My point of departure is the designer’s mission to serve people, satisfying their needs and creating wellbeing. Often we speak about the users for whom we design, who acquire the things we have designed, and use them for their own purposes and purposes we have suggested. Sometimes these users are the products of our imagination, but often they are real. Perhaps they have no other choice but to use our designs. Or perhaps it is their neighbor who acquires and uses our designs—vehicles, entertainment electronics, garments—and they have little option but to tolerate this. It all comes down to use, whoever is using the design. They may end up disliking their neighbor for having such a flamboyant car, noisy stereo or provocative outfit, while actually they should dislike us, the designers, and we should realize that. Designers have a responsibility to help ensure that people like their neighbors. That is why I suggest that design should be seen as a societal function that distributes pleasures and pains, resources for good life, and capabilities to achieve valuable goals. It influences distributional justice.
This book contributes to the ethics of human-centered design. Human-centered design is an orientation of design that pays serious attention to involving users and other stakeholders, with all their needs, wishes, and contextual requirements of use, in the design process from its very beginning to the end. If I were to explain my motivation in writing this book in human-centered design terms, I could say I have long believed in and worked to promote ideas of usability and user experience but have found them inadequate. A new angle is needed. Usability is a branch of human-centered design that focuses on evaluating users’ ability to complete tasks with devices and systems. I wrote my postgraduate theses about inclusive design, usability, and consumers’ decision-making in the mid-1990s and became familiar with usability. I observed, as did many others, that usability was too achievement-oriented and instrumental to be seen as a fundamental goal and framework for human-centered design, and switched my attention to user experience. User experience pays attention to aesthetics, hedonic experiences, memories and dreams, social context and others in addition to users’ capability to achieve practical goals. It focuses on subjective experience and perception of use. But then I became disappointed with the idea of user experience as well, finding it too hedonistic and conceptually diluted. The world or the way we see it has changed, and I am confident that design is more than ever needed to address deeper issues than hedonic pleasures. Another angle needs to be found if we want human-centered design to remain relevant. Most of my colleagues would say this new angle is collaborative or participatory design, which elevates users from being subjects of user studies to active and equal contributors of design alongside professional designers. I don’t disagree, but in this book I start by looking for the answer from another direction—one that we could perhaps call “responsible design” or design for justice. I will turn the lens from answering the usual question of how to design products that are good for their users towards a seldom-asked question: how can we ethically justify human-centered design? A key concept in this book is distributional justice, which refers to the justice of allocating assets, happiness, or possibilities of action between individuals.
Design is a form of human behavior. Some say it is particular to and characteristic of humans. This means that just design is almost equal to justice, and design ethics is almost equal to ethics. There are more than enough academic traditions in which we study just distribution; ethics, welfare economics, and the political philosophy of distributional justice are the ones addressed in this book. The sociology of consumption and the adoption of new technologies are also relevant to the discussion. Thus, I had to be selective and decided to trust the classics. I refer to Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Alasdair MacIntyre, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum. For a person like me, who has been designing what we call “new technologies” such as digital communication and industrial automation, and who believed that design has recently changed to something it has never been before, it has been healthy to notice how much the classics have to offer in terms of understanding the design of today.
The book is written in a dialogue format. In its six dialogues there are plenty of questions, arguments, and assumptions, and these are questioned and debated in a way that can more usefully take place in a dialogue between two people trying to make sense of these issues, than in a document where a sovereign author dictates how they should be understood. I hope and believe that, considering the nature of the topic under discussion, this informal approach can be fruitful. Presenting the results in another format implying confidence in the proposals put forward would be misleading.
The discussants are Scholar and Practitioner. Scholar is the more talkative of the two. He shares his personal experiences and knowledge of human-centered design, ethics, and justice. He seems to be excited to have an interested audience. Practitioner is not ignorant about design theory either, but he mostly contributes by asking questions about how design should be practised in a “just” manner. But why don’t I let them speak for themselves?
–Hi, Scholar! May I bother you for a minute? Would you like to introduce yourself to the reader?
S:I don’t know what to say. Why don’t we let Practitioner introduce me and then I can introduce him?
–That’s a good idea. Practitioner, did you hear that?
P:I did. Well, Scholar is a teacher of human-centered design. He’s critical and reflective and seems to have a hard time believing in what he’s been teaching about human-centered design. That can make him a bit hard to follow. He’s not very good at understanding what we practitioners already know and sometimes he gets carried away by his own elaboration of a topic. When he gets sidetracked, he tends to lose the thrust of his main argument.
S:Thanks. I guess you’re right. I suppose I assumed you already knew quite a lot.
P:I do.
S:What should I say about you? You’re very sensitive to the idea of “justice” in your own practice, and eager to learn. You ask good questions, summarize my incomplete explanations, and keep me on track when I start to digress from my argument. You also contribute with your theoretical knowledge, so that I no longer know who’s the scholar and who’s the practitioner. Well, I also have a history of having practiced design. We often face questions that we answer with somewhat questionable simplifications. In these cases I ask that you agree to accept my simplified interpretation so that we can continue. I feel that we create interpretations together, even though I’m the more vocal one. I also let or even push you to summarize and crystallize the results of our discussions. I hesitate to wrap up long discussions with only a few words, but I don’t mind you doing it. We are not really very different.
P:Thanks.
–Thanks guys.
This format in which Scholar and Practitioner discuss ethical questions could perhaps be called a “Socratic dialogue.” “Socratic dialogue” refers to the manner in which Socrates in Plato’s famous texts challenged his fellow Athenians by questioning their assumptions. It also refers to an educational process based on examples and counter-examples. The process helps the learners to understand their own assumptions, reject their false preconceptions, and learn more coherent conceptions. Scholar’s and Practitioner’s discussions are in some respects Socratic. They are “indirect, ingressive and incomplete” (Khan 1998: xiv), they deal with fundamental issues of design and ethics, they are based on questioning, and they challenge Scholar’s, Practitioner’s, the author’s, and hopefully the reader’s assumptions. Scholar and Practitioner take turns to present ideas about use, users, design, and justice in both concrete and abstract terms.1 The dialogues are also a process of self-scrutiny for Scholar and Practitioner, by which they confront their own preconceptions and engage in collaborative sense-making. However, both the ingenuity of Socrates on the streets of Athens and the rigorous educational process of Socratic dialogue are more systematic and more sophisticated learning vehicles than Scholar and Practitioner’s dialogues. Without the proper Socratic qualities we could perhaps call their talks a Schönian dialogue. Donald Schön’s example of teacher Quist and student Petra engaging in a reflective process of elaborating an architectural plan is well known to designers. Quist and Petra used pen and paper, but that is not always necessary for reflection. Schön’s second example is of a therapy dialogue between an anonymous Supervisor and a Resident (Schön 1983: 105–27). Schön uses this to show how dialogue is equally a platform for reflective sense-making. Scholar every now and then attempts to tell Practitioner something that he already knows, but the outcomes of the discussions are nevertheless unknown to both of them at the beginning and the dialogue is a way for them to reflect and learn. In this respect, Scholar and Practitioner tell a true story about the author, who has been using their discussion as a way to approach both the answers and the questions the dialogues deal with.
A topical reason for writing the book has been my experience in design for wellbeing. Helsinki was the world design capital in 2012, and I was in charge of one of the projects associated with the programme. My project, “365 Wellbeing” (Keinonen, Vaajakallio, and Honkonen 2013), as well as much of the larger umbrella programme, “Living+” (Kinnunen, Kivelä, and Tyyri-Pohjonen 2013) run by Aalto University, addressed the social responsibility of design. But as is customary in design, and life, it’s difficult to engage in deeper reflection when your days are busy. We did not have much time to conceptualize or reflect on what we did and learned. At the end of the year, I felt no wiser about questions of design, wellbeing, equality, and social justice, even though those were the areas in which we had been working. Fortunately, an opportunity to think about these issues arose not long after, in 2013, when I was able to take a research sabbatical with the support of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
The six dialogues in this book try to be faithful to the ways in which they were born. The structure of the discussions is based on my associations and thus can be read as a rough description of his research process. That is why some ideas appear in perhaps somewhat surprising contexts. A topic starts in one dialogue and continues in another. But there is also some structure.
The first dialogue focuses on design methods. It is based on the idea that the choice of a righteous design method can be a route to the ethical justification of design activity. Doing design ethically would lead to ethical design. Scholar and Practitioner observe, however, that methods and outcomes do not seem to be ethically commensurate. The dialogue includes a short discussion about the different ethical bases that various design approaches seem to imply. Eventually Scholar and Practitioner decide to lean on virtues and the internal goods of a practice as clarified by Alasdair MacIntyre. They notice that certain ways of designing make design a more virtuous and ethically sustainable practice and that this can be used as a guideline to decide how we work. The dialogue leans on probes—tasks given to users to document and reflect on their experiences and perceptions—as an example to illustrate the links between methodological choices and ethical evaluations.2
The second dialogue addresses the quality of use. It includes criticism of usability and user experience in terms of their conception of the user. In the dialogue, Scholar and Practitioner recognize five standpoints that users can assume. Users in these standpoints have conflicting interests and, consequently, are diagnosed as having a serious case of multiple personality disorder. The dialogue ends with Scholar and Practitioner proposing to broaden the evaluative framework of use to include the practices where the use takes place.
The third dialogue focuses on usability and the capability approach. The capability approach is a conceptual framework of distributive justice. It claims that individuals’ capabilities to do and be what they want, within reason, should be the criterion of justice and development. The dialogue identifies that design, usability, and capability are all concepts bridging resources and achievements. The dialogue outlines a version of usability that is sensitive to distributional justice and to the principles of the capability approach. Scholar and Practitioner propose a new definition and a new name for usability.
In the fourth dialogue, Scholar and Practitioner claim that user experience and Jeremy Bentham’s version of utilitarianism are similar in many essential respects. Utilitarianism is an ethical school that believes happiness is the most important quality of life and that maximizing the happiness of all is the goal of development and the rule for just decision-making. That being the case, the sharp criticisms of utilitarianism as the foundation for justice should also apply to our more recent conception of user experience. Scholar and Practitioner seek to criticize user experience accordingly and propose a new more righteous version of it.
In the fifth dialogue, Scholar and Practitioner present a set of ethical heuristics. They continue discussing the links between the capability approach and design, but most importantly their dialogue suggests that the ethical responsibility of designers lies in making their assumptions transparent. This discussion, more so than the others, leans on a case study: a service design called Transfer Ticket.
Finally the sixth dialogue summarizes the main points of the previous discussions and presents the design process and the responsible designer’s state of mind as a situation where a contract is drafted in a “transitional position.” The idea follows John Rawls’ philosophy. Rawls claims that the principles of a just society can be outlined in “the original position” behind “veils of ignorance.” Behind these veils, decision-makers do not know their own societal position and status. Thus, their decisions are impartial and give priority to the worst-off in the distribution of goods.
There are a few hand-drawn illustrations at the beginning of the chapters. They are not captioned and as such serve as a sort of visual quiz referring to certain key aspects of the dialogues.
I want to thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for a grant enabling the writing of the book. I am also grateful to Umeå Institute of Design and the School of Design and Environment at the National University of Singapore for fruitful research visits. Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture agreed on special arrangements to enable me to focus on writing. Comments from anonymous reviewers have been most helpful for improving the earlier drafts.
Anita deserves special recognition for her tolerance for a husband who probably has done more justice to his work than to his spouse.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Turkka Keinonen
Helsinki
1For applying Socratic dialogue in professional ethics and teacher education, see, e.g., Van Hooft (1999), Fitzgerald and van Hooft (2000), Morrell (2004), Skordoulis and Dawson (2007), Gose (2009), and Knezic et al. (2010).
2This chapter is partly based on a keynote lecture I gave in Lugano in 2009 (Keinonen 2009b).