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Human-Centred Design and its Inherent Ethical Qualities
Abstract
In this chapter I will present three specific HCD projects and the social processes happening in these projects, in order to discuss the ethical qualities inherent to HCD.
The future is known to be uncertain. Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of the future and impacts future predictions. Designers often require analyzing current situations to identify complexities, deficiencies, pain points etc., to gain empathy and insights as the basis for preferred Human-Centered Design (HCD) solutions. When creating preferred HCD design solutions for the near future or long-term future, designers face the unforeseen and unprecedented constraints of the future, which require careful analysis from the future perspective. Designing human-centered focused, futuristic systems is challenging. There is no abundant published literature to support specific and effective human-centered focused futuristic systems design. Generally, designers follow one or many HCD methods they frequently use for futuristic design without significantly considering futuristic aspects. This paper discusses current futuristic models and presents a human-centered design and analysis approach to design effective and desirable futuristic systems.KeywordHuman-centered designDesign thinkingFuturistic design
While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions -- that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of possibilities -- Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct.
Scandinavian research projects in system de- velopment have traditionally put a strong em- phasis on user participation as a strategy for increasing working life democracy. The arti- cle analyses a few of these projects with re- spect to this goal. We argue that there has been a development from politics to ethics in system development research, and that the political dimension should be reintroduced. A reorientation of system development strate- gies aiming at increasing working life democ- racy can learn from the historical success stories, in particular the combination of glo- bal strategy and local action used in the trade union projects in the 60's. Recent develop- ment in technology and working life will, however, introduce new challenges to system development.
Many innovations in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry are driven by technological developments, rather than by concerns for users’ needs and preferences. This technology push approach brings a risk of creating products or services that people cannot or do not want to use. In some projects, however, people conduct human-centered design (HCD) as an alternative approach. In HCD, diverse experts, such as designers and researchers, cooperate with potential users—who are “experts of their experiences”1—to bring users’ ideas and knowledge into the innovation process and to jointly articulate problems and develop solutions.
This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed—relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second point of the article is to argue that present (science and) technology studies are now able to break away from a too academic, internalistic perspective and return to the politically relevant "Science, Technology & Society" issues that informed much of this work more than a decade ago.
Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe. The evolution in design research from a user-centred approach to co-designing is changing the roles of the designer, the researcher and the person formerly known as the ‘user’. The implications of this shift for the education of designers and researchers are enormous. The evolution in design research from a user-centred approach to co-designing is changing the landscape of design practice as well, creating new domains of collective creativity. It is hoped that this evolution will support a transformation toward more sustainable ways of living in the future.
In human-centred design (HCD), researchers and designers attempt to cooperate with and learn from potential users of the products or services which they are developing. Their goal is to develop products or services that match users’ practices, needs and preferences. In this position paper it is argued that HCD practitioners need to deal with two tensions that are inherent in HCD: they need to combine and balance users’ knowledge and ideas with their own knowledge and ideas; and they need to combine and balance a concern for understanding current or past practices with a concern for envisioning alternative or future practices. Six HCD approaches – participatory design, ethnography, the lead user approach, contextual design, codesign and empathic design – are discussed in order to argue that these different approaches are different ways to cope with the two tensions. In addition, several examples from practice are provided to illustrate these tensions. Moreover, it is advocated that HCD practitioners critically reflect on their practices, their methods and their own involvement, so that they can more consciously follow specific HCD approaches and more mindfully cope with the two tensions.
In this essay several virtues are discussed that are needed in people who work in participatory design (PD). The term PD is used here to refer specifically to an approach in designing information systems with its roots in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s. Through the lens of virtue ethics and based on key texts in PD, the virtues of cooperation, curiosity, creativity, empowerment and reflexivity are discussed. Cooperation helps people in PD projects to engage in cooperative curiosity and cooperative creativity. Curiosity helps them to empathize with others and their experiences, and to engage in joint learning. Creativity helps them to envision, try out and materialize ideas, and to jointly create new products and services. Empowerment helps them to share power and to enable other people to flourish. Moreover, reflexivity helps them to perceive and to modify their own thoughts, feelings and actions. In the spirit of virtue ethics-which focuses on specific people in concrete situations-several examples from one PD project are provided. Virtue ethics is likely to appeal to people in PD projects because it is practice-oriented, provides room for exploration and experimentation, and promotes professional and personal development. In closing, some ideas for practical application, for education and for further research are discussed.
Technology is human behavior that transforms society and transforms the environment. Design is the cornerstone of technology. It is how we solve our problems, fulfill our needs, shape our world, change the future, and create new problems. From extraction to disposal in the life-cycle of a product, the design process is where we make the most important decisions; the decisions that determine most of the final product cost, and the decisions that determine most of the ethical costs and benefits. It is quintessentially an ethical process. Ethics is not an appendage to design but an integral part of it, and we advocate using the moral imagination to draw out the ethical implications of a design [1]. We will stress and develop the social ethics paradigm, because design is an iterative social process for making technical and social decisions that may itself be designed at each stage with different people at the table, different information flows, different normative relationships, different authority structures, and different social and environmental considerations in mind [2]. Despite the considerable recent growth in the literature and teaching of engineering ethics, it is constrained unnecessarily by focusing primarily on individual ethics using virtue, deontological, and consequentialist ethical theories. In contrast, the social ethics method requires an examination of the social arrangements for making decisions that is particularly relevant to the iterative, decision-making, design process. Different social arrangements may be made for making any decision, each of which arrangement embodies different ethical considerations and implications. Dewey argued in much the same way for a scientific and experimental approach to ethics in generalWhat is needed is intelligent examination of the consequences that are actually effected by inherited institutions and customs, in order that there may be intelligent consideration of the ways in which they are to be intentionally modified in behalf of generation of different consequences.' [3]. The social ethics paradigm that we will unfold owes much to the pragmatist thought of John Dewey.
We characterize Participatory Design (PD) as a maturing area of research and as an evolving practice among design professionals. Although PD has been applied outside of technology design, here we focus on PD in relation to the introduction of computer-based systems at work. We discuss three main issues addressed by PD researchers; the politics of design; the nature of participation; and method, tools and techniques for participation. We also report on the conditions for the transfer of “PD results” to workers, user groups, and design professionals that have characterized PD over time and across geopolitical terrains. The topic of the sustainability of PD within an organizational context is also considered. The article concludes with a discussion of common issues explored within PD and CSCW and frames directions for a continuing dialogue between researchers and practitioners from the two fields. The article draws on a review of PD and CSCW literatures as well as on our own research and practical experiences.
How Designers Think is based on Bryan Lawson's many observations of designers at work, interviews with designers and their clients and collaborators. This extended work is the culmination of twenty-five years' research and shows the author's belief that we all can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. This book is not intended as an authoritative description of how designers should think but to provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design. 'How Designers Think' will be of great interest, not only to designers seeking a greater insight into their own thought processes, but also to students of design in general from undergraduate level upward.
Products play a role in our everyday lives. Insight into the experiences of people in their everyday lives is of great use for designing products. For example, the contexts in which products are used (physical, social, culture etc.) and the state (excited, tired, concentrated etc.) of the users influence how they experience using products. However, in design practice using this type of diverse, subjective and multi-layered information, as inspirational input for the design process, is a recent development. In this research project, I explored how this information can be communicated in such a way that it supports designers (1) to empathise with users, (2) to be inspired to create new product ideas, and (3) to be engaged to use this information in their design processes. By a set of eight explorative studies in collaboration with industrial practice (varying from a small design firm to a multinational telecom company) the current situation in design practice is investigated, tools to communicate this type of information are designed and explored in use, and a theoretical framework is created to organise the elements which play a role in this communication. The filled in framework and a set of guidelines for practitioners to successfully communicate rich experience information in design are the results. The framework folds out how the three main qualities (empathy, inspiration and engagement) can be achieved by setting in mechanisms and means. The guidelines show various examples of how these qualities can be supported.
Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies (STS). They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain "technology blindness," the most influential approaches within STS show a "normative deficit" and display on agnostic or even antagonistic attitude toward ethics. To repair the blind spots of both applied ethics and STS, the authors sketch the contours of a pragmatist approach. They will explore the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics and pay special attention to the exploration of future worlds disclosed and shaped by technology and the management of deep value conflicts inherent in a pluralistic society.
How organizations can use practices developed by expert designers to solve today's open, complex, dynamic, and networked problems.
When organizations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed—open, complex, dynamic, and networked—and require a radically different response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centered approach to problem-solving in organizations: frame creation. It applies “design thinking,” but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques that usually characterize that term. Frame creation focuses not on the generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself.
The strategies Dorst presents are drawn from the unique, sophisticated, multilayered practices of top designers, and from insights that have emerged from fifty years of design research. Dorst describes the nine steps of the frame creation process and illustrates their application to real-world problems with a series of varied case studies. He maps innovative solutions that include rethinking a store layout so retail spaces encourage purchasing rather than stealing, applying the frame of a music festival to understand late-night problems of crime and congestion in a club district, and creative ways to attract young employees to a temporary staffing agency. Dorst provides tools and methods for implementing frame creation, offering not so much a how-to manual as a do-it-yourself handbook—a guide that will help practitioners develop their own approaches to problem-solving and creating innovation.
Building on existing considerations of reflexivity in research writing, this essai seeks to reappraise the concept of responsibility in relation to the ethics of post-representational research methodology in organization studies. Jacques Derrida's discussions of responsibility and undecidability and Emmanuel Levinas' distinction between the saying and the said are brought to bear on the ethics of the discursive construction of organizational research as a form of representing the Other. The essai argues that responding to reflexivity extends beyond textual practice and self-accounting towards a responsibility for the exercise of academic freedom. This freedom entails a radical openness that is operationalized in an ongoing reinvention that resists the institutionalization of the field of inquiry through a form of transformative knowledge. It is the legacy and promise of reflexivity in organization studies that can invigorate the imagination in research - its poiesis - as an ongoing project of saying the ethical.
The concept of 'designerly ways of knowing' emerged in the late 1970s in association with the development of new approaches in design education. Professor Nigel Cross first clearly articulated this concept in a paper called 'Designerly Ways of Knowing' which was published in the journal Design Studies in 1982. Since then, the field of study has grown considerably, as both design education and design research have developed together into a new discipline of design. This book provides a unique insight into a field of study with important implications for design research, education and practice. Professor Nigel Cross is one of the most internationally-respected design researchers and this book is a revised and edited collection of key parts of his published work from the last quarter century. Designerly Ways of Knowing traces the development of a research interest in articulating and understanding the nature of design cognition, and the concept that designers (whether architects, engineers, product designers, etc.) have and use particular 'designerly' ways of knowing and thinking. There are chapters covering the following topics: •the nature and nurture of design ability; •creative cognition in design; •the natural intelligence of design; •design discipline versus design science; and, •expertise in design. As a timeline of scholarship and research, and a resource for understanding how designers think and work, Designerly Ways of Knowing will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of design; design practitioners and design managers.
The present work develops ideas first presented in
Studies in Logical Theory. "All logical forms (with their characteristic properties) arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions." "Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole." After an introductory section, the three remaining parts of the treatise deal successively with the structure of inquiry and the construction of judgments, propositions and terms, and the logic of scientific method. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity – it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a field as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organisations in other fields?”. We sketch a partial answer by considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for organisational problem solving and innovation.Highlights► Analysing design reasoning in terms of abduction. ► Presenting a framework for the description of design practices. ► Investigating the creation of new frames as a key design practice. ► Describing the different levels on which design (framing) practices can impact organisations.
Using transcripts of both architectural and engineering design meetings this chapter shows how the fields of ethics and design inter-relate, especially in the area of creative imagination. The chapter first draws on the concept of a ‘virtual building’ to show how essential aspects of designerly thinking can apply to ethics. It then goes on to show how, in the process of designing, designers engage explicitly and implicitly with ethical issues. The chapter discusses four extended examples from two design processes – one involving the design of a crematorium the other involving the design of a digital pen – before suggesting that by addressing ethical subjects without framing them in explicitly ethical ways, the design process allows us to ‘imaginatively trace out the implications of our metaphors, prototypes and narratives’ a key element of ethical decision-making according to the philosopher Mark Johnson.
This paper articulates an Aristotelian theory of professional virtue and provides an application of that theory to the subject of engineering ethics. The leading idea is that Aristotle's analysis of the definitive function of human beings, and of the virtues humans require to fulfill that function, can serve as a model for an analysis of the definitive function or social role of a profession and thus of the virtues professionals must exhibit to fulfill that role. Special attention is given to a virtue of professional self-awareness, an analogue to Aristotle's phronesis or practical wisdom. In the course of laying out my account I argue that the virtuous professional is the successful professional, just as the virtuous life is the happy life for Aristotle. I close by suggesting that a virtue ethics approach toward professional ethics can enrich the pedagogy of professional ethics courses and help foster a sense of pride and responsibility in young professionals.
The ethical choices faced by engineers today are increasingly complex. Competing and conflicting ethical demands from clients, communities, employees, and personal objectives combine to suggest that engineers employ ethical approaches that are adaptive yet grounded in three concrete professional circumstances: first, that engineers apply unique professional skills in the service of a client, subject to protecting the public interest; second, that engineers advance the state of knowledge of their professional field through reflection, research, and sharing experience in journals and conferences, and third, that they develop new professionals by active mentoring. This paper examines five features of American pragmatism and suggests that its emphasis on specific, context-based ethical decision making can assist engineers in a postmodern setting. In particular, it considers the venues of interpersonal ethical choices, institutional ethical conflicts, and social choices that have ethical components. Pragmatism suggests that in such a complex ethical climate, there is a need for the co-evolution of judgment and action, for individual reflective judgment in particular situations, and for ceasing to search for a single, immutable principle for ethical choice.
Excellent introduction to ethics for designers
- C Bowles
Bowles, C. (2018). Future Ethics. Hove, UK: NowNext Press. (Excellent introduction to ethics for designers,
with a focus on online/digital/data/algorithms, from a designer's perspective.)
Dewey: A Beginner's Guide
- D Hildebrand
Hildebrand, D. (2008). Dewey: A Beginner's Guide. Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications. (An accessible introduction to John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism.)
Thorough and practical treatment of ethical issues for engineers and engineering practice
- I Van De Poel
- L Royakkers
Van de Poel, I. and Royakkers, L. (2011). Ethics, Technology and Engineering: An Introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. (Thorough and practical treatment of ethical issues for engineers and engineering practice.)
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