Your phone is changing you—and you don’t notice

design justice – A conversation with Vanessa Chang, director of programs at Leonardo and author of The Body Digital, argues that everyday technology quietly trains people’s bodies and reshapes how they communicate, grieve, and even connect—often through systems designed by maj

When you reach for your phone, it feels like you’re in charge. You tap, scroll, and move on with your day. But in Vanessa Chang’s view, the device isn’t just a tool you use. It’s a kind of choreography you learn—until the movement becomes automatic, until your habits start to feel like instincts.

Chang. director of programs at Leonardo. the International Society for the Arts. Sciences and Technology. lays out that idea in her book The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT. Speaking with Scientific American’s Science Quickly host Rachel Feltman in a discussion that also includes Bri Kane. Chang argues that technologies can “disappear” from our attention while they continue evolving alongside the bodies using them—especially through interfaces that discipline how hands move and how minds anticipate what comes next.

She starts with the hands, because that’s where the book begins. Writing. she says. is a technology people often don’t recognize as one—particularly now that texting and voice text have changed everyday habits. Learning handwriting. Chang explains. begins as shapes without meaning. then becomes disciplined training: the body has to learn the movements that make letters legible. Over time, it becomes second nature.

That same training shows up, she says, when people learn to type. A QWERTY keyboard may not be “the most ergonomic format. ” but it persists—because it trains bodies through repeated patterns of movement. Chang links that bodily discipline to what phones now do constantly: “choreograph” gestures in ways that fit proprietary systems designed by major companies.

She points to how quickly that can narrow your options. She uses an iPhone, her partner uses a Samsung, and she describes feeling “absolutely useless” when she turns on his phone—an everyday reminder of how deeply the body can be trained for one specific set of gestures and expectations.

The unease, for Chang, isn’t about technology being new. It’s about how thoroughly it can reshape what you do without asking whether the design matches what people actually need. And she argues that this concern has old roots, long before smartphones.

Bri Kane asks what worries people expressed early on when communication technologies began to warp time. space. and authenticity in ways that felt existential—citing Chang’s references to War of the Worlds and The Twilight Zone. and her discussion of the microphone as a technology. Kane describes being pulled into an iPhone by “sparkly apps” for hours, noticing only later that her hand is cramping.

Chang answers by describing the arc she organizes the book around: craft, early automation—like cuckoo clocks—and then code. The anxieties. she says. start getting rehearsed in the clockwork era. when people built proto-robots and automatons meant to mimic writing. music. or even the natural world. like birds. When these machines were close to life but not quite alive, they struck people as uncanny.

The displacement of human creativity is woven into the reaction, Chang says. One early example she returns to is the Jacquard loom. a machine attached to a loom that used punch cards to automate designs. Before the Jacquard loom, creating complicated patterns required many people and specific expertise at the loom. Once automation arrived, those craftspeople were displaced—and Chang draws a line from the punch-card model to early computation.

Kane connects that thread to her own fascination with Ada Lovelace, calling her foundational and noting that a lot of modern computing remains built on that foundation.

Chang’s conversation then turns to where the uncanny valley shows up now—not just in machines that look human, but in products that try to replicate deep human experience.

Kane mentions a recent feature article about “griefbots. ” AI systems designed to help people grieve by talking to loved ones or working through grief. Kane says she loves the idea of someone else being able to experience that support. but she also admits she’s “inside the uncanny valley” about the concept of turning herself—after death—into a bot someone else uses.

Chang treats that discomfort as a key clue. She argues that AI used to leverage human feeling can displace actual human connection. A griefbot has no body; a hologram doesn’t age or die. Chang describes how the rhetoric around these tools can suggest people “don’t have to feel that loss” or can work through grief without the messy reality of death. But she insists there is a cost: working through actual human connection.

Kane then brings the conversation to another kind of training—this one mediated by algorithms. She talks about Chang’s Spotify “daylist,” a playlist that seems to know the right song for a morning commute. Kane describes the thrill of being understood. then the creeping worry that the “1s and 0s” know you better than you know yourself.

Chang says she isn’t a Luddite. She loves technology. But she wants more people engaged in building it so it reflects what matters. She also describes digging into discussions comparing Spotify and Tidal, including people’s claims that one service knows them better than the other.

For Chang, the emotional payoff comes with a price: your listening habits can be up for grabs, and the result can be homogenization—less challenge in what you hear, and even cultural homogenization if systems use sales and download patterns to manufacture more of the same.

She points out another question that data makes unavoidable: who gets the data, what they do with it, and whether it connects you to other people or leaves you isolated.

That concern about design choices and who benefits becomes sharper in Chang’s section on disability and a principle she frames as “design justice.” Kane asks why Chang included a late Alice Wong’s essay. “I Still Have a Voice. ” and what it can teach about technology’s benefits alongside the obstacles it creates.

Chang says disability plays a big role in her writing. and her thinking is shaped by how disabled people and creators work with technology—showing that tools carry assumptions about the bodies that use them. She describes text-to-speech as a technology with real benefit when someone can’t speak. but she also emphasizes a disjunction between a person’s accustomed voice and the voice a system provides. She says Wong describes text-to-speech as Anglocentric.

Chang says Wong’s essay matters because it shows both the gaps and the need for disabled people to be involved in design. That is design justice: technologies are designed with assumptions about abilities, gender, age, culture, and language—and those assumptions can fail people.

She extends the point to captioning. Chang says captioning can have shortcomings for people who aren’t native speakers or who grew up deaf, including those with a deaf accent. In her telling, the people who might need captioning more aren’t represented in a way that makes it work for them.

Kane adds another example: the QWERTY keyboard doesn’t have Chinese characters. She describes her own “Anglocentric” assumption—that because different languages use different letters. those languages must have figured something out—rather than technology adapting to users. Chang agrees, and she notes that a Chinese typewriter prototype was discovered recently and is now at Stanford.

The conversation then widens beyond keyboards and interfaces, moving toward cities and streets—because the assumptions live everywhere. Kane asks Chang about how design justice reaches into the physical world: sidewalks and crosswalks. strollers and wheelchairs. and what Chang calls the “ideal body” designed for.

Chang points to a group called the Rolling Quads in Berkeley in the 1970s. She says wheelchair users protested and created curb cuts by pouring concrete in some areas. She adds that they brought demands to the Berkeley City Council. and that move helped launch the world’s first widespread curb-cut program. which later expanded nationally. In Chang’s framing, accessibility isn’t a bonus feature. Without curb cuts. wheelchair users. people with strollers. or people riding bikes can’t fully use the environment. which means they can’t fully participate in city life.

Chang also describes a video of a world designed to be fully accessible. where telephone booths were lower and everyone used sign language. She uses those examples to sharpen the moment where technology and its invisibility stop working: if systems are made for some bodies and not others. the resistance becomes clear.

In the end, Chang argues that technologies wanting to be invisible can hide who they were designed for. But when design fails—when you can’t move through a space, can’t read signs, can’t cross because a crosswalk timer is too fast—questions of rights and participation surface immediately.

Feltman closes the episode by directing listeners to more book coverage on the website and inviting ideas for new releases to discuss by email at ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. The weekly news roundup returns on Monday.

Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. The episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check the show, and the theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

smartphones design justice Vanessa Chang The Body Digital QWERTY Jacquard loom Spotify daylist griefbots grief AI text-to-speech captioning curb cuts Rolling Quads