Hi All,
I should be doing something else at this moment, but I wanted to get some thoughts down on this subject.
To open, it’s worth starting from a larger frame. So called human centred design, presupposes that we have some knowledge of and insight into what it means to be ‘human' and that we have some shared sense of what it means to ‘design’. Neither of these can be taken at face value. There is no agreed and universally shared meaning for either of these terms. That in itself is not problematic and speaks of a delightful richness and diversity for us to explore. But it does mean that we have to define the focus of our interest: the limits and boundaries of our problem landscape, the position from which we see that landscape and the types of changes/problems we are interested in. None of these things are given. We have to create them.
Having said that, it’s worth looking at the micro level of what is actually happening on the ground—in design studios, consulting houses, think tanks and, of course, universities. Here the definitions of ‘human’ and ‘design’ take on a much narrower frame and focus.
I can only speak with any direct knowledge about my own field of information design, from which I can offer a few bleak observations. Most human centred design in information design is actually customer centred. It is only human centred in the sense that being a customer is one small aspect of being human. Moreover, ‘customers’ are a construction of commercial organisations and capitalism. And commercial organisations are by their nature interested in extracting money from your wallet and mine and putting that money into their own wallet. Thus the primary aim of human centred design in this area is to sell and keep selling good and services to customers.
The field further narrows somewhat when it becomes apparent that most of the work in this areas focuses on customer use of websites. An entire design industry has grown up around this two dimensional digital technology.
When I survey the range of design methods and thinking, design research, outcomes, and before and after results, I’m struck by a shallowness at all levels, and a fudging of what counts as success or failure. Recent interest in such things as ‘customer journeys’ broaden the frame a little but never enough to see the many rich contexts and journeys that people undertake outside being shoppers.
Then, when I see these exact same ways of thinking and practice extended into the larger social realm of organisational design, even design of social systems and ecologies, I’m struck by the hubris of it’s advocates.
When fudged success in one small information design domain is extrapolated to these larger issues without evidence or track record, I baulk. I baulk still further when I see other fields of design with their own limited methods, processes, ways of thinking and fudged criteria of success and failure, do the same but on a larger scale: engineering, architecture, town planning, and the ubiquitous system design take on the challenge of redesigning the world…
I’m not a modest person, but the collective arrogance of our time is deeply worrying.
I don’t doubt the good intentions, and I don’t doubt the sense of shared commitment to making the world a better place, but, hey guys we need some professional modesty about our real capacity to bring about meaningful and useful change.
David
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