Despite these vulnerabilities, UCD adherents often argue user-centricity adopts a neutral, pure stance. It’s a stance that tends to look down on fashion and style, instead laying claim to a higher purpose. User-centred designers often describe themselves as impartial observers using rigorous, repeatable methods to uncover true needs and to support them via timeless design.

This supposed neutrality is a myth. Whenever you design, you’re making a claim about how the future should be. You’re putting forward an argument about which technologies should exist in our future world, how we should interact with them and, by extension, how we should interact with each other. Every click of the Erase tool discards thousands of other slightly different worlds.

All design bears the fingerprints of its creators, whether intended or not. A product we might think of as style-neutral and value-neutral is simply one that wears the predominant styles and values of the society we live in, invisible like the air.

So the very idea of neutral design is fundamentally conservative. Rather than trying to change society, or to engage with the ethics and the politics of the world around us, neutral design is content to reproduce the status quo, along with all its entrenched hierarchies and inequalities. Given the huge challenges facing society — scathing inequality, the conundrum of automation, and the looming climate emergency — we don’t have time for neutrality. This is no time to meekly support our current trajectory.

User-centred thinking has become an almost analgesic way of thinking, numbing us to the deeper impacts of innovation, both positive and negative. The current ethical crisis in technology is just a teaser of what lies ahead: we could argue that design’s most important role now is to help humans not flourish, but even just to *survive* the 21st century. So it’s time for design to abandon the pretence of neutrality and all its regressive connotations. We should recognise the responsibilities and powers we hold, and actively imbue our work with the values we want to see in the world.

This isn’t, however, a call for moralizing superheroes. Ethical and social change must be participatory, not imposed by privileged elites.

It’s time for an opinionated but flexible model of design; one that doesn’t revolve around the user — or indeed anyone — but instead addresses the diverse needs of all stakeholders, including indirect and hidden ones. This can only happen if designers become active facilitators, bringing unheard voices into the design process, and engaging the wider public in a discussion of the ethics of technology.