The Future of Experience Design Is Connected, Not Centered
The limits of human centered design are in the second word, not the first.
I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
HCD is dead; long live HCD
Let’s begin in medias res: Human centered design is the subject of much interrogation these days. It’s broken, it’s bullshit, it’s harmful, it’s killing the planet, it’s causing suffering and toxic individualism…
…but at the same time, we still need it, it’s not actually the problem, it’s more important than ever, and if it seems broken it’s because we’re not even doing it right.
For the socially conscious designer, it poses a conundrum: if not human centered, then what? To be sure, designing with compassion to support human experience, dignity, and agency will continue to be our ethical imperative. But we cannot deny a bit of cognitive dissonance here: like so many human endeavors under the dynamics of late capitalism, our beloved craft has had unintended consequences on our communities, our environment, and ourselves.
By definition, human centered design magnifies certain components (humans — as users, consumers) in our ecosystem while neglecting others (flora, fauna, non-consumer humans… basically everything else). And, what’s more, centering (certain) humans in our work doesn’t even seem to guarantee positive outcomes for those very humans, when the process leads to a myopic omission of context and system dynamics that impact those same people we’re aiming to serve through design.
To wit: AirBnB has accelerated gentrification in several communities by driving up rents; Uber has contributed to traffic, pollution, and a precarious gig worker culture; Twitter has resulted in the spread of hate speech and radicalization of young people toward extremism; Facebook has platformed misinformation and illegally shared user data with historic consequences. For more examples, click through any of those links above.
Yet, I believe HCD’s existential crisis is a perfectly natural evolutionary step forward. Human centered design emerged as a response to what existed before: business and engineering practices that did not design with humans in mind. A few decades later, a human centered approach to innovation is practically table stakes for any successful product, tech, or service organization; to develop anything for human use or benefit without deliberate care and attention to the humans in question seems outright arcane by modern standards, (or, barring that, problematically paternalistic).
Human centered design has humanized design, and opened many eyes to the fact that understanding the human on the other end of a tool, product, or service can make said tool, product, or service more humane, and, yes, more successful.*
(*Precise definition and ethics of “success” not included in this article.)
_____ centered design: beyond Mad Libs
Quite understandably, we now have a flood of manifestos attempting to answer what design should center, if not humans? Perhaps we need humanity centered design, stakeholder centered design, activity centered design, life centered design, environment centered design, society centered design, or planet centered design… Of course, each of these approaches provokes designers with thoughtful perspectives, useful frameworks, and new lenses for the work. They are all right.
And, all wrong. This won’t do. Searching for something else to center is, (perhaps ironically for designers trained to identify and frame problems), solving the wrong problem. The aspect of human centered design that requires our attention isn’t the word “human,” it’s the word “centered.” It’s not the choice of what to center that gets us in trouble, it’s the choice to center any one component at all — even with good intent, it leads to short term thinking, incomplete understanding, and narrowed opportunity spaces.
So how can we serve humanity without centering humans? How do we broaden the aperture of our focus, without zooming out so far that we lose touch all together? While a higher altitude vantage point is often awe-inspiring to behold, the goal here is not simply to achieve breathtaking views from 10,000 feet where we can’t accomplish much in practical terms. The objective of a wider perspective is to see how things are interconnected, and to illuminate the interconnectedness, so we can better understand, and act, in ways that work with, not against, the natural forces of an ecosystem to achieve positive change. As design evolves toward (or depending on your philosophy, returns to) a more holistic and trans-disciplinary practice that deals just as effectively with webs, networks, and interrelationships as with isolated moments, products, or point solutions, we’re better able to map the flow of power, value, implicit and explicit incentives, and socio-emotional dynamics, to observe how universal principles emerge from otherwise complex systems.
Which, it seems, may be more important than ever in “an increasingly complex world.” *
Systems thinking has entered the chat
If you’re keeping score, that means we can now add ideas like systemic design, strategic design, de-centered design, and transition design to the bingo card. But, design really doesn’t need another branding exercise. What it needs are reflective practitioners committed to a rigorous praxis beyond navel gazing thought exercises and who can, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, “assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.” We need designers who have the stomach to work within complexity when it can’t be reduced, and the courage to pursue constructive and destructive interventions in pursuit of improved experiences and outcomes — for human and non-human ecosystems alike.
Fortunately, disciplines like systems thinking, complexity theory, and their adjacent social sciences provide meaningful tools and frameworks for exactly this purpose. In fact, systems science has existed for a very long time, quite a while longer than Design Thinking (TM) has been part of the public zeitgeist; systems science led to the design methods movement, a direct predecessor of design thinking, which means comprehensivist designers and strategists have been drawing on these disciplines for decades, (with or without a manifesto labeling their unique plot among the design landscape).
So, if you are working anywhere near the intersections of human experience, learning, or behavior to improve real-world outcomes, your practice should incorporate systems thinking. Cue the pithy quotes:
Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. — Peter Senge
Systems thinking is ‘contextual,’ which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole. ― Fritjof Capra
The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable problems arise directly from this mismatch. — Donella Meadows
A systems oriented design practice can still draw on the tenets of human centered design to infuse humane, constructivist values in the work, but also benefits from the added awareness that, as Senge emphasizes, today’s problems often come from yesterday’s solutions.
To further paraphrase Senge, we can break that cycle by understanding that causes and effects are not as closely related in time and space as we tend to assume. We build this understanding by zooming out in both a spatial and chronological sense, and by studying the connections between everything. We strive to make invisible dynamics visible — and more actionable, just as understanding the same types of invisible air currents that cause a falling leaf to move in complex, non-linear ways can also help engineers design efficient aircraft and help airline pilots adjust course to safely reach their destination. We can map complex systems (whether organizational, technical, social, environmental…) to understand current behaviors and to search for leverage points, which Donella Meadows describes as “places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
Many systems thinking primers reference the “iceberg model” as a metaphor for this type of approach:
Increasingly, design driven organizations that are willing to invest in strategy and infrastructure to investigate ‘below the surface,’ and insight generation and synthesis practices that incorporate deeper and broader causal relationships from a systems view, will find themselves at a significant competitive advantage. Their ability to sense and respond to complex environments and unexpected challenges will serve them well where conventional predict and control strategies fail.
By broadening the aperture of our attention and deepening our knowledge of interrelationships and hidden influences, we can improve outcomes on a number of levels, including:
The organizational dynamics that empower innovation and resilience through collaboration and employee empowerment.
The business value of services and products that better deliver on brand promises because they reflect the context of use.
The human experiences that honor agency, dignity, and belonging within local communities and across the globe.
Gaining higher ground
There’s also an important awareness we must have about the intersection of what we design (e.g. products, experiences, systems), and for whose benefit (e.g. individuals, organizations, societies), to know what altitude we’re operating at and what zooming in or out might entail. Richard Buchanan developed one of the more useful frameworks describing these categories as four “orders” of design. If we aim to apply a systems lens to our design practice, it’s critical to ensure that everyone co-creating desirable future states together are aligned on the what and the how of their collaboration. These four orders represent different altitudes where design operates:
It’s important to note that, perhaps counterintuitively, systems thinking enriches experience design at any altitude, (one need not be redesigning entire social, technical, or political systems or seeking the power and influence to operate only at the highest vantage point for this lens to be relevant). It’s the cultivation of a holistic mindset and the ability to zoom in and out resolution at different altitudes that matters most.
You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory. Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete. ― Donella Meadows
For example, a systems oriented approach:
…in product design, provides a deeper knowledge of the context of use as well as upstream influences and downstream impacts on the value proposition of that product or touch point.
…in service design, ensures the orchestration of components across the service ecosystem can deliver an intuitive and meaningful experience — for both the end user as well as the other humans and non-human entities who are affected by or involved in mediating the experience.
…in behavioral design, improves the quality of behavioral interventions we implement and mitigates the risk of specific behaviors we seek to change having unintended consequences down the road, all while preserving the agency of the individuals we serve in the process.
…in organizational design, creates more resilient learning organizations whose teams are capable of responding to emergent signals and thriving (vs. merely surviving) in complex, unpredictable scenarios.
The common tools and methods of this work aren’t all that novel — but through a systems thinking lens, the outputs and artifacts typical to design strategy are constructed with subtly different means and for critically different ends, to support more rigorous sense making and more confident decision making.
For example, systems oriented designers (ideally co-designing directly with stakeholders) will often:
Develop personas, behavioral archetypes, jobs to be done and similar models to build shared understanding of diverse stakeholders’ (human or otherwise) lived experiences, motivations, obstacles, and unmet needs across a given ecosystem.
Map systems, landscapes, and infrastructures, to articulate current or potential future states and downstream impacts in time and space, as well as customer journeys, information flows, value transfer, invisible dynamics, and unrealized opportunities.
Synthesize and translate insights into actionable leverage points, as short term tactics, medium term experiments, long term vision, user requirements, product prototypes, learning frameworks, behavioral interventions, community programs, policy guidelines, step by step action plans, and so on, depending on the altitude of the work and the resources on hand.
The call is coming from inside the system
The trickiest part of all may be in recognizing that we are rarely in a position to act on a system as if we were outsiders; cue the classic saying, “you aren’t in traffic, you are traffic.” It’s naive (or arrogant?) to think we can pursue all of the above as if we are mapping a system that is separate from us, rather than looking for interventions that include us, even begin with us. We act within complex systems, as part of the systems ourselves.
We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. ― Donella Meadows
As a designer, strategist, educator, consultant, and/or leader, you don’t have to be an expert in complexity theory and dynamical systems to appreciate that you live and work within several complex systems, each with non-linear, self-organizing, emergent properties all their own… but if you’re not already applying systems thinking to your work or collaborating with those who do, it’s time to broaden your perspective from simply human centered to holistically interconnected, and see what manner of invisible patterns and opportunities are made visible.
