Design, as we all know, is responsible for rampant consumerism, all the landfill in the world, and riding roughshod over the needs and wants of users and other stakeholders, and all because Designers™ focus on their creative muse or technical curiosity to the exclusion of all other considerations. Don't worry though, there's a whole queue of movements lined up to sort these designers out, who are no match at all for the massed forces of design activitism, responsible design, sustainable design, value-sensitive design, human-centred design and all future humane centrings and sensitivities.
Advocacy and demonisation appear to go hand in hand. Advocates draw attention to the dire state of the world, which fails to live up to their ideals, by pointing the finger at blame at those responsible. A zero sum game can operate whereby WE make ourselves better by showing how bad THEY are.
In the 1980s, software developers took a beating from self-appointed user-centred design specialists, who were rarely designers or developers themselves, and often knew very little about people either. Users were model information processors with mechanical behaviours for perception, cognition and motor skills. Humanity was reduced to a mirror image of the input-processing-output model of the digital computer. Emotion, meaning, values, choice, motivation and other defining facets of what it is to be human were rarely addressed. Social factors were given more attention in the 1990s as sociologists joined cognitive psychologists to extend the theoretical bases for human-centred design. The input to design from narrow human-science specialists was essentially descriptive: this is how people are, design for that, and your design will fit its human context.
In the 1990s, the dotcom boom allowed human-centred design advocates to beat up visual designers as well as engineering designers. While the latter focused on technical opportunities with no thought for human activities and capabilities, the former focused on eye candy with no thought for interaction or navigation. Both groups produced bad designs because they didn't understand people, or take them into account when designing.
The 2000s witnessed an interesting cross-over. Human-centred philosophies spread out from Interaction Design, leveraging earlier human factors traditions in product design and interior design. However, Interaction Design, which had experienced the most intense focus on user-centred design practices, rediscovered life beyond the user. A human-centred focus has been balanced by foci on creative design practices, on sustainable, inclusive and responsible design, and on the benefits and the harms experienced by stakeholders beyond immediate users of designs. So, while some areas of design were playing catch up on the human-centred front (even Engineering Design!), critical researchers and practitioners within Interaction Design rendezvoused with those in sustainable/responsible design to develop a critique of narrowly conceived user- and human-centred design philosophies.
In Interaction Design, these developments are often referred to as Third Wave HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). Overall, these developments are characterised by a move away from humanity being little more than cognitive psychology or the ethnomethodology of human activities. As design foci have expanded beyond these two anthills of human science, Third Wave HCI has found itself rediscovering concerns that established design disciplines have considered for millenia.
As someone whose interest in REAL design has increased over the last six years, and who has spent his first year in a Design department with a 150+ year tradition of Applied Arts and much more, there is a risible irony in the 'discoveries' of Third Wave HCI (of which I have been a hopefully worthy part), since they relate to design perspectives that were always present in the applied arts and engineering design practices that user-centred zealots initially demonised.
The idea that Fashion, Visual, Interior or Transport Design must embrace human science inputs and evaluation practices to enable human-centred design is grossly misinformed. All of these craft disciplines span back into pre-history and have profoundly human practices, both in drawing on the humanity of designers, and in deep understandings of human needs, wants, aspirations, dreams, experiences and the creative responses to these embodied in millenia of material culture.
All design is human-centred. It is practised by humans for humans, albeit with different degrees of success. What differs is the way in which designers and design practices construct users, consumers, clients and other stakeholders. As such, it is close to meaningless to state that design is human-centred. If design is not centred on people, then what is it centred on? The answer here is often the creative or technical object, an artefact-centred characterisation of design that is just a vehicle for demonising designers who do not apply disciplinary knowledge or evaluation methods from the human sciences.
Dividing the design world into the truly human-centred and the negligently artefact-centred is a pointless waste of time that quickly degenerates into a ping pong game of ungrounded ignorant accusations and weary corrections. The reality of design practices is that they have multiple foci: some have a few, others have several. As extra foci are added, design becomes more complicated and requires increasingly sophisticated management of ever larger multi-discipinary teams. While design foci are kept simple, masterly design practices remain within reach of the solo designer-maker.
My interest in Design Situations stems from an interest in the variety of design settings and my need to understand and respect different settings without prejudice. No doubt some design settings are better than others for specific design needs and contexts, but the dynamics of each extend far beyond whether design practices are human-centred or not.
I am currently developing a framework (or Non-Philosophy in the style of François Laruelle) that can identify and explain differences in design settings on the basis of the types of design choices that are explictly made, and the work that is required from design and evaluation approaches in these settings. I have explored the latter through meta-principles for designing (committedness, receptiveness, expressivity, credibility, inclusiveness, improvability). For the former, I began with John Heskett's account of the determinants of design outcomes (choices about artefacts, purposes, beneficiaries and evaluations), but I am currently expanding beyond these four types of design choice to cover simpler design situations in Engineering Design and millenia old Applied Arts practices.
I'll be using this blog to provide updates on the development of my Non-Philosophy of Design, with the hope that this will trigger discussions of the adequacy and attractiveness of the evolving conceptual framework. My forthcoming posts will explore design choice types and how meta-principles interact with these in design work to create a wide range of requirements for design and evaluation approaches.
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