This short post contains a great question and a healthy nudge.

First the question, which I’ve adapted into a stem:

What is offline ______ experience better than online______ experience at achieving?

Or, flipped:

What is online ______ experience better than offline______ experience at achieving?

(The post inserts the word “retail” to ask the question, “What is offline retail experience better than online retail experience at achieving?”  I’d imagine you could have a good discussion if you inserted the word “educational” or “communication” or “training” or “entertainment” or “social.”)

And here’s the nudge:

Designers . . . have cultural antennae and cilia that are tuned by far-field signals that are hard to leverage when imprisoned on the other side of the glass display of a smartphone. Digital omniscience is cool — no doubt about it — but the algorithms that are used to fetch for us “interesting things” lack a bit of multi-dimensional randomness that the real world can often bring us.