For decades we’ve been taught that user-centricity is the key to good design. But now the philosophy is showing vulnerabilities. We need approaches that are less narrow, less transactional, and more able to cope with the diverse, systemic challenges the 21st century has in store. Designer and futurist Cennydd Bowles elaborates.
In those toddler days, when the connected age was still taking its first tremulous steps, digital design was slow to find its identity. Design practises tended to fall into one of two extremes; either the experimental but baffling sandbox of Flash design, or design as web page layout, subsumed in a developer’s daily work, a matter of table hacks and spacer GIFs.
It wasn’t until the early years of the new millennium that the budding UX movement, a chimera of human-computer interaction and library science, brought some rigour and process. The key to the movement’s success was a single, external reference point: the user. We were taught to stop focusing on business or technical whims, and to instead do what’s right for users. Do that, and everything else will fall into place.
It worked, mostly. User-centred design (UCD) helped convince tech companies that design can offer a reliable and genuine competitive advantage. The field matured, companies grew, conferences, books, and celebrities sprang up.
User-centricity became an orthodox view even outside the world of design. Of course, the problem with orthodoxy is that other options start to seem ridiculous.
Discussing the quirks and flaws of the status quo is seen as weird or borderline heretical. But as it belatedly dawns on our industry that technology has serious social and ethical dimensions, one thing is increasingly clear: user-centred design is inadequate for the needs of the 21st century.