Dear all,
Thank you François, for sharing Don’s piece, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I
particularly enjoyed how optimistic (or perhaps I should say humanistic) it
is; it is a defence of human capability and that is no minor thing. In my
view, the key point of the essay is neatly summarised in the final
paragraph:
"We must change our mind-set from being technology-centric to become
people-centric. Instead of starting with the technology and attempting to
make it easy to understand and use, let us take human capabilities, and use
the technology to expand our abilities."
While I’m in line with the essay’s main point I do wonder if this state of
affairs isn’t inevitable. It is often the case that technological advances
and discoveries happen by accident and are by and large unintended. Design
takes over in the following step, that is, in making the technology useful
and meaningful. Of course, many technological advances are indeed intended,
but great technological leaps often spring from unintended discoveries.
Don’s suggestion that we invert the components of this formula (currently
technology comes first and human affairs later) is exciting. What would
happen if technology was guided by design? Assuming, of course, that design
adopts a human perspective. What would happen if human capabilities were
enhanced by technology instead of wasted in countering the insufficiencies
of the technologies we invent?
I also appreciated the part about curiosity. It is a shame how digital
technology exploits this human trait for cheap gains (such as gambling,
social media, video-gaming, and television addiction);
I disagree with Ali when he says:
“Just a small side note, but I find the extra emphasis on “human” a little
problematic. Through technology or human or whatever centred design(s) we
made a lot of damage to large scale systems around the world, and in my
humble opinion we need a little less human centredness to counter this
tendency.”
It is a thin line that separates pessimism and misanthropy. Being a
humanist, I am much closer to the compelling argument recently presented by
Steven Pinker in his book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science,
Humanism, and Progress.” in which the author shows how human beings are
doing better in every single well-being metric since the advent of the
Enlightenment: from life expectancy to the eradication of poverty
worldwide, to child mortality, the eradication of several deadly diseases,
and the list goes on.
We need more human-centredness, not less, particularly so in design.
´best,
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