Post by Her Highness on Oct 30, 2016 5:39:36 GMT
What Comes After User-Centered Design?
Kevin Slavin has written a thought-provoking post on the limitations of user-centered design in the face of complex systems and 21st-century societal and ecological problems. He asks “should designers continue to privilege users above all others in the system?” While I agree that we need to expand our perspective on what and for whom we’re designing, building, and operating systems, I find the idea “de-privileging” or “de-centering” the user to be potentially dangerous. It’s all too easy to cite examples of societies that have gone wrong by putting the needs of the many over the needs of the one. Is there a way forward that addresses the need to expand our vision while balancing individual and systemic perspectives? I believe there is. I further believe it starts with critiquing the very word ‘user’.
Many before me have challenged the value of thinking of people as ‘users’. What bothers me is not the notion, semi-humorously advanced by some, that it treats people as drug addicts. My objection stems from my belief that treating people as ‘users’ is fundamentally egotistical. It defines them solely in terms of ourselves as purveyors of design solutions. As quoted by Slavin, Don Norman invented the term ‘user experience’ because “I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system”. This concern is a noble one, but it ignores anything a person might do that isn’t directly related to their interaction with the system you are designing and operating.
Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, offered a different way of thinking about people: “As somebody once said, it’s kind of arrogant to think that the only reason that people exist is to use what you built. They actually have lives, like, outside of the experience they have using your product. So the first step to designing in a human-centered way is to recognize that they’re humans.” I think the word ‘human’ is a great starting point for a 21st-century design approach. Humans inherently exist with a complex mesh of relationships. We have families. We are employees, consultants, or vendors. We are citizens, team and club members, and fans. On a more elemental level, we have bodies and minds, with which we act and think and feel. Because we are physical, we live on the planet and in the universe.
Designing for humans rather than for users may point us in the right direction, but it doesn’t get us there. How can we incorporate the complex systemic aspect of being human? How can we understand and express the mesh of relationships within which individual humanness happens? I believe that Promise Theory, a model for thinking about complex systems conceived by Mark Burgess, can provide an answer. Promise Theory treats complex systems as emerging from sets of voluntary commitments between autonomous agents. Humans don’t just statically or passively exist within systems; to use Slavin’s term, they actively participate in them. I promise to buy my son a birthday present every year. I promise to show up on time for work every morning. I promise to do my best for my team during the local bowling tournament.
We can use promises to model how humans interact both with the systems we make and with the other systems that surround them. By doing so, we can simultaneously understand and solve for individual and systemic needs. We need to start by taking a service-dominant approach and thinking about the larger goals that lead people to want to interact with our services. I don’t request an Uber because I want a taxi. In the language of promises, I do it because I’ve promised to get to my meeting on time without spending too much money.
This promise occurs within a larger mesh of other promises, many of which may be implicit. I implicitly promise to obey the law. If I didn’t, stealing someone’s Porsche, or commandeering a taxi at gunpoint, might be viable alternatives to taking an Uber. I make other implicit promises, such as observing basic social hygiene and courtesy. At the highest level, I (should) make a promise not to contribute to human extinction by adding to climate change. That promise might lead me to prefer a bus over a taxi. Once I get on the bus, my promises to be hygienic and courteous come into play. Those promises can generate opportunities for additional products, such as hand soap at the entry to the bus. (Soap on the bus may or may not be a good solution; I present it here merely as an example of products that address implicit promises.)
Complex systems emerge from circular relationships between wholes and their parts. To design for complexity in a healthy way, we need the ability to model humans as active participants in their world. We simultaneously need the ability to model our own solutions as co-participants in the living networks that surround us, our designs, and the people for whom we create them.
We can accomplish these goals by continuously asking an interrelated set of questions:
What explicit and implicit promises do (or should) people make?
What promises can and should we make that can help people keep theirs?
What promises do we need from other people or systems in order to keep our promises?
How do we maximize people’s ability to keep their promises by maximizing our ability to keep our own?
Source
Kevin Slavin has written a thought-provoking post on the limitations of user-centered design in the face of complex systems and 21st-century societal and ecological problems. He asks “should designers continue to privilege users above all others in the system?” While I agree that we need to expand our perspective on what and for whom we’re designing, building, and operating systems, I find the idea “de-privileging” or “de-centering” the user to be potentially dangerous. It’s all too easy to cite examples of societies that have gone wrong by putting the needs of the many over the needs of the one. Is there a way forward that addresses the need to expand our vision while balancing individual and systemic perspectives? I believe there is. I further believe it starts with critiquing the very word ‘user’.
Many before me have challenged the value of thinking of people as ‘users’. What bothers me is not the notion, semi-humorously advanced by some, that it treats people as drug addicts. My objection stems from my belief that treating people as ‘users’ is fundamentally egotistical. It defines them solely in terms of ourselves as purveyors of design solutions. As quoted by Slavin, Don Norman invented the term ‘user experience’ because “I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system”. This concern is a noble one, but it ignores anything a person might do that isn’t directly related to their interaction with the system you are designing and operating.
Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, offered a different way of thinking about people: “As somebody once said, it’s kind of arrogant to think that the only reason that people exist is to use what you built. They actually have lives, like, outside of the experience they have using your product. So the first step to designing in a human-centered way is to recognize that they’re humans.” I think the word ‘human’ is a great starting point for a 21st-century design approach. Humans inherently exist with a complex mesh of relationships. We have families. We are employees, consultants, or vendors. We are citizens, team and club members, and fans. On a more elemental level, we have bodies and minds, with which we act and think and feel. Because we are physical, we live on the planet and in the universe.
Designing for humans rather than for users may point us in the right direction, but it doesn’t get us there. How can we incorporate the complex systemic aspect of being human? How can we understand and express the mesh of relationships within which individual humanness happens? I believe that Promise Theory, a model for thinking about complex systems conceived by Mark Burgess, can provide an answer. Promise Theory treats complex systems as emerging from sets of voluntary commitments between autonomous agents. Humans don’t just statically or passively exist within systems; to use Slavin’s term, they actively participate in them. I promise to buy my son a birthday present every year. I promise to show up on time for work every morning. I promise to do my best for my team during the local bowling tournament.
We can use promises to model how humans interact both with the systems we make and with the other systems that surround them. By doing so, we can simultaneously understand and solve for individual and systemic needs. We need to start by taking a service-dominant approach and thinking about the larger goals that lead people to want to interact with our services. I don’t request an Uber because I want a taxi. In the language of promises, I do it because I’ve promised to get to my meeting on time without spending too much money.
This promise occurs within a larger mesh of other promises, many of which may be implicit. I implicitly promise to obey the law. If I didn’t, stealing someone’s Porsche, or commandeering a taxi at gunpoint, might be viable alternatives to taking an Uber. I make other implicit promises, such as observing basic social hygiene and courtesy. At the highest level, I (should) make a promise not to contribute to human extinction by adding to climate change. That promise might lead me to prefer a bus over a taxi. Once I get on the bus, my promises to be hygienic and courteous come into play. Those promises can generate opportunities for additional products, such as hand soap at the entry to the bus. (Soap on the bus may or may not be a good solution; I present it here merely as an example of products that address implicit promises.)
Complex systems emerge from circular relationships between wholes and their parts. To design for complexity in a healthy way, we need the ability to model humans as active participants in their world. We simultaneously need the ability to model our own solutions as co-participants in the living networks that surround us, our designs, and the people for whom we create them.
We can accomplish these goals by continuously asking an interrelated set of questions:
What explicit and implicit promises do (or should) people make?
What promises can and should we make that can help people keep theirs?
What promises do we need from other people or systems in order to keep our promises?
How do we maximize people’s ability to keep their promises by maximizing our ability to keep our own?
Source