The hubris of design
At Deloitte Digital, we frequently talk about designing for the human experience. Implicit in this idea, then, is that designers must understand what an experience is like for a person in the present, at the same time trying to construct new kinds of experiences in the future. The designer, whether it’s for a physical or a digital product/service, must be comfortable straddling these time zones.
One of the big problems, though, that has beleaguered the design field is that all too often, designers get bogged down in their own psychological, social and bodily experiences, which leads to products and services reflecting their intrinsic biases and blind spots. This is especially true of race and gender.
Hip implants, for example, are more than twice as likely to fail in women, causing huge pain and discomfort in the process. Yes, there are different sizes available, but women aren’t just “small men.” There are fundamental gendered differences to how the female hip moves. The edges around the socket tend to bear greater weight than in men, increasing the risk that implants — in their current form — will wear down and release damaging metal particles, especially when a person runs or carries out some other vigorous activity. However, because no evidence on this was gathered during the design and testing process, women continue to bear the brunt of these failures. In a similar vein, predictive algorithms used by healthcare companies in the US deny Black and Hispanic patients’ access to potentially life-saving treatments and therapies that are routinely provided to less severely ill white patients. Whilst these are especially grievous examples, the reproduction of experiential prejudices is ubiquitous across the history of design, impacting everything from supermarket shelves (designed for male height) to the websites we use every day (designed for the visually unimpaired).
A new tool for a new toolkit
How, then, do we guard against these dangers? What critical tools are available for designers to think with and move them beyond the blinkers of their own experiences? One such tool is phenomenology [fi-nom-uh-nol-uh-jee]. Phenomenology is the study of experience. Its starting point is the creation of rich descriptions of human experiences, alongside contextual reflections on what makes this experience possible and meaningful. In this view, our experiences are not sealed inside the black-boxes of our individual minds, but rather are always already relational: inextricably tied to other people, things, places, ideas and situations.
Not just being, but being-in-the-world
This is what the philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of the pioneers of phenomenology, was getting at when he described existence in terms of “being-in-the-world.” Heidegger was interested in grasping human existence from beyond an abstract, theoretical perspective. Rather, he understood that the meaning of our experiences emerges from our immersion and engagement with the world around us, whether that is hammering a nail into a wall, embracing a loved one, or swiping right on a dating app.
That’s why the term is hyphenated, because “being” and “the world” can’t be separated. We aren’t in the world as water is “in” a glass, as he put it. Take the experience of listening to music at a concert. The experience can’t be reduced to musical notes wafting through the air, dislocated from the surrounding context. Rather it encompasses everything from the collective effervescence of the thronging crowd, the sense of joy and anticipation that comes with the artist ratcheting up their performance, the lights spiralling outwards from the stage, the vibrations coursing through your body, the nostalgic dam-burst when a song from your teenage years gets belted out, the alcohol (if you’re so inclined) relaxing your muscles and sending waves of pleasure rippling across the brain-body barrier.
Any state of existence, as the concert example demonstrates is defined by the complex web of relations we have to make sense of in a given situation. Phenomenology is a tool to make this web more visible, so that we can better unravel and interpret the complexity of all human experiences, from the ordinary to the extraordinary and everything in between.
Mirror, mirror on the wall…who’s the most biased designer of them all?
In design circles, this quest for understanding other peoples’ experiences can be boiled down to one word: why? Why is the user doing what they are doing? Once we get closer to the why, we understandably feel that we have a stronger foundation for our designs, whether that is a new type of corkscrew or the digital transformation of a health or banking service. More often than not, the design process involves asking the user explicitly why they go about a certain task the way that they do. This is typically done through interviews, focus groups, card sorting, usability tests, participatory workshops and the like.
Valuable as these methods are, they often run aground against a classic human paradox. Namely, that what people say they do (and the reasons they give) is frequently not what they actually do (for reasons they cannot always articulate), especially when they are being quizzed outside of their normal everyday contexts in design studios. This problem is frequently compounded when the questions or tasks are structured, often unintentionally, by the research teams’ own implicit biases and perspectives. What often happens, then, is that even in our sincerest search for empathy with the person sitting across from us, we end up less with a window unto their lives and more of a mirror into our own.
Being-in-the-home: Invisible Energies
Let’s say, for example, you’re trying to design a digital platform that helps people better manage their energy consumption at home. Rather than hauling people into a design studio to interrogate them about “why” and “how” they use energy, a phenomenological approach would begin by observing, documenting, describing and exploring what it actually means for that person to exist inside their home, and in particular how their experiences of home life are shaped by their bodies, senses and interpersonal relationships.
This means paying deep attention to the textures, sounds, smells and visual aspects of the home, how people move through it, what objects and technologies they engage with, where they gather as a family within it, and under what conditions. Rather than asking them explicitly about their energy consumption, we would instead try to describe what people do to make their homes “feel right.”
In fact, this is precisely what Sarah Pink, a Professor of Design, did. As part of her phenomenological investigation, Pink invited her research participants to use video to guide her through their home, both as a way to gather data from their personal, embodied perspectives but also as a way for them to collaboratively explore and reflect on what home meant to them.
Eventually, Pink started to think about the home in terms of invisible energies. The state of the downstairs floors, for example, were very important for mum, who wanted her infant son to be able to crawl across it and not get dirty. This meant boiling lots of water in a kettle to mix with floor-cleaning products. Likewise, upstairs the guest room had been carpeted to give it a cosy feel for friends or family who stayed over, requiring regular vacuuming to make sure it always felt soft underfoot. Watching TV together as a family in the living room meant cranking up the radiator. Bedtime routines meant different things for different family members, the nightlight and space-heater in the toddler’s room a different sensory experience from the parent’s room, where the television would stay on as background noise and the windows would be cracked open for ventilation.
Designing for complex worlds, not individual users
What this example shows is that home is more than just a collection of physical building materials, rather it is something that is actively made. It is, in Heidegger’s sense, a world — a dynamic mixture of practices, materials, sensations, emotions, routines and relationships. Anything that hoped to successfully mediate energy consumption would need to be designed in such a way that understood the complexity of this world.
It would not be difficult to see how a single man in their mid-20s who lived in a one-bedroom flat could very easily, for all their best intentions, end up designing something that woefully failed the family that Pink studied in her research. Phenomenological approaches can help guard against the kind of botched design jobs that are, at best, based on a gross oversimplification of user needs and, at worst, a reflection of the bias and prejudices of the designers themselves. By taking the being-in-the-world of our users as the fundamental starting point of the design process, we really can get that much closer to the experiences of other people, not least of all because it forces us to put aside our own.
By Josh Burraway —Senior Consultant, Deloitte Digital
