→ P004: On “Human Centered Design”
“The human is inseparable from the artifacts it produces, with the human body having the extended shape of all the artifacts it has made ... In a sense the artifacts are more human than the human.”
-Beatriz Colomina, Are We Human?
My current read as of April 2025, not such a simple question, is it...
Warning: This section of La Fleur is by far the most intellectual and wordy and such. I promise- trust- that it has some crucial points about ethics in design, but if you decide to skim this, I won’t blame you.
Professionalism has never been my strong suit. In fact, right after I won “Bravest Creator”, my friend, Luke Ramsdell, won “Most Professional”. The juxtaposition felt like a slap in the face and I was deeply jealous of the organization, efficiency, and skill present in everything he designs. Even this personal tension, between two classmates, reflects a wider polemic that plagues both Graphic and Industrial design.
What role does the designer play? Should design be efficient, human-centered, and research based, or rather a creative expression seeking to bring joy? Can it be both?
At NC state, it feels like the business side is winning things, despite considerable gains for experimental creativity in the wider world. I’ll reference this quote from How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul, “The pragmatic view of the designer’s role doesn’t hold true in other areas of design; we don’t ask architects or fashion designers to suppress their personal voices … and increasingly, the messages that get noticed… are the ones where the designer’s thumbprint is clearly visible”. Why do we have such an obsession with minimalism, efficiency, and human-centered design?
Le Corbusier’s modulor man
IDEO style sticky notes... which HCD people would love to say has nothing in common with the modulor man
The imprint designers leave on their work has been a debate for ages, tracing its origins to the infamous Crystal Goblet essay by Beatrice Ward, published in 1924. Ward creates an elaborate metaphor for typography and design– using a wine glass. She argues that type should be a perfectly transparent container for the content within, reflecting a pure functionalist stance on the role of type. Yet just 2 years later, design critic Adolf Behne stated that, “Those designers who only care about the mechanical logic of function and aim to make a building a “pure tool”, actually end up with an anthropomorphic architecture: that in fact dehumanization is the very thing that leads to humanization, to anthropomorphism.” Immediately, this brings me to think of Corbusier’s Modular Man, where a human-centered impulse leads to a fascist and racist design practice. Designers have been squabbling over the relationship between design and content, design and the human for a century.
We shouldn’t be designing for the human. We should design for everything in between.
The extra-human matrix.
The inspiration for this concept, found in our own human biology (just because it’s extra -cellular doesn’t mean it’s not human)
In an effort against a potential plagiarism of Beatiz Colomina’s work “Are We Human?”, I’ll begin with a quote from her and then try my best to stick to my own words and thoughts.
“Today the mantra human-centered design is chanted again as the way to approach any question, as if the human is a specific knowable entity. It presupposes a kind of transparent human, which is such a fragile, utopian, or even dystopian idea… If the human is a question mark, design is a word for how that question is engaged.”
-Beatrix Colomina, Are We Human?
If you’re in design school, I would bet my life that you have heard the phrase human-centered design. And to quote Elizabeth Goodspeed,
“I have a confession to make: I’m a hater.”
If I see human-centered design on your LinkedIn or portfolio or even the words coming out of your mouth, I will likely be rolling my eyes in response. Why the hate, you ask? Well I’ve got a lengthy response for you.
Design for our interdependent world
My philosophy of design as love calls for an end to human exceptionalism. One could argue that “human centered design” is why we have found ourselves in the midst of a climate crisis. Rather than designing for humans, why don't we design systems for the web of which we are a part? Perhaps the most well designed systems are those that exist around us in nature.
Some language specificities I weirdly care about
HCD has often been dubbed “user” centered design, which I find to be even worse than its forefather. There is no term more alienating than that of “user”. It implies a separation between the designer and the designed-for, a hierarchy of power that at worst suggests the designer is the prison guard of a panopticon, wielding knowledge against the oblivious people they design products, buildings, advertisements for, and at best, implies practicality and research. Even the term “human” alienates, creating a sterile and diagnostic view of what it means to be a “human”. Instead of “user” or “human”, why not say “people”? We design with people to create grassroots, community movements that are self-sustaining and don’t rely on the “superior” knowledge of the designer.
This was at GXD convocation and at risk of sounding harsh: FIND SOME NEW WORDS!!
Design Floating in Cyberspace
In our world, where modern functions of information transfer prevail, we must design in tandem with the digital systems that act as a mirror to our physical world. We have become true cyborgs, operating half in the world of objects, half in the Otherworld of digital networks and space. This view of design practice involves reflecting, analyzing, and diagramming the digital structures that encapsulate our lives.
In his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), Heidegger (citation alert: this man was a Nazi, so take this with a grain of salt, and I am deeply sorry to even reference him) suggests that technology is not just a neutral tool we use; it influences how we perceive and interact with the world. Dubbed "enframing" or "Gestell" in German, essentially, he argues that technology pushes us to see the world primarily as a resource to be used up, rather than recognizing it as something with its own inherent value. This is what human-centered design promotes. When we focus on the human, we fixate on human desires, ignoring the reality of our dependence on digital and natural systems around us.
To address these systems, I propose a switch to what Sadia Quiddus has named the “Otherworld”, coming from her thesis, The Otherworldly Manifesto. The manifesto closes with a beautiful paragraph that both summarizes my point on cyberspace, and my point on design for our independent world.
Quiddus states, “In the OtherWorld, the built world and natural world are symbiotic. Architecture and nature fuse and flow seamlessly, each responsive to and always learning from the other. In the OtherWorld, our technology is in symbiosis with the natural, eco-logical, and biological. We are taught by plants and animals and our own bodies, we co-create with and for plants and animals and one another. Our progress and our prowess is not exploitative or extractive; we move forward and upward and non-directionally when we move together. In the OtherWorld, no species or being is considered of a higher order of sentience or intelligence. In the OtherWorld, dualities and paradoxes are witnessed, celebrated, and accepted.”
We must embrace negative capability (a free search for truth while embracing ambiguity) and live in the inbetween of binaries to design for the extra-human matrix.
Typesetting I did for the Otherworldly Manifesto in The Student Publication: Volume 40
Design Against Oppression
Designing for the extra-human matrix, at its core, is about using design to break systematic oppression. It is a revolution of radical care. Design is human, and by transitive property, exercises the evils of humanity, the like of oppression under capitalism, industrialization, and colonization. Instead of aiding in the minutia of information transfer (ex. Designing the UI of a FinTech startup), sincere design creates revolutionary new systems to reroute capital and information to create a more equitable world. This “sincerity” (read more about sincerity in “Psychoanalysis to find sincerity”) brings attention to the systems that burden us while taking action against them.
Designers making breakthroughs in the extra-human matrix
- Ruben Pater Pater’s design practice is the epitome of what I mean by design against oppression. He is direct, bold, and takes action in real life, like writing books, designing identities for unions, etc.
- Tomas Kajanek Kajanek is pushing critical design in a radical direction, creating “How many iPhone 7s does it take to save your life?”, which studies the Ghost Gun in modern society. Check it out.
- Dunne and Raby The creators of the term speculative design have no shortage of extra-human breakthroughs. Their “Designs for an Overpopulated Planet” (2009) is the encapsulation of what I see as Otherworldly Design- acknowledging our wrongdoings as humans while designing for the natural systems we are a part of.
- Neri Oxman I am suspicious of Oxman for several reasons (which I won’t get into here, but mainly… who is paying for this?) I digress, her work is amazing. Her project Man Nahata, using the indigenous name for NYC’s geographical area, creates beautiful simulations of a future designed around nature, where the anthropocene has decayed into a natural wonder. This serves dually as a work of art and as a warning to humanity.
- Poly Mode Polymode embodies exactly how I view our relationship with the otherworld through their practice of poetic research, defined as “taking into account the factual with the formal, the universal with the outsider, the sacred, the mystical, the cerebral prophet, and the fool”. As well, their BIPOC design history class takes an active stance against the eurocentric design education practices and offers something that is rare to find in the design history canon.
- SuperFlux A leading speculative design studio, Superflux is both an advocate for environmental and societal justice. They state, “Justice is a prerequisite for the safety of the planet and its people.” as the opening line of their project A Just World on a Safe Planet, which is yet another example of OtherWorldly design that I aspire we all move towards.
Psychoanalysis to
find sincerity
How do we define the human? Who is chosen to be “human” and who is excluded? Human centered design routinely constructs radical inequalities and creates spaces in which people are exploited. But if we want to change this, we need a break from First Things First style manifestos ( gentle anti-capitalist sentiment), and a move towards radical changes- sincerely. Designing for the extra-human matrix involves a certain degree of care, love, and compassion that I dub “sincerity”. Defined by an Elizabeth Goodspeed article, she states, “Sincerity isn’t about loving design again. It’s about letting go of the idea that you have to hate it just to protect yourself – that it’s ok to want to be one of the greats. Caring doesn’t have to be visible to be real, and it doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be radical.” Embracing new, transformative approaches to design demands intentionality that depends on passion, drive, and sincerity. Let’s care and not be afraid to show it.
How to not be armchair: a guide
- Diversify your bibliographies. Do direct research and interviews with underserved communities that historically haven’t been represented in design. There are ways to go about this that are very sensitive and context based, so please, use common sense and read the room.
- Go out of your way to resist the Western canon. Polymode’s BIPOC design history courses are excellent, as well as several articles on letterform archive about non-latin scripts. Design history is more than the Bauhaus.
- Design self sustaining, open-source systems instead of smaller scale projects. If you want an example, check out this speculative mapping project I did where I created a system of 3D printing topographic tactile maps for those who are visually impaired. Open source systems have the power to be transformed by the communities that participate in them.
- Archive. Host it publicly online. Knowledge is power and in this political climate, information transfer and freedom of speech is everything.
- A general statement but applies to the design practice- if you are a white, straight american (like me), hold your privilege with consciousness in everything you do.
- Don’t be afraid to acknowledge your own mis-steps. Once I had this whole idea for a project creating letterforms for oral native languages in the US and realized the whole thing was rather colonizing for me to do. I switched gears and openly explained why to my type class.