Pace Layers give designers a clear way to understand how some parts of Interaction Design were able to rapidly evolve, while others remain stagnant. Stewart Brand mentions fashion and commerce layers which dictate the rapid shifts in visual style, interaction patterns, growth loops and user flows. This accounts for the yearly redesigns, evolving micro-interactions and new user flows that keep interfaces feeling “fresh”, even when the product itself hadn’t fundamentally changed. Designers constantly work on iterating to keep products current, competitive and aligned with changing key performance indicators.
The next layer are the slower layers where infrastructure and governance shape the deeper lifecycle of Interaction Design work. Infrastructure provides platforms, frameworks, devices and technical constraints that determine what is possible t design at the time. Changes in this layer trigger major redesigns, which pushes designers to think about shifts like flat screens to spatial computing. Governance provides privacy laws, platform policies and accessibility standards that require significant updates to core flows such as consent, data visibility and account creation, however these changes seldom change.
Finally, the last layer is the slowest layer. This is where culture and nature reside. Culture shapes people’s expectations, norms and mental models which allow designers to design how technology should behave, while nature limits perception, attention, memory and motor control. These layers change very slowly as they act as anchors across the entire lifecycle of Interaction Design itself. Successful Interaction Design align with these slow layers by grounding interfaces in stable human needs, culture norms and cognitive limits, creating interfaces that remain intuitive, trustworthy and usable overtime, despite the ever-changing trends shifting around them.