How the interfaces — not just visual — between humans and machines interact, how they’re designed to react, tells us two things:

1. What their designers think about human beings: not necessarily about themselves, but certainly about the rest of humanity. What they think their clients deserve, and how much effort should be made to deliver on this.

2. Indirectly, in the battle between traditional tech’s desire for a machine primacy compared to other fields of human activity where a human primacy seems much more wished-for, it tells us if the designers of these interfaces want us to fit into the machine or prefer to do something much more complex: shape machines so they extend and fit around us.

I was told an anecdote recently in Stockholm. A very good Swedish salesperson, as Swedish as they get, told me an interesting story about when Amazon.se was first set up. Surprisingly for its advocates, traction was really slow. According to my interlocutor, it was for one simple reason. The pages served up on the site looked to Swedish people as if they came from the 1990s.

Swedish citizens have high expectations in all sectors; a real culture and therefore clear understanding of when something isn’t as first-class as it could be; and a rightful resistance to buying into it when it isn’t. After all, what does that say about your potential supplier’s view of you?

The Nordics do really care about the relationship between what they consider to be extensions of themselves — our machines, our screens, our devices, our vehicles — and their own personal humanity, and, in my view, they want it to stay that way.

At Nordification, so do we. But not just for the Nordics. For the rest of the world, too; even Silicon Valley’s own backyards.