Reducing activities to their core misses the point

There may be a very simple evolutionary reason why water does not really taste of anything, as I learned from the psychophysicist Mark Changizi. Pure water has no taste because our taste buds have been calibrated, very sensibly, not to notice it.

For a few million years, the most important contribution taste buds made to survival were to detect things in water that weren’t water: the very things, in short, which might indicate that the water wasn’t safe to drink. If we had evolved perception so that water tasted like Rioja or Dr Pepper, the sensory overload might have overpowered that hint of dead sheep from a rotting carcass 100 yards upstream: our taste buds are calibrated with water as the base line, the better to notice things which shouldn’t be in it.

In the same way, we often ignore information which is normal and expected and derive the most meaning and significance from things which are unusual, unexpected or superfluous. It’s why a lot of advertising focuses on seemingly irrelevant details: as any poker player knows, it is often the tiny clues which reveal the most.

When the renovated St Pancras station reopened, there was a very clever PR campaign which did not talk about trains at all: instead, it trumpeted that the station contained ‘the longest champagne bar in Europe’. This seemingly irrelevant fact led to thousands of people visiting the station as a destination in itself. The V&A once promoted itself as ‘An ace caff (with quite a nice museum attached)’.

The criteria we use to judge a service may be altogether different from what seems important to the person who provides it. Often modern technologists fail to recognise this. At their worst, they take some existing operation, define its function very narrowly, strip it of anything not essential to this one function and then engineer an automated replacement, thereby destroying what we valued about its predecessor.