Foremost let’s unpack this flawed notion of “user centered design.” This dehumanizing term reduces humanity to an objectified unit referred to as a “user.” In this increasingly irrelevant and hypocritical conception of humanity the personhood of the human being is entirely removed and replaced with this abstract and inhumane notion of a “user.” Anyone who claims to center these people and their goals through some kind of distorted altruism is either woefully misguided or at worst nefarious and underhanded in their actions. They are people, human beings, not users.
The term “user” seems flawed for most contexts but especially so in product development and design. The word invites a superficially clinical connotation into the dynamic between creator and audience. In the context of product and technology development and at a time where we are generally aware of the addictive qualities these technologies can possess, the word “user” seems like a linguistic misfortune.
Another term worth reexamining is so-called “human centered design” albeit marginally better than “user centered design” it is still fundamentally flawed. Why should humans be centered anyway? What kind of narcissistic and anthropocentric ideas or motivations led to this erroneous belief that humans are so worthy of being at the center of technology and experiences more broadly? All life, humans, animals and plants alike, past, present and future are interconnected as part of a much broader nature. There is an absurdity worth pointing out about any kind of practice that claims to center their audience, yet in reality exploits them for resources often including their cognition, attention and who knows what else. To be complicit in this kind exploitative dynamic of an audience doesn’t seem to genuinely center humanity at all. Rather, in this way design for example becomes merely a tool for certain power structures to create surplus wealth rather than also a means to create the conditions for flourishing in not only human development but life or “being” altogether in the broadest possible sense.
Nature centered design, not without its flaws but perhaps as an alternative or even no name at all for this overall intent, as a broader framing reasonably abstracts the activities of creation for a more ubiquitous approach. If we design anywhere near the proximity of the numbers that nature already gives us, it becomes straightforward to create refined and repeatably high quality experiences without the thinly veiled superficial performance of centering often found elsewhere.
Once you release the constraints of centering humanity an option exists to consider what opportunities are beyond humanity. With the improvement of technology for example when, if ever does the humanity of today or tomorrow become so different from the humanity of yesterday that it also becomes misleading or entirely wrong to even refer to that state of being as “humanity” at all in the first place?
