Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Benediktas Gylys, a Lithuanian artist and entrepreneur, had an optimistic vision for a technology designed to connect people. And it worked perfectly—until actual people started using it. Then it had to be redesigned to thwart the various ways actual people had abused it. That’s the story of the Portal, a project connecting New York City and Dublin with big, public video screens linked by a live feed. But it’s also an object lesson illustrating what has become one of the most urgent issues in tech innovation: What happens when designs are too user-friendly? The “portals” are round screens about 8 feet in diameter, with an unadorned concrete frame, and weighing an estimated 11 tons. One is just off O’Connell Street in Dublin’s City Centre, the other in Manhattan’s Flatiron District—“a testament to the power of art to transcend physical barriers,” according to a press release accompanying their opening earlier this month. There is no audio, but people on either side of the connection can wave, dance, play rock-paper-scissors, and do whatever else to those in the other locale. And that’s what happened. [Photo: Niall Carson/PA Images/Getty Images] But that wasn’t all that happened—because art is not all that “transcends physical barriers.” There were obscene gestures (of course), and a handful of people on the Dublin side brandished Nazi symbols and pictures of the World Trade Center attacks. On the New York side, an OnlyFans model and a Brooklyn “influencer” each flashed their breasts. As the Portal had originally gone viral, so did these hijinks. Less than a week after its debut, the New York-Dublin Portal was shut off. When it was reactivated a few days later, the portal experience had been given a refresh. Hours were limited (6 a.m. to 4 p.m. in New York, which is 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. in Dublin) and staffed by “Portal ambassadors” in yellow jackets in Dublin. New York already had security guards but added “fencing,” according to a statement from the organizers. In addition to physical barriers, they also implemented a “proximity-based solution,” meaning that getting too close to the object’s camera now blurs the entire stream. @garron_music #fyp #xyzcba #foryoupage #irish ♬ original sound – Garron Noone The Portal project was developed in Vilnius, Lithuania, which was half of the original portal pair, along with the Polish city Lublin. Those portals began operation in May 2021. Gylys envisions a global network of the portals devoted to “meeting humanity as it is,” according to the Portals.org site, working with public and private partners in various locales. The New York-Dublin link was the second to go live. When it closed after a mere four days, it all seemed like just another example of why we can’t have nice things. But jokes aside, the New York-Dublin Portal was misused precisely because it worked so well at doing exactly what it was designed to do: accommodate instant, unfiltered communication and attract attention. The new round of design revisions are meant to put some parameters (or guardrails, or restrictions) on the original design in order to save it. This is why the Portal became a kind of stand-in for one of the knottiest tech-design themes of recent years: dealing with problem users. Versions of this challenge have been around as long as the Internet, but the downsides of an easy-onboarding, minimal-barrier, freewheeling ideal of social media made it acute: Welcoming everybody sounds great until it sinks in that everybody can include scammers, Nazis, death threats, and more. Facebook connected friends, but also became a platform for misinformation. TikTok is for funny videos, or for sharing how to steal a Kia. In social media, the resulting content-moderation quagmire has proved that tech companies needed to learn to think like bad actors.  And now, an even more treacherous version of the same struggle hovers over the development of AI—with a host of competitors moving as fast as they can to make their tools broadly available and easy to access, even as they openly worry about how those tools might be abused—from deepfake celebrity porn to scammers imitating family members in distress. Some have adopted “red-teaming” tactics borrowed from Cold War-era war gaming to expose potential misuses. The consequences of the Portal’s false start are obviously less severe, but they make clear that the real challenge these days isn’t making things user-friendly or even user-centric, but ensuring that they are user-proof. The reopened version of the Portal has so far attracted positive responses (even if some wondered whether the new rules undercut the project’s mission)—and arguably even more attention, thanks to the first-round hiccups. It enables the unique connections it was designed for but also recognizes that users and their motives can be unpredictable. “I did it to go viral,” the OnlyFans flasher told Rolling Stone, noting that the incident attracted thousands of new followers to her account. Besides, she added: “If you wanted to connect people and do a piece about human nature, what’s more human than a hot girl showing her boobs?” Absurd as it sounds, that’s the sort of question product designers should answer before anybody has a chance to ask it. Failing to anticipate misuse may be embarrassing for some tech projects—but for others, it could be anything but funny. 

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