Dear Don, dear All,

I enjoyed your article regarding design education and there are many aspects included which are great proposals. Thank you very much for communicating.

I also enjoyed your article in the fastcompany blog focused on waste and our environmental design issues.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90463116/waste-is-an-enormous-problem-but-recycling-is-the-wrong-solution?partner=feedburner

You wrote:

The principles of human-centered design—and where recycling goes wrong

Before I get into why, let’s look at the characteristics of a good design solution.

Human-centered design’s four principles are:

1. Focus on the people.

2. Solve the underlying problem, not the symptoms.

3. Everything is part of a system: Design for the system.

4. Prototype ideas, test, and refine them, over and over again.

Since I used several of your texts in my classes to discuss design and what has been established as HCD, it comes down to the following question, which might raise a discussion thread beyond this list. I would be even interested in getting a few people together to focus on that.

There is no doubt that human centered design (especially the framing and naming) was a great achievement, but don't we need to overcome the human centeredness in order to prepare students for the future, taking responsibility for what they generate?

For instance the first statement,... 'Focus on the people' we could extend to
1. Focus on the people within their environment and the world
2. Solve the underlying problems and be aware the problems are the outcome of design decisions, problems are artifacts
3. Everything is a part of a system. Design for a system, but be aware that we might never comprehend the entire system, take responsibility for that.
4...  no suggestion for the moment.

What I try to state here since i have been watching students and designers working with the HCD framework, that the system aspects are somehow second choice, when we call it human centered design.

For the moment I do not have any great alternative wording (but I am thinking about this) how we need to call the important development, where designers take in consideration that each product is as well a waste issue, thinking in terms of product ‘Half-Life’. Or considering that we act in systems without knowing the systems and system boundaries.

Such a similar discussion has already happened. But it seems worth it to bring this up here again:

Thomas, Vanessa; Remy, Christian; Bates, Oliver (2017). The Limits of HCD: Reimagining the Anthropocentricity of ISO 9241-210. In: Third Workshop on Computing within Limits, Santa Barbara, 22 June 2017 - 24 June 2017.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3080561

I know as well Don's reflection on HCD: 
Human-centered design considered harmful, published 2005: https://doi.org/10.1145/1070960.1070976

So to summarize and as a proposal (provocation)... from HCD to (WDR) world design responsibility? 
Don that is my first statement regarding your call: a serious discussion is encouraged


Thanks

Prof. Dr. Jurgen Faust
Macromedia University Munich
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