Resonant Systems: The Forward-Operator-Back Dynamic in Experience Design
Honoring Choice and Freedom as Foundational Design Principles
The distinction between control and choice is subtle but profound. While human control over the world and even the self may be limited, the capacity for choice remains essential. Experience Design must explicitly honor and enhance this freedom, creating systems that empower agents to make meaningful, informed decisions within the constraints of their environments.
By prioritizing freedom of choice as a guiding principle, resonant systems can foster environments where individuals and agents alike are empowered to act as conscious participants in their own trajectories. This is not about rejecting or affirming philosophical notions of free will but about recognizing and operationalizing choice as the cornerstone of human autonomy in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
The future of Experience Design centers on the critical distinction between the constraints of human control and the expansive potential of human choice. While humans may not possess complete control over their bodies, minds, or environments, they are uniquely endowed with the ability to make meaningful choices. This freedom of choice is a foundational capacity, enabled by observation, awareness, and interaction with the structured environments around us.
Experience Design must explicitly prioritize freedom of choice as its guiding principle. Systems should empower individuals to explore, evaluate, and act autonomously, ensuring environments are constructed in a way that fosters informed and equitable decision-making.
Forward-Operator-Back: A Resonant Framework Rooted in Freedom of Choice
1. Forward (System Design):
Systems must establish conditions that enable autonomous decision-making in environments including financial. This involves designing environments that are transparent, equitable, and free from coercive or manipulative influences. The foundation must ensure all agents have access to the information and opportunities they need to make informed choices. In financial systems this requires ensuring users have access to clear, unbiased information about their options while minimizing friction in executing transactions.
Examples:
A civic engagement platform designed to inform citizens about policy issues and voting options must provide unbiased, comprehensive information without steering users toward specific outcomes.
A recipe recommendation platform must present cooking options based on available ingredients while clearly indicating difficulty levels, time requirements, and dietary considerations without limiting choices based on past selections.
An urban mobility app must show all available transportation modes—from public transit to bike-sharing—with clear indicators of environmental impact, estimated arrival times, and physical effort required, allowing users to weigh these factors according to their own priorities.
A peer-to-peer payment app should provide clear fee structures for transactions across currencies, ensuring users understand the costs associated with their choices.
2. Operator (Agent Behavior):
Agents—human or artificial—navigate these systems through their capacity for observation and decision-making. Systems must respect the inherent variability of individual goals and perspectives while ensuring agents are not unduly influenced by biases or limitations within the environment and must respect the variability of individual goals and circumstances, enabling users to act freely and confidently.
Examples:
A digital library system must ensure that users, regardless of past behavior or algorithmic predictions, have equitable access to the full range of resources, encouraging exploration beyond their algorithmically inferred preferences.
A music streaming service must allow listeners to discover new genres and artists beyond their typical preferences, ensuring that algorithmic recommendations don't create an echo chamber of familiar sounds.
A smart home system must present users with granular control over their automation preferences, allowing them to adjust settings based on time of day, occupancy, or energy usage patterns without assuming optimal configurations.
A small business owner using a digital invoicing platform should be able to select how they receive payments—e.g., instant payments at a small fee or delayed transfers at no cost—based on their cash flow needs. The system must present these options without defaulting to what it assumes is “best” for the user.
3. Back (Feedback Loop):
Systems must analyze feedback from the agent’s behavior and outcomes to refine and improve the environment. This feedback loop should enhance the agent’s ability to make choices without introducing new constraints or biases and should focus on enabling greater transparency, fairness, and ease of use while ensuring agents retain autonomy.
Examples:
A healthcare system monitoring patient engagement with treatment options should refine how information is presented to ensure patients feel confident in their decisions, rather than nudged toward preselected options.
A language learning application should adapt its lesson difficulty based on user performance while still allowing learners to challenge themselves with content beyond their current level, rather than restricting access to advanced material.
A fitness tracking platform should provide insights about exercise patterns and recovery needs while empowering users to make their own decisions about training intensity, rather than prescribing rigid workout schedules.
A financial budgeting app that tracks spending patterns could provide suggestions for cost-saving opportunities but must do so without prescriptive judgment or limiting access to certain transactions.
Resonance: Preserving Choice Within Dynamic Systems
This forward-operator-back relationship creates a resonant system, wherein systems and agents co-evolve in a dynamic interplay of choice and response. Resonance ensures that:
Choice is prioritized as a fundamental right, not just an incidental feature, empowering individuals in their financial decisions.
Equity and transparency remain integral as systems adapt to user behavior.
Trust and alignment are maintained through consistent support for autonomous decision-making.
Implications for Experience Design
1. Expanding Awareness Through Dynamic Stage-Gating:
Systems must use stage-gating as a method to scaffold choices, empowering agents to navigate increasing complexity without compromising their autonomy.
For example:
A public transportation system that provides dynamic route recommendations must also preserve access to full schedules and alternatives, ensuring users can deviate from suggested paths if desired.
A career guidance platform that recommends training or job opportunities must allow users to explore non-standard paths or lesser-known options without ranking them as inferior.
A personal investment platform might guide a user through initial decision-making with simplified recommendations but later enable access to advanced tools like portfolio analysis, ensuring users always have control over their level of engagement.
A global remittance app could allow users to choose between various transfer methods (e.g., lower-cost but slower bank transfers or instant payments with higher fees) while ensuring full transparency about costs, timelines, and potential trade-offs.
2. Empowering Choice Within Constraints:
Experience Design must recognize that while human autonomy operates within physical and informational and financial environmental limits, freedom of choice remains meaningful and actionable, and while financial autonomy is often limited by economic conditions, Experience Design must honor and expand the ability of users to make informed choices within these constraints.
Systems should focus on enabling informed choices that reflect the agent’s unique perspective, goals, and context.
Example:
A personal finance management platform that offers loan consolidation services should allow users to compare interest rates, repayment timelines, and total costs across multiple lenders, rather than restricting options to pre-selected financial institutions or proprietary partnerships.
3. Auditing for Choice Integrity:
Designers and engineers must embed mechanisms to ensure that systems consistently uphold freedom of choice.
This involves monitoring for unintended biases, coercive tendencies, or manipulative defaults and patterns that could undermine the agent’s ability to act independently.
Example:
A rewards and incentive system must allow users to redeem their points or benefits flexibly—whether for cash equivalents, products, services, or charitable contributions—without steering them toward options that prioritize the provider's profitability over the user’s preferences or value.
Experience Design as a Steward of Freedom of Information Choice and Financial Freedom
Experience Designers, Architects, and Engineers must act as stewards of freedom of choice and financial freedom, ensuring that systems they create enhance and preserve this capacity. This requires:
Commitment to Transparency:
Designing information and financial systems that clearly communicate options, outcomes, and underlying processes without obscuring or biasing critical systems that clearly communicate costs, benefits, and trade-offs without obscuring critical information.
Ethical Awareness:
Respecting the agent’s autonomy by avoiding manipulative or overly deterministic design strategies that violate the user’s autonomy by avoiding manipulative or overly deterministic design strategies, such as “dark patterns” that push users toward higher-cost options.
Continuous Refinement:
Iteratively improving information and financial systems to better support choice, equity, and alignment with user values.
The evolution of Experience Design must place freedom of choice at its core, recognizing it as a fundamental human capability that transcends the constraints of physical, informational, and financial environments. While humans may lack complete control over their circumstances, they possess the capacity to observe, evaluate, and decide within the boundaries of the systems they inhabit. Resonant systems must honor and enhance this capacity by creating environments that prioritize clarity, transparency, and equity, ensuring that every individual can make informed, autonomous decisions.
In practice, this means designing systems that remove barriers to information and financial access while avoiding manipulative or overly deterministic influences. From unbiased financial platforms that transparently communicate costs and benefits to decision-support systems that empower exploration without steering, the role of Experience Design is to enable users to act confidently within their unique contexts. These systems must focus on expanding the user’s awareness of possibilities, preserving their ability to choose freely while fostering trust through fairness and integrity.
As dynamic systems evolve in response to user behavior and environmental changes, the feedback loop becomes critical. Experience Designers, Architects, and Engineers must ensure these systems remain adaptable without compromising the foundational principles of equity and freedom. This requires continuous refinement, regular auditing for unintended biases, and a steadfast commitment to enabling choice rather than limiting it. Through this iterative process, resonant systems can maintain alignment with the needs and values of their users while adapting to the complexities of a rapidly changing world.
The implications extend beyond individual systems to the broader societal impact of empowering human agency. Financial freedom, for instance, is not just an individual benefit but a catalyst for broader economic participation and innovation. Similarly, equitable access to unbiased information strengthens communities and fosters informed citizenship. By embedding the principles of freedom of choice into the fabric of Experience Design, we can create systems that elevate human dignity and collective progress, ensuring that technology serves as a partner in autonomy rather than a gatekeeper of opportunity.
In this future, Experience Design becomes more than a technical discipline—it becomes an ethical practice that respects the inherent value of human agency. By prioritizing freedom of choice, resonant systems can empower individuals to act as conscious participants in their own trajectories, transforming how people engage with technology, information, and financial systems. This vision challenges us to move beyond mere functionality and efficiency, calling for designs that amplify the human spirit and enable a world where choice is the cornerstone of progress and autonomy.
