How Can We Bring Order To The Metaverse’s Chaos? It’s Simple: We Don’t

“The web as I envisioned it, we still haven’t seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past”.

So said Tim Berners-Lee in 2018, reflecting on the impressive and tumultuous life so far of his invention, the internet. It’s a useful quote to come back to - not just on its own value as an indication of the bigger picture, but also in the context of the metaverse. It’s a helpful reminder that, no matter your job title or how much money your brand is throwing at this thing, nobody knows - nobody can possibly know - just what the metaverse is going to become. Like the original web before it, the metaverse will take on a life of its own regardless of our best-laid plans.

First of all, a confession: It’s become a mild frustration to so often clumsily talk of ‘the metaverse’, given it’s a collective term which is increasingly used to discuss specifics. But, perhaps like ‘the internet of things’ before it, ‘the metaverse’ is a helpful shorthand to discuss these intricate and exciting changes in technology and culture. Whilst many creatives, innovators and developers have been working on projects we might now define as ‘metaverse’ for 15 years or more, it’s only now that these disparate and unique technologies are coalescing under one term in our broader consciousness. 

It’s important to recognise that we are very much in a sandbox phase at the moment, one of play and experimentation. As a result, there will be some exciting success stories as well as some disappointing misfires before we truly understand the alchemy at work. 

There’s a palpable desire to make sense of it all - and that’s most often where designers come in. But, instead of asking whether design can bring order to the metaverse, what we should be asking is ‘should it?’. 

Design has many virtues, but it can often rationalise and limit experimental ‘failures’ too soon, and homogenise successful applications, patterns, and interactions. Think of the overly-familiar app designs we experience with such regularity today. Perhaps there’s a little too much order in the way we talk about the metaverse. Maybe it’s time to invite some well-intentioned chaos.

After all, why should we try to define something that has the potential to redefine us? Instead, it would be wiser in the long-run to allow metaverse experiments to evolve according to the limits of technology and the demands of consumer permissions and taste. According to a report published last month by Analysis Group (and backed by Meta), the metaverse will make up 3% of our entire planet’s GDP in the next ten years. In that context, It seems sound logic to not throttle its potential so early.

It’s not the role of design to give definition and structure to the metaverse. It is, however, the role of design to ensure its innovations are authentic and have purpose. “We need to be in the metaverse” is not the simple epiphany that business leaders need. Rather, it ought to be a question of “Why should we be in the metaverse? What would we enable our customers to achieve? How will that create a better experience?”.

Just ‘being there’ is not the same as achieving. Experimenting quickly, iterating, learning, and reinvesting is the rule for this playground. But few will pay just to play - ROI’s and KPI’s are the mantra of business investments in these times of efficiencies, and these will be difficult to guarantee in such an experimental and early stage.

For now, we must embrace what we don’t know. We’re collectively about to embark on a journey equal parts exciting and unknowable, and our strategies will be most effective if they leave space for that turbulence to play out organically. 

Have We Been Here Before?

As brands and marketers look ahead to that turbulent future, we do all share one big advantage: rich-seams of technology-enabled profits that have been seen in the recent past. Think web2, and the SAAS successes.

That advantage can seep into our strategy in so many ways, and it can help us discover the metaverse’s purpose (or more likely purposes) through design as much as understanding. For one thing, that experience lends us perspective. It would be fair to say that the broad adoption of the smartphone (the first iPhone was released in 2007) put the internet on steroids and changed it in enormous ways. The same could be said for the invention of the App Store one year later, and how that utterly transformed our view of the internet’s utility. These are things that, when Mr Berners-Lee decided to open up the internet in early 90s, he could never have envisaged. But that change in technology and consumer access revolutionised his invention and, without unnecessary hyperbole, changed the world.

It would be fair to expect a similar moment in the long-term evolution of the metaverse. Perhaps it will be a sudden widespread adoption of VR beyond gaming or, most likely, it will be something nobody is quite thinking of right now. This is why our metaverse strategies should be experimental and unthrottled. Let’s celebrate the concept of play, because the rules of the game are highly likely to change.

Ultimately, you need to understand why your audience will, or indeed should, be using the metaverse. Figure that out, and you’ll understand why you should be embracing it, too. That’s going to be a process of experimentation, and perhaps a few of the false starts which will prove to be the necessary steps you must take to get where you need to be. Whatever multidimensional destination the metaverse is eventually heading towards, what we do know is that by embracing play in our method, design will help us get there.