowledge; it is a certain service journey frame for consumers (end-users) to collect different experience. Hence, social value, “what do I and we provide to you and myself,” is a matter to amplify our life quality.

“Medium is a message.”

Through this, what McLuhan’s message about the medium is about the emergence of the media and the perception change of society and humans, not only about the contents. Also, ‘tetrad’ is a schematic representation of these.

Obsoletes

What does it make obsolete?

The flow of context, situation transition, and trend analysis, etc. These terms are referred when the products and services need to be positioned in a certain domain. To do so, it is crucial to prepare a keen key performance indexes (KPIs) for certain products. For key indicators, analysis of success and failure factors should be picked out, emphasizing the special individuality, so called personal singularity. Normally, the common problems of laggard of providers is always the absence of ‘how to‘, which do not have contexts of success and failure, in specific, there is no factor. However, this is totally different with obsolescence area.

“… the medium by which a human sense has been extended to the external environment and the existence which causes internal changes.”

McLuhan (1962; 1964; 1994) insists the process of reorganizing the medium and the structure of human senses and experiences, rather than the socio-cultural fluctuations of the external environment surrounded by media. Thus, McLuhan’s medium is not only set up in a simple environment and effects on one direction.

Retrieves

What original idea or ground is being brought back?

Recently, agile management and design thinking methodology have been argued in terms of getting a success on behalf of quick failures. Here, the McLuhan’s Tetrad model is contextually similar to the description of agile organisational behaviour in today’s management trend. In other words, the resurrection (or retrieve) strategy creates some challenges against as a result of strategic failure. Compare to the past, various failure and success cases of organisations have been extracted and the retrieve strategy’s diversity is being pursued through the redefinition of current firms.

Reverses

What happens when pushed it to limits?

Innovation has double edged swords (Christensen ). No one can anticipate whether human’s challenge versus technology is reckless or innovative .

Universally, when we push human to their limits, a burnout happens which might be seen as overheated potato. However, as human, we never set aside this state. Learning from the failure experience, we set up the reverse planning. It is the era that new technologies replace what we used to do. For instance, AI technology produces countless creative outputs. Designers do not need to “design” anymore. What human can design is “how to use”. The medium, depended on how we define it, allows for human to flip into innovation.

Sun-Young HA | Trained as an industrial design engineer at South Korea and researched about innovation research in design management at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked as a designer and project manager in design firms and has studied of designers’ firm performance. Sun-Young is a strategic designer, innovation management researcher, and writer.