How Is UX Design Changing the World?

I don’t think it is only my impression when I say that we are flooded by an ever-growing list of good, worse, but also excellent articles on UX design. Many of them are written by design professionals with many years of practical experience on large projects. It is worth following what these people have to say, because practical experience remains an important form of knowledge and know-how for any designer. The question, then, is why you should read and listen to theoretical remarks on a field as practical as UX design.

My answer is well known, but I will repeat it anyway through the famous motto of the Star Trek series: in order to boldly go where no one has gone before, it is necessary to stop now and then and look at what we have tried, what we have tested, what works and why. In other words, in our case it means reflecting on why we do UX the way we do it. I don’t know whether you are like me, but when I devote myself to something, I tend to always want to know the latest developments in the field. There is nothing like the good feeling of reading the newest article every morning and learning something new. But this good feeling does not last long. One could say it is just one dose of a drug called information overload. When I don’t read new blog posts every day, I feel I am missing out on something important. Or at least I used to have that feeling. More than half a year ago I had the opportunity to spend those six months reading a great deal of historical and theoretical literature on UX and HCI, which gave me many answers, but, I confess, also many new questions. What I realised along the way, though, is that UX and, more generally, HCI, the field that studies the interaction between humans and computers, are fields that in themselves represent a figurative as well as a real interface between design, cognitive science, philosophy, culture and society. In my opinion they are among the most interesting fields one can study today in an information society filled with the internet of things and ubiquitous technology. And not only because they are theoretically interesting: studying them more deeply offers a view of the relationship between humans and technology, and also an explanation of why UX is so important and why it holds potential for social as well as business innovation.

Instead of a definition, the history of HCI as the present of UX

It is no accident that on sites like Quora one of the most frequent questions is how UX differs from UI, UX or interaction design. Many questions deal with what UX design is and call for some kind of definition. The common and more or less sophisticated answers include, for example:

As you surely know, it was Don Norman who, while working as a usability architect at Apple, introduced the term “user experience design” in its modern sense. Don Norman comments on the use of the term:

“I invented the term because I thought HCI and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread so widely that it is starting to lose its meaning.”

Although I consider these definitions important guides, today I would like to look at UX a little differently. All the definitions mentioned suffer from the same ailment: they try to capture UX design in its current form, as it appears to us here and now. Which is a legitimate approach. I, however, like to look at the evolutionary trajectory of things, at how they develop over time. For UX, this means taking a brief look at the historical currents in fields like HCI, from which UX developed, directly or indirectly, and appeared on the scene. This also gives us the chance to compare whether UX design today fulfils the motivations and expectations placed in it.

Human factors and ergonomics

Without going too deep into history, it is interesting to note that HCI and UX were no exception: the most innovation happened in wartime. During the Second World War, researchers were trying to find out why aircraft pilots, well trained and with no mechanical failures, crashed for no apparent reason. It turned out that what we would today call the user interface of the cockpit, its buttons and levers, was not exactly a model of good design and ergonomics. This is one of the reasons why new fields such as human factors, ergonomics and engineering psychology emerged, which were meant to help design aircraft controls that were simpler and more suited to the human body. A few years later, in 1952 and 1957, professional associations such as the Ergonomic Society and its American counterpart, the Human Factors Society, were founded, which confirmed the importance of and the demand for these fields.

The interface and its design at that time focused on how to use knowledge of the physical limits of the human body to design suitable mechanical controls.

Innovation in IT and the birth of the GUI and the interface

Let us skip almost a decade to 1963, when Ivan Sutherland, in his doctoral dissertation inspired by Vannevar Bush and his Memex, presented the first interactive graphics software, called Sketchpad. It can be said to be the first computer graphical interface.
Later, at the legendary Xerox PARC, Douglas Engelbart created a graphical user interface built on the metaphor of the desktop. This is exactly where the graphical, so-called “desktop interface” was born. Thanks in part to NeXT, Apple and Steve Jobs, who visited Xerox at that time and was amazed by the GUI, the desktop metaphor survives in a relatively unchanged form to this day.

Society began to be flooded with these personal computers. Many millions of people began to rely on the interface as a window onto the functionality and the invisible technical potential of computers. These began to address work needs and later everyday human needs as well. Suddenly the design of computers, of their interfaces and of the interaction between computer and human became more and more important.

Designers therefore needed a solid foundation on which to design interfaces. For the fields of ergonomics and human factors were a-theoretical, that is, they did not concern themselves with a theory of interface design but focused above all on pragmatic solutions.

Bannon (Bannon, 1995) said that specialists often came to human factors and ergonomics with a background in behavioural science or industrial engineering, and in retrospect their efforts were criticised for an insufficient orientation towards generating theoretical knowledge, which earned the fields the pejorative label of “knobs and dials” psychology. Today we might say that some approaches in HCI, UX and interface design are nothing more than the design of “buttons and scrollbars”.

Around the 1980s, interface designers and researchers realised that the earlier view of the relationship between human and computer had become outdated. When computers spread into the workplace, it was clear that working with a computer did not involve our “hands and backs” but our cognitive abilities, that is, our intelligence. We can say that we did not “work” with the computer; we began to think through it. Rescue for designers came only with new knowledge and findings from the seemingly unrelated fields of cognitive science and the new field of HCI.

Cognitive science and HCI

Cognitive science has a long and important history in HCI. To a large extent we are still influenced today by the theories that began to be used for designing the interaction between humans and computers. It was precisely at the beginning of the 1980s that the fields of human factors and ergonomics were supplemented with findings from cognitive science. A milestone was the 1983 book The Psychology of Human-computer Interaction (Card, 1983), which de facto established the field of HCI. In the book the authors criticised the existing orientation of the human factors field and argued for a greater emphasis on theory based on applying knowledge from cognitive psychology: “[…] The user is not an operator. He does not operate the computer, he communicates with it” (quoted in Grudin, 2012).

HCI became the main field for the design of computer user interfaces. Under the influence of the cognitive sciences it adopted theories as well as experimental research that explained the role played in working with a computer by our memory, attention, perception, learning, mental models, decision-making and our other abilities and limitations. The already mentioned book The Psychology of Human-computer Interaction introduced into HCI one of the most important and most influential metaphors of what a human being is and how human thinking works. This book, inspired by research in the cognitive sciences and in the field of Artificial Intelligence, adopted the metaphor and theory of cognitivism, i.e. the view that a human being and human thinking are nothing other than the information processing of certain abstract or physical symbols on the basis of fixed, predetermined rules, or, if you like, algorithms. In short, the human being explicitly became a digital computer.

Probably the best-known picture illustrating this is an animated figure called, aptly and without a trace of irony, the “model human processor”.

Cognitivism in HCI meant that researchers focused thoroughly on optimising communication with the computer. Clicking speed, the number of words typed per second, and following fixed rules to complete predefined tasks became the core of HCI research.

Phil Turner lists the most widely used methods that stem from the cognitivist view of HCI, among them the GOMS model (Goals, Operators, Methods and Selection rules), KLM (Keystroke-Level Model), CCT (Cognitive Complexity Theory), TAG (Task Action Grammar) and task analysis.

HCI under the influence of cognitivism, which persists in research to this day, reduced the human being to a computer that has everything it needs for its thinking and behaviour in its head. That is where everything important happens. For HCI, but also for more obscure present-day fields such as usability engineering, this meant and still means that the most used methods take place remotely or in laboratories, often on the basis of quantitative research from analytics tools. Moreover, completely stripped of real contextual factors.

It was thus merely a superficial and artificial view of everyday human experiences with technology. Human experience of technology was reduced to impatient workers who want to finish their work as quickly as possible.

But that is not the only relationship we have with computers and with technology in general. In any case, from the 1980s and, let us say, for the following ten or twenty years, it was the predominant view. No wonder: in this prehistory, design was a dirty word in IT, interfaces were designed by programmers, and managers decided which tasks were important for the users of the software. The role of the user, and more generally of the human being, was negative, understood as “those irrational human aspects” of software, which were a nightmare for most programmers, because users often did what was not in the script.

Although cognitivism unified research in HCI and some call it the golden age of HCI, many questions were never addressed. For example, cognitivism pushed into the background or ignored: who is the user, what is their life like? Or: is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University the same user as a retired grandmother? Is the interaction meaningful for the user? Does it address their needs, does it improve their life? What is the context, the place, the time in which the user interacts with technology?

With the gradual arrival of smart devices and of approaches such as pervasive computing (perhaps better known in English as ubiquitous computing), or the Internet of Things, we can see today that the cognitivist focus solely on what happens in our heads was very limiting. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Since there were no iPhones and iPads in the 1980s and 1990s, it was not easy to imagine what relationship people would have with technologies and how technologies would affect our lives. This is also why the critique of the prevailing cognitivist approach in HCI came above all from unexpected fields: philosophy, Artificial Intelligence research, but also, of course, from HCI itself, where one of the first critiques came from a man most listeners know. It was Don Norman, who, as I will show, had, in my opinion, a hand in all the important moments of the HCI and UX fields.

The critique of cognitivism

This part of my lecture is among the densest and provides the most important arguments for why what we today call UX had to come into being. It meant, however, taking on a great battle with the dominant belief that the human mind works as an information processor, processing symbols according to fixed, algorithmic rules. If cognitivism is wrong at its core, it would mean that the fields of HCI and Artificial Intelligence, which build on it, are also wrong at their core. That does not mean that absolutely everything would have to be thrown away, but our idea of what a human being is and how they find their way in life was mistaken.

John Searle

One of the great critics of cognitivism was, and is, the well-known American philosopher John Searle. In his thought experiment he asks us to imagine the following situation. In a closed room sits a man, Bob, who does not speak Chinese. What he does have at his disposal is a book with which he is able to respond to every message written in Chinese. Outside the room stands a woman who speaks Chinese, say Alice. She slips messages written in Chinese under the door into the room. Inside the room, Bob looks at a message, writes a reply according to his big book of transformation rules, and slips it back under the door. Alice assumes that Bob knows Chinese, but according to Searle he does not. Bob merely follows an algorithm for transforming symbols and has no real understanding of the language. Searle wants to show here that the pure form of symbols, that is, syntax, cannot produce understanding, meaning, sense, that is, semantics.

So if cognitivism says that a human being is nothing other than a computer processing symbols, which it manipulates, like Bob in the Chinese Room, according to prepared fixed rules, then according to Searle we “should not understand anything”. Which is not the ordinary experience of our lives. Despite considerable criticism, it seems that Searle’s attack on “strong logical AI”, that is, cognitivism, still holds.

Don Norman

Another critic of cognitivism was Don Norman. As early as 1980 he wrote the article Twelve issues for cognitive science which, in my opinion, is unfortunately and needlessly ignored by the community of HCI and UX specialists, even though otherwise every one of us has read and reads Norman.

In this article Norman pointed to entirely obvious things. He claims that we are not artificial beings but living organisms with an evolutionary history that influences us. At the same time we live in the real world, and our thinking and acting are influenced by culture, social interactions, motivations and emotions. These are aspects of our acting and of our interaction with technology that were completely ignored and in many respects still are today. Norman argued that we should stop following the cognitivist approach and instead start studying the human being and their interaction with technology through a systems-oriented and cybernetic lens of complex interactions and feedback loops between people (users), the environment, history, culture and society. The question is: what do the environment, culture or our physical body have to do with how we think, act or interact with technology and the interface? As Norman and one lesser-known philosopher showed, the trivial fact that we are not artificial beings, but that we are all in the physical world, has a fundamental influence on how we act.

Dreyfus, Winograd, Heidegger and the critique of AI

If Searle says that cognitivism cannot give us an answer, where does meaning come from, and what exactly gives sense to our actions and to the things around us?

The philosophers mentioned argue that meaning has to do with how we actually experience the everyday world around us. Whereas cognitivism turned us into scientists or computers that constantly calculate, analyse and compare options in order to arrive at optimal action, philosophers and present-day behavioural economists alike claim that our approach to the world is thoroughly practical, and that the most common way we interact with things in the world is through ordinary, everyday activities. We take our children to school, we write emails, we make decisions when shopping at the farmers’ market, or we work out how to use that new printer in our office. Every day we grapple with practical problems in order to meet our needs and goals. But this idea goes even deeper: we also use the things around us to solve problems, and these things have meaning for us. Not because we analyse them, but because these things appear to us as tools with which we can do something or extend our natural human abilities. Tools, and things around us in general, have meaning by virtue of our using them and interacting through them with the environment around us.

And yet, even though tools and things around us have meaning by virtue of what we do with them, these meanings are not fixed but change with context. How are we to understand this?

PET

My favourite example is the utterly ordinary PET bottle. If I ask you about the function or meaning of a PET bottle, most people will answer that it is used as a container for liquid and that the form of the bottle is specifically designed to help people hold it and drink from it. Indeed, at first glance it seems that form follows function, as many designers and others have at some point heard this famous phrase.

How, then, do we explain that a group of environmental activists uses PET bottles as flowerpots for sustainable gardening, in order to draw attention to, and reduce, the needless and dangerous waste of plastics? This simple example once unexpectedly made me think. Does form really always follow function? Was the form and meaning of the PET bottle as a flowerpot for environmental activism built into the bottle at the moment the designer was designing it? I assume not. But the form allows or provides (in English, affords) such a function, and that is also why many people really do use a PET bottle as a flowerpot, and for many other uses. That is why we should change the old motto form follows function and say that function also follows form. And what is also interesting: notice that the PET bottle not only changed its meaning but acquired a completely opposite meaning. From a symbol of plastic waste it became a tool for a better world.

The story behind this story of the PET bottle points to an important point for designers. The meaning and even the function of the objects around us are not fixed. Of course, objects are undoubtedly designed with a certain intention, but human creativity cannot be stopped. People will use all the means available in a given context to solve their problems. It is not only about PET bottles; it is about our relationship to things, objects, tools and technology around us in general.

Some of you may have noticed that between the lines I am talking about what design and psychology call affordances. The original definition of affordances says that affordances are simply properties of objects that allow us certain actions. The prototypical example is a chair. The shape and material of a chair allow us to sit. A PET bottle allows us to drink, but also to use it as a flowerpot. A urinal allows us one obvious thing, but it can also be used as one of the most important works of art of the twentieth century, as the French artist Marcel Duchamp showed us.

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus agrees with Don Norman that affordances, the meaning of things and thus the actions we can perform with them, are not carved into them in advance but are relative. And this was precisely the argument with which Dreyfus, from the position of a philosopher, was able to criticise the best experts in the world in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Although he worked at institutions as important as M.I.T. and Stanford, no AI expert was able to answer how artificial intelligence can decide what is relevant in a given context and what is not. Dreyfus explains this problem, technically called the “frame problem”, as follows: what is significant and relevant for us depends to a large extent on who we are, what society we live in, what culture has influenced us, but also on the concrete situation we find ourselves in and what our needs and goals are. Artificial intelligence based on cognitivism did not exist in the real world; it had no real body, no real needs and so on. Hence all relevance had to be programmed in advance. At first, AI and robotics researchers dealt with this by defining a context, for example as “kitchen”, “garden” or “morning”, and defining for each context which actions are relevant. But Dreyfus remarked that this does not solve the problem, it only moves it one level up. Now it was necessary to define how the AI would select not the relevant actions but the relevant context. For that, a meta-context had to be defined, and so on. Dreyfus therefore claims that this so-called “frame problem” had no solution in research based on cognitivism. Relevance and meaning are not only in our heads but depend on the context of the situation we find ourselves in.

Lucy Suchman and situated actions

This assumption of the importance of context was explored by the anthropologist Lucy Suchman in her doctoral dissertation at Xerox. She decided to take on the cognitivist dogma prevailing at the time, and she called it into question. Suchman argued very precisely that people do not follow fixed plans but act on the basis of a dynamic interaction with material objects and with the social and cultural influences of the given situation. Whereas cognitivism imagined the world as a static background, Suchman showed that people constantly “update” their behaviour and adapt it to the situation at hand. Her research led to the introduction of a new direction in cognitive science called situated cognition and was a direct stimulus for HCI/UX to start using methods for studying people’s real practices in their real contexts, the way anthropologists, sociologists or ethnographers study them.

Tacit knowledge

Another reason for the need for contextual or ethnographic research is the fact that people are not able to articulate all knowledge and thoughts or put them into words. This is the problem of so-called tacit knowledge, which from a practical point of view may also be familiar to managers and business leaders responsible for knowledge sharing and knowledge management in a company. Tacit knowledge is the kind where we ask “how to do something”, as opposed to the kind of knowledge of “what something is”. “What” knowledge is, for example, knowing the date Czechoslovakia was founded or the name of the first Czech president. Whereas by “how” knowledge we can imagine knowing how to swim, how to play the piano and so on. Of course there are certain rules and recommended procedures, but unless a person actually sits down at the piano, they will never learn to play it. The problem with tacit knowledge is that if it cannot be described well and has to be shown, a person must be right “there” to have a chance of at least grasping how the thing is done, how and why it works. People, teams, organisations and companies have a great deal of tacit knowledge in their lives and structures, also because people automate many everyday activities. Yet what is a daily routine for one person, something they do not think about, is for designers and UX researchers, who try to map the context of how people do certain things, tacit knowledge that is immensely valuable, important and also hard to map.

That is why here, too, ethnographic research is important for uncovering hidden, automated, tacit knowledge. That does not mean it will uncover everything important; that of course depends on the talent and experience of the researcher. But it has a greater potential for it than speculation from the designer’s armchair or laboratory research, where the test subject is torn out of their usual environment.

Emotions and experiences influence and are influenced

After the critique of cognitivism and the outline of post-cognitivism, we can finally also say something about emotions and experiences, which User Experience Design, at least judging by its name, is after. As tends to be the custom in the HCI/UX community, it was once again Don Norman who popularised the idea that besides the utilitarian aspects of products, emotional and aesthetic experiences matter too. On this Norman is undoubtedly right. In his newer book Norman admits that in his bestseller The Design of the Everyday Things he left out emotions entirely and focused only on functionality, usability and form. Now, with the book Emotional Design, published in 2004, he wants to make up for this omission. The question is: how do we design emotional and aesthetic experiences?

Susanne Bødker comments on Norman’s book and, surprisingly, criticises it. Not that she would disagree that emotions and aesthetic experiences are important for designing interactions with technology, but she says that although Norman writes that emotions influence our thinking (and vice versa), he is still anchored in the cognitivist paradigm. Bødker is right: on page 11 Norman writes that thinking and emotions are both cognitive systems in our heads that process information.

For Bødker and for Boehner et al. (Boehner et al., 2005) and others, emotions, experiences and the attribution of meaning to things are important aspects shaping the nature of interaction with technologies, but they reject the cognitivist thesis that it is possible to understand and study their causes by “looking into the heads” of individuals. The opposition to cognitivism, and not only in HCI, claims that our psychological states are the result of a complex interconnection of the person, culture, society and also the place and time in which the individual finds themselves. Emotions, experiences, meaning-making and interaction can be understood as a dynamic process, culturally and socially constructed and lived (Boehner et al., 2005).

We can thus understand emotions like the meaning we attribute to the PET bottle. Can we, through the most scrupulous scientific analysis of the bottle’s material, discover that its meaning is environmental activism? No. Only when it is set into the wider context of culture and society does something like “environmental activism” begin to exist, and so it can also be the meaning of a PET bottle.

Similarly, emotions need to be understood as a story that unfolds in time and space. What people feel to be beautiful, or why people are jealous, is influenced by external factors, and so experiences and emotions have to be studied at the interface of the person, place, time, society and culture. That is, in context. One variable of context is still missing. And that is technologies and their influence on the human being. Present-day cognitive science, which explores theories other than cognitivist ones, offers a certain guide to this relationship. That is also why they are called post-cognitivist. And among other things they show us how fundamental a role technology plays in our acting and thinking.

Post-cognitivist theories

Post-cognitivist theories are, put simply, those theories of thought that explicitly set themselves against cognitivism in all the fields where cognitivism was the dominant approach. For HCI and UX, and for me personally, post-cognitivist theories are very interesting, because they show us that our relationship to tools and technologies is much closer and more intimate than we thought. I can already say now that the vision of the cyborg that we know from science fiction was not entirely fiction.

Embodied cognition

The theory of embodied cognition, following on from tacit knowledge, points out that our body plays an important role, above all precisely in tacit knowledge, and must be taken as an essential part of our thinking. For example, Eleanor Rosch writes in the book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience that embodied cognition means, first of all, that our thinking depends on the kinds of experience that come from the fact that we have a body with various bodily capacities. If we need a body to express a certain knowledge (for example, playing the piano), then it means that the cognitivist vision, that we have everything for thinking inside our heads, is wrong. Second, Rosch claims that our bodies are themselves embedded in a wider biological, psychological and cultural context. This is a much more controversial point, but one that has its advocates in other post-cognitivist theories: in extended and distributed cognition.

Extended, distributed cognition

These theories hold that our thinking seeps out into the external environment around us as well. How could that possibly be, and what would it actually mean that the environment is part of our cognitive system?

Let me ask you deliberately: “Who of you remembers the phone number of your partner? Of your mother, father or grandmother?” Why should you, after all? Our lives are complicated enough as it is, so if we can “outsource” part of our memory to smart devices such as the iPhone or iPad, we certainly will.

According to philosophers and psychologists such as Andy Clark, David Chalmers, Edwin Hutchins and others, we should take this relationship to technology seriously. The more we are surrounded by technologies, the more we offload our thinking onto smart devices. As the theorists and theories mentioned suggest, we should regard other people, technological artefacts and the environment around us as an extended and distributed system of our mind, which both helps and influences our thinking.

Lev Vygotsky and cultural-historical psychology

It may seem that the theories of extended and distributed cognition are the result of recent research, but as the HCI/UX researchers Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi show us in the book Acting with Technology Activity Theory and Interaction Design, one Soviet psychologist was already dealing with the influence of technology and of more general, everyday objects in the 1930s. His name was Lev Vygotsky, and he studied children’s psychological development and the learning process. He noticed that children and adults alike use various tools that at first serve as external aids for thinking. Gradually, however, people stop needing these tools, because, in Vygotsky’s words, and I apologise for the needlessly technical term, they have internalised the process. Which means that tools discipline, train and shape our thinking in a far from trivial way. Vygotsky counted among tools not only physical tools but also those he called psychological, or immaterial. Among these tools he counted language, mathematical notation and so on, that is, what is part of our culture.

Vygotsky moreover pointed out that our culture, the experience and the lived experiences of a certain society or group of people, are stored in physical and psychological tools alike.

In Vygotsky an interesting relationship appears between the human being (society) and tools (technology). This relationship goes both ways. People and society influence technologies, which seems obvious at first sight; but on the other hand technology influences us too, and fundamentally so. According to Vygotsky it influences our thinking and also how we learn new things from early childhood. Technology is an intermediary, a medium, that from childhood gives us access to our relationship with the world. Sometimes we learn what tools and technology enable us to do so well that internalisation takes place; a typical example is using our fingers for counting. Sometimes technology is indispensable, as in the case of a particle accelerator or a gravitational wave detector.

Vygotsky gives us a good starting point for realising the importance of the relationship between humans and technology. Of course, we will not rely on just one person. For one thing, we can look at research in media theory or the philosophy of technology, where earlier people like Marshall McLuhan, or at present the excellent philosopher of technology and design Peter-Paul Verbeek, argue that technology is not something that exists outside society but is an inseparable part of it, and, like Vygotsky, they argue that technology influences our acting and our thinking.

In the end there is no need to stay with theory: I think each of us has personal experience of how our life is influenced by present-day technologies that we no longer even notice, because they have become an ordinary part of our lives.

If we take seriously the idea that technology is an integral part of culture and society, then it means that current methods for studying context may not be sufficient if they do not focus on how technology influences us. What are the current contextual methods in design?

Participatory design and HCD, human-centred design: are they enough?

Participatory design

Participatory design was, and still is, the first systematic method of studying the wider environment of how people work. Participatory design began to be used and to spread in the 1970s in the Scandinavian countries. It was there, under governments of left-leaning political parties that fought for employees’ rights, that the atmosphere was right for company employees to become more than a number in large corporations. Designers began to collaborate with individual employees and other stakeholders. PD draws on their knowledge to design new systems and products. It makes sense: designers are experts in creative problem-solving and in listening to people; they are not experts in taxes or in growing potatoes.

And it is precisely employees who have worked for twenty years in a certain department who have a lot of experience and tacit knowledge of how things work or don’t work. Clearly, not every employee is a designer. The task of designers and researchers is therefore to obtain, through interviews and through observing employees in their real context doing their real work, suitable data for designing a new system. Co-design and collaboration between employees and designers went from a more radical left-wing politics striving for the emancipation of working life to the mainstream. What used to be a politically tinged agenda began to look like good practice and common sense. Collaborating with people who have a great deal of expert, albeit tacit, knowledge makes sense. Participatory design as a method originally took hold in the setting of work activities. But there is no reason not to use its methods and its view of design outside the workplace too.

Human-centred design

Another method of studying context from the human point of view is human-centred design. Its popularisation is owed to the excellent design studio IDEO, or, in the academic world, for example, to the d.school programme at Stanford University, where business, management and design are taught as an inseparable part of how to innovate.

HCD can be described, for example, as follows:

“In this case, designers strive to understand what the target group needs, what wishes and dreams it has, how it presents itself and what its typical behaviour is. Designers focused on human-centred design therefore first ask what the target group wishes for and needs, and only then how to realise its wishes technically, financially and organisationally.”

HCD frees itself from traditional design focused on the “product”, that is, on physical or digital objects, and focuses on the human being, on the wider context of their life, their needs, their problems. One of the most frequently invoked watchwords in HCD is “empathy”, because putting oneself in the shoes of individual people is essential to HCD. That is why HCD uses methods from sociology or anthropology, above all ethnographic research.

Based on what we have said in detail about the problems of cognitivism and about post-cognitivist theories, it is entirely right that HCD uses ethnographic and anthropological research to study context and obtain useful data for design. Moreover, many companies have found that by focusing on people and their needs they really can create better products and services.

My favourite example of how things turn out in design when human needs are not taken into account dates from 1924. It is an architectural plan to redesign the centre of Paris, proposed by the world-famous architect Le Corbusier. His plan, called the Radiant City, is a showcase of chilling, technicist and inhuman beauty. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker comments that this plan ignores the need for buildings on a scale closer to human dimensions, the need for greenery and so on. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s pupil and follower Oscar Niemeyer managed to use his teacher’s ideas for the design of the capital of Brazil. It is up to each of us to judge whether or not the centre of Paris should have looked like this.

Does human-centred design have any drawbacks? After all, it is oriented towards the human being. It explores people’s opinions and needs. On the basis of these, designers try to design products and services that will meet them. Paradoxically, however, this is also where its weaknesses lie. Orientation solely towards the human being means that, in studying context, we have left out or pushed into the background another powerful actor of our time, one that is unequivocally part of our lives: technology.

Technology as the other side of the coin of the human-machine relationship

In the age of ubiquitous computing and the internet of things, technologies are at every turn of our lives. The founder of UbiComp, Mark Weiser, wrote that the ideal state of computing will be reached when the technology around us becomes invisible. For Weiser, the goal of computers and technology was for them to be a quiet and invisible servant of humanity, extending our intelligence and intuition. Weiser also claimed that technologies should extend our unconscious. According to him, all of this will lead to technologies becoming so-called “calm technology”, creating calm and comfort without our being aware of what technology is doing in the background of our lives.

I agree with Mark Weiser that the evolutionary development of technology really was, and is, heading towards existing more in the background of our lives, without our having any idea of what it is doing. Indeed, the media and design theorist and sociologist Benjamin Bratton wrote the book The Stack in 2016, in which he comments on the invisibility of technology.

Bratton claims that, without our knowledge, something has formed in the background of our lives. It is a planetary, technological and, as Bratton stresses, completely unplanned megastructure, which he calls The Stack. Bratton writes that with the various kinds of computation and technology, from digitised electricity grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, the IPv6 address space, smart cities, the internet of things, automation, interfaces and sensors that extend our senses, something has happened. Instead of seeing these different technologies and their influence separately, Bratton proposes that we understand them as a single whole, a new computational platform or apparatus of our lives. This megastructure consists of six interconnected layers: Earth, Cloud, City, the Address layer, Interface and finally User. Each layer communicates with the others and is thus a component of a single whole. To some, this model may rightly recall the TCP/IP model of the OSI layers and protocols of the internet. And they will be right, because Bratton explicitly took inspiration from it. Instead of TCP/IP layers, however, Bratton states that The Stack consists of computational, that is, technological, social, human and physical layers.

This model, in which we as humans are only one of the layers, has far-reaching consequences for design, architecture, urbanism, but also for political decisions. Like every technology, it contains an influence on our lives that is both negative and positive. Whether one or the other prevails calls for further research.

Interface and UX design in the era of the Stack

For me as a UX designer, however, this planetary megastructure represents incredible potential. Let us notice that before the User layer Bratton mentions the Interface layer. In this case Bratton certainly does not mean only buttons, scrollbars, form fields and the like. For Bratton, the interface is something that mediates our relationship to all the layers of the Stack, to all technological platforms, infrastructures, devices, but also to other people. Since our human senses and cognitive abilities would never be able to perceive all of this, the interface is a figurative space where this enormous complexity of technological and social relations is reduced, compressed into something digestible for a human being. The interface is the place where the enormous potential of technological infrastructures and platforms is concretised into some form a human being can perceive. Suddenly, with buttons, levers, gestures and touches on a screen, we really can control all the other layers of that planetary moloch called the Stack.

For this reason I prefer the dictionary definition of interface, which says that an interface is in general a point where two or more systems, subjects, organisations etc. meet and interact. And in my view that is entirely right.

The Dutch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek and a whole philosophical current called postphenomenology hold that designing technologies and their interfaces is not primarily about how the surface of the interface itself looks; it is not primarily about which buttons we use or how certain colours affect us and so on. Verbeek and the others say that the interface of a technology is a gateway into today’s world, a gateway that markedly determines what relationship to the world we will have, for it is not a passive gateway. On the contrary, for postphenomenology the interface of a technology is something that actively shapes and influences our relationship to the world.

The following technologies can serve as classic real-world examples of these ideas:

• The invention of the microscope revealed to us the realm of the microscopic world, which markedly changed our view of the world
• The European particle accelerator at CERN revealed to us finer and smaller parts of the world, thanks to which we once again altered our conception of what the world is
• Last but not least, ultrasound now makes it possible to see unborn children, and on the basis of these images doctors can tell parents whether the child is healthy or, on the contrary, has such problems that it would be better for it not to be born. That is a decision we used to leave, so to speak, to the good Lord, whereas today, thanks to the interface of technology, these divine and ethical decisions rest on our shoulders

This is also why Verbeek is very interested in the ethics of technology design. If technology is a powerful and ubiquitous force of today’s information, networked and digital world, filled with the internet of things, smart devices and interfaces on every corner, then the designers of technologies have immense power to influence our lives.

In my opinion, it is thus now possible to sketch much more interesting definitions of UX design. The human being is only one layer in the megastructure of Bratton’s Stack. Or one node in a complex network of relations between culture, society, the human being and technology. If we want to design experiences by means of the interface of technology, it means creating a certain reduction of this complexity of relations and layers, creating a certain view of the world. In other words, UX design creates a relationship to the world. And the window onto this relationship is the interface.

Systemic design and UX design as tools of social and business innovation

How can UX design deal with such complexity, and what methods does it have for it? Recently, academic initiatives in Europe and the USA have come up with a possible answer to how designers can, indeed must, deal with the complexity of today’s world. It is a newly emerging field of design that integrates the principles of systems thinking and human-centred design. The field has been named Systemic design, which expresses one thing that is important for design: every design problem has to be thought about in the wider context of the whole system; one has to take into account and anticipate side effects at the social and economic level or at the level of the environment.

The impact on the environment in particular is an important topic nowadays, especially since it has become clear that our entire planet, in a way relatively similar to how Bratton defines it, is affected by human activity. The official term for the period in which all planetary systems are affected by humans is the word Anthropocene.

Not all side effects can be predicted far enough in advance. When Mark Zuckerberg was programming Facebook in his room, he did not think about his social network allegedly being used by Russian governmental and non-governmental organisations to influence political opinion and even elections in the USA.

To make it possible to grapple with complexity, systemic design has introduced into design a new method, GIGA-mapping, which helps designers visualise all the possible components and their mutual relationships in the “system” into which they are going to introduce some new design changes. GIGA-mapping provides a complex and rich picture of the real situation; it combines various kinds of media (image, graphics, photographs, text and so on); it enables designers to see, and to move from, a macroscopic view of the system to the microscopic detail of one of its parts; information and relevant data from various fields are visualised in it; and it serves as a tool for the final design synthesis, when designers create a solution.

Social and business innovation

Systemic design, GIGA-mapping and a systems view of the present in general make it possible to look into the future. Creativity and design solutions never arise in a vacuum. Creativity and design are, in a way, a new, fitting and functional combination of two or more parts that had until then existed separately.

Systemic design and UX design alike, if they look at the world systemically enough, can uncover potential social and business innovations precisely by combining disparate and hitherto separate elements, problems, solutions and so on. They will achieve this, however, only if designers are not merely passive elements of companies and large corporations but, on the contrary, proactive actors who seek out potential innovations. Designers are superbly equipped for this, for their cognitive skills and talent predispose them to find, in the chaos of the complexity of diverse relations, the right and fitting combinations that solve a given problem.

Humanitas Deventer

One of my favourite examples of UX design, one that still fascinates me and that looks at problems systemically, which made innovation possible across technologies, social problems and individual people, is the Humanitas Deventer project in the Netherlands. One of the Netherlands’ pressing problems is expensive housing together with an ageing population. Young students cannot afford even a sublet, while pensioners at least live in retirement homes but lead lonely lives. The entrepreneur and founder of the Humanitas Deventer project was aware of these problems, and although she had not studied at UMPRUM or any other design school, she was able, exactly like a designer, to think systemically and to connect two disparate and seemingly unrelated things.

Now Humanitas Deventer offers seniors affordable housing in a beautiful and pleasant environment. But that is not all. The project offers students free housing on the condition that during the week they look after and help the local seniors. The entrepreneur created a project that very creatively solves two social problems which, until then, neither the private nor the public sector had been able to solve.

Mindlab.dk

The Danish government decided to try experimenting with design at the level of several ministries. The result was the design incubator Mindlab.dk, owned by the Ministries of Industry, Employment and Education. Mindlab.dk uses the traditional design methods of participatory design, HCD and UX design to improve the running of the public administration and to ensure faster and smoother communication with citizens and the private sector. Among Mindlab’s main projects were teaching the public administration design methods of problem-solving and also a redesign of how the education system in Denmark now works.

The Ainonghui community in China

The Italian professor of design Ezio Manzini, in his book Design, When Everybody Designs with the subtitle An Introduction to Design for Social innovation, gives another example of how design thinking can work at the intersection of social, economic and business problems. He describes a community in one of China’s provinces where local farmers had trouble selling their produce. On the other hand, not far away there were many potential customers who could not buy food of organic quality anywhere. A group of designers decided to set up the Ainonghui project and community, which connects these two sides, educates farmers in marketing and consumers in why organic and local food is better. It also created a digital platform through which consumers and farmers can communicate.

Design for Europe

Design for Europe is a European Union project that supports design-led social and other innovation across Europe. At present the European Commission oversees the Europe 2020 Growth Strategy initiative, which sets aside grants in the order of tens of billions of euros for cooperation between the private and public sectors, and specifically for social innovation.

Cooperation between the private and public sectors for social innovation is design for the 21st century

Ezio Manzini writes in his book that while the twentieth century was dominated by the design of products and services, the 21st century will be different. Manzini claims that 21st-century design will be dominated by design for social innovation, in which the private and public sectors will have to cooperate so that problems in society can be solved, especially since the State as an institution, because of its inflexible practices, its bureaucracy and its utter absence of innovative thinking, is unable to think in (UX) design terms.

Projects like Humanitas Deventer, but also much better-known platforms such as Uber or Airbnb, are in my eyes symptoms that something in society is not working. But since Uber and Airbnb both reach into the core of how our society runs, by which I mean transport and housing, it was clear that their disruptive potential to replace the State to a certain extent would not be without problems.

Today’s world is global, digital, connected, constantly online. The intertwining of the public and the private is inevitable. The current affair surrounding Facebook is on the one hand a drastic violation of the right to privacy; on the other hand, from the point of view of the philosophy of technology and of the ethics of design, and not only of digital systems, it is fascinating. A use case of how technology does not stand outside society. Technology is society.

If the intertwining of the private and public sectors is inevitable for solving social and global problems, it would be good not to shy away from it but, on the contrary, to embrace this possibility as fully as we can. Design has always enjoyed a peculiar position between art and business, between serving “the people” and serving capital, but also between what belongs to the human being and what technology offers. My view is that we should not only accept these relationships but encourage them as much as possible. Not behind the scenes of parliamentary caucuses, but transparently and openly, as an innovative design strategy for the 21st century. Design has always had a little utopian thinking in it, because it quite deliberately did not look at how things are but at how things could or should be. It did not look at the existing world but at a possible world. But in order to be at least somewhat sure that new ideas and changes will not lead to something worse, we need certain methods and a mapping of how the present works. At a time when the relationship between technology and society is so intertwined that the human being is only one part, one component of a great whole, there is an exceptional potential to make fundamental use of digital technologies above all, and of their interfaces.

From my point of view, then, design, and above all UX design, can be defined as the creation of possible worlds.

I presented this text as a lecture on 18 April 2018 at the invitation of the Czech IT company inventi.