Design has a granularity issue
Why we need to move towards a new design philosophy & practice.
Hi, Kevin here.
I often talk about design –and most of its practices, to which, subsequently, UX is part of– as going further than the individualistic understanding/vision it has been framed into, this “personal-level experience”.
But in practice, User Experience Design (UXD) and its parent approach Human-Centered Design (HCD), is hardly capable of reflecting on an entire population, its set of shared socio-cultural practices within an ecological landscape [1], and this has become ever more problematic.
UX design and other corollary practices, like Product design, Service design, etc. have all the same issue: they are heavily focused on both the products/services then the individual characteristics of their users (their brains, needs, preferences, etc) as core fundamental assumptions. These are assumption-based practices.
Part of the issue stems from, counter-intuitively, its origins (Ergonomics, HMI) [2] and its unequal mingling with some cognitive psychology knowledge, and with it, a tendency to bring everything to the brain –but not only. Its roots in engineering and influence of business management heavily oriented the design practice towards a problem-solution paradigm. Furthermore, the datafication of our life, as a necessary solution-enabler, permitted an unprecedented shift in value extraction for businesses [3]. The personalisation of experiences in modern products and services is less about you as a human being than it is about the dividuation of certain characteristics of your personhood, in its extractive form, and its alienation [4].
Design practices are rendered myopic –or to the very least, incapable to adjust– to such dynamics, which the reinforcing of individuation (and dividuation through value extraction) only participate in increasing inequalities, injustices, polarisation, lack of belonging, etc.
A philosophical & practical critique: Understanding the issue
We need to explain a few things on the critique made here, before moving forward. For the sake of the argument I’m simplifying a few core concepts here. I’m also purposefully putting UX, Product and Service Design in the same basket for reasons which will become apparent below.
User experience (UX) design is focused on understanding the users, and users are defined by the very interfaces they use. The product or service is a prerequisite intermediary to that end as the conveyor of said interfaces.
The interface here has to be understood as an explicit, hard, tangible object (or constraint) –and due to UX origin’s tightly coupled to computing tech, it is most likely a digital (graphical) interface (UI). Therefore, without tangible interfaces –meaning without products and services– there are no clearly defined users.
Users are not necessarily humans –although it is generally assumed to be the case– and they have to be using the interface in order to achieve goals.
Goals are defined as explicit desired end states, and tasks are merely means to reach such states. Thus, it is believed that their maximization is desirable.
Note: while I’m happy if you disagree with me on definitions, please note these are considered largely shared beliefs in the field.
This unit of analysis is actually dehumanizing: even when defined as human, a user is not really a complete being, not even a living being, but merely an entity reduced to selfish and rational motivations. It has been suggested for some time now to move away from “users” towards “people”, but this only exacerbates further the ontological-epistemological tension baked in the field’s very axioms: the interface, the product, the service, is the real underlying layer of interpretation that matter and this acts as a great filter.
If we add that most products and services are the visible apparatus of, the materialisation of, business models, which are still mainly defined by their strict transactional aspect of the value exchange between “rational agents” on a market, and you end up with an even narrower and skewed understanding of said “people”.
Hence, UX, Product and Service design practices focus heavily on individualistic values within a problem-solution paradigm, further reinforcing them. People’s goals and preferences are sorted, homogenised and generalised to much simpler characters (e.g. persona), removing people, at least partially, some form of their meaning attribution, interpretation and agency in their own context.
On the other hand, most digital experiences ask people for their unique and exclusive attention, mandating intrusive behaviours, while providing an inequality class-based experience –the push for neo-feudalist and especially anarcho-capitalist ideals in recent years is a continuation of such dynamics, enabled by a process towards decentralisation. Here, the notion of “personalisation” (of experience) is believed to be the holy grail of experience only because it maximizes these dynamics. And AI will certainly play a role in further exacerbating them.
All of this is the very definition of the concept of “dividuation” [4] which G. Deleuze talks about in his work on “Societies of Control”, exemplified.
I’m not saying that nothing is done to mitigate the issue, but when it is, it’s treated as extra things to do rather than the default modus operandi.
A social critique: Design practices are memetic engines
UX design is, for better or for worse, tightly coupled with tech and, despite all good intentions, willingly perpetuates its worst tendencies.
“Tech” here is not just any “technology” but an extension of globalisation of corporate and modern capitalistic values, and as such, it doesn’t care about people and their environment, it cares about itself as a system of power. To an extent, this system (disdains?) dislikes the human (and more-than-human) condition as it is a hindrance to its “ideal fulfilment”, marked by a constant acceleration towards more of itself –and therefore, the processus of exploitation, objectification, exclusion, reduction, and removal of said humans (and non-humans) is a feature of such a system, not a bug.
This is not a dystopian prediction nor a personal judgement, rather a description of dynamics at play. Design practices operate in a special role in this, the one of memetic engines [5], of self-replication of the very cultural markers of the system by copy, alteration/mutation and recombination. To function, this requires a lot of diversity and, as such, design practices are in a perpetual state of tension –which is, ultimately, a good thing.
This means that, on one hand, we indeed participate in its continuation but, on the other hand, we have opportunities to inject change. Adaptive systems are not monolithic and immutable, but rather always evolving as their initial conditions change overtime.
Design is social. Design creates social objects.
For several years, I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about Deleuze & Guattari’s work on Assemblage Theory [6] [7] and Schizoanalysis [8], its relationship with the study of complex adaptive systems [9] in the context of human social systems and how this can be translated to design.
The study of human social systems is the domain of Sociology [10], which is the study of people and their ecologies at the level of societies. All of which are extremely relevant to design (and designers) but also to innovation practitioners, as it equips them with means to make sense and act according to a broader understanding of the landscape they are intervening in.
The impact of Deleuze & Guattari (and others like Latour) on social sciences, combined with the feminist movements, the development of the interdisciplinary field of Complexity Sciences [11], and the inclusion of other living forms in the face of climate change and ecological collapse led in recent years to a new broad field of contemporary philosophy called New Materialism (see here [12] and here [13]). See below the New Materialism key approaches.
Many of the themes and topics I discussed in my exploration of Solarpunk [14] [15] are in fact coming from (or at least, heavily connected to) this field and philosophy, which I definitely feel closer to than the Solarpunk movement [16]. Don’t get me wrong, this is an interesting movement to observe and follow, but adopting its views brings its own set of issues and is not a prerequisite to adhering to some of the ideas and principles.
Anyway, why is this relevant? Well, as I entertained earlier, I’ve come to critically think that design practices have a granularity issue: a focus on the solution (product and service) and a focus on the individual as unit of analysis and understanding.
New Materialisms: Key Approaches
Source: Deborah Lupton 2019, New Materialisms: Key Approaches
Find more resources on the interdisciplinary field of New Materialism in this compilation:
Sociology (new materialism)
Ideas: What can bodies do? All matter has an agential capacity to affect — ‘we need to explore relations’ capacities when assembled together and intra-acting’ — affects are ‘the engines of assemblages, altering capacities’ — using empirical data to identify affect-economies and relations and what capacities are generated and the affects producing these capacities — can identify lists of human-nonhuman relations forming assemblages from interview data — affects can have negative consequences for capacities (‘constraining affects’) (Fox & Bale). Retheorising power and resistance — resistance as continuing process — importance of acknowledging materiality and material forces, agency of things — no structures of power, just events that are emergent and dynamic.
Key researchers: Fox and Alldred, Duff, Fullagar
Key theorists: Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Barad, Braidotti, Latour
Indigenous materialisms
Ideas: Identifies the antecedents of new materialism in indigenous worldviews. E.g. the Indigenous Australian concept of Country as ‘a living and life-giving nexus of energy-matter’ (Ravenscroft) or the Inuit concept of climate as the vital breath of life and of knowing for humans and others (Todd). The importance of sensory relational connections and atmospheres that are more-than-representational between humans and other phenomena.
Key researchers: Tallbear, Todd, Kukutai and Taylor, Bird Rose, Cariou, Roziek, Ravenscroft
Key theorists: –
Environmental feminism, material ecocriticism, Anthropocene feminisms, environmental materialism
Ideas: focuses on the nature-culture divide and the material agencies that are part of environmental systems and the Anthropocene. Attempts to understand the intersections and relations of humans and nonhumans in ecologies. Works towards ‘a posthuman environmental ethics’ (Alaimo) and ‘a better understanding of humans’ kinship with nonhumans. ‘Posthumous life’ (Weinstein & Colebrook). Recognises indigenous knowledges and philosophies of nature. Sees materials and humans as ‘storied matter’: matter as ‘a site of narrativity’ (Iovino and Opperman).
Key researchers: Colebrook, Alaimo, Wilson, Morton, Plumwood, Kirksey, Malone, Kirby
Key theorists: Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Barad, Haraway, Braidotti, Grosz
Education — gender and posthuman performativity
Ideas: Focuses on assemblages of sexuality/bodies/gender (including digital images such as selfies) and spacetime-matterings in education contexts. What are the affective intensities and the larger apparatuses of knowledge-making at work? (e.g. ideas about and material arrangements concerning girls’ and women’s sexuality and how they should act and look) — intra-activity/affect — activities directed at establishing boundaries.
Using examples from data that have affective force and resonance with the researchers.
Key researchers: Ringose, Renold, Coleman, Osgood, Blaise, Davies
Key theorists: Barad, Braidotti, Deleuze, Guattari, Butler, Foucault, Latour
Diffraction theory, post-qualitative inquiry
Ideas: Focuses on diffraction theory and method. Reading theory diffractively — engagements with different disciplines to make new theories — reading insights through one another. Develops a method of diffractive analysis of data — looks at what data do rather than what they mean. Analysing data by tracing affective intensities in their empirical contexts — what do affective forces ‘do’? How does matter make itself felt? — look for the agential cuts, where meaning is made from the constantly changing choices of meaning — reading the data with theory after coding — ‘renewed’ rather than ‘new’ materialisms (Coole and Frost) — ‘plugging’ theory and data into each other — diffractive analysis.
Key researchers: Davies, Lenz-Taguchi, Mazzei, Jackson, Hicke-Moody, Ivinson, Lather, Coole, Frost, van der Tuin, Gullion, Fullagar
Key theorists: Foucault, Barad, Haraway, Deleuze, Guattari, Butler
Vital materialism
Ideas: The power, vibrancy and enchantment of more-than-human assemblages (‘the force of things’ and ‘thing-power’ — Bennett) — we are all compost (Haraway) — post-Anthropocene politics. Critical life studies. Animacies.
Key researchers: Coole, Frost, Colebrook, Chen
Key theorists: Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Bennett, Haraway, Braidotti, Merleau-Ponty, Latour, Agamben
Education — materiality and enactment theorising
Ideas: Builds on Ball’s policy enactment/implementation work (Foucauldian) by incorporating greater emphasis on materiality and actor-networks and dynamic nature of assemblages and enactments (‘becoming’) — policy as performative agent/object that creates material effects — policy takes form in practices, territoralising and de/re-territoralising — lines of flight — policy assemblages as ‘messy objects’/micro-negotiations of policy.
Key researchers: Mulcahy, Fenwick and Edwards
Key theorists: Foucault, Deleuze, Latour, Mol, Law, Singleton
Anthropology of material culture
Ideas: Focuses on making, doing, skills, articulation, becoming, moving through the world, creativity, cultural improvisation, incorporation of objects, the life of objects — decay, reinvigoration, ‘mutable things’ (DeSilvey).
Key researchers: Inghold, Hallam, DeSilvey, Edensor
Key theorists: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Barad, Bennett, Appadurai, Douglas, Bourdieu
Posthuman archaeology/museum studies
Ideas: Puts things at centre: how things connect with other things and with humans. Focuses on the properties of materials, their social lives and networks of things. Entanglement analysis — making ‘tanglegrams’ (Hodder and Mol). ‘Symmetrical archaeology’ — humans emerge from their relationships with things (Oleson).
Key researchers: Hodder, Oleson, Conneller, Alberti, Jones
Key theorists: Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, Latour, Haraway, Bennett
Cultural geography/anthropology — sensory ethnography/affective atmospheres/non-representational methodologies
Ideas: Focuses on the interaction between the senses, embodied habits, emotions and engagement with the more-than-human world.
Key researchers: Pink, Howes, Classen, Bissell, Vannini, Lorimer, Dowling
Key theorists: Haraway, Meleau-Ponty, Thrift, Latour, Law, Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, Marcus, Clifford
Design anthropology/sociology and arts-based practice
Ideas: Focuses on use of design and art methods for inspiring creative, speculative and imaginative thinking about presents and futures — generating more-than-representational artefacts.
Key researchers: Michael, Gaver, Suchman, Dunne & Raby, Pink, Hickey-Moody, Pink, RC Smith, Otto
Key theorists: Marcus, Latour, Heidegger, Stengers, Whitehead, Serres, Law
Information systems/organisation studies/management studies — sociomaterialism
Ideas: Focuses on the relational ontologies of digitised information systems and organisations (data, archives, libraries, management and other infrastructures). Iterative material-discursive performances — entanglements — of assemblages of people, work, organisations and technologies. Builds on the sociology of scientific knowledge. ‘The mangle of practice’ — trajectories and ‘dances’ of human and material agency (Pickering).
Key researchers: Orlikowsky, Scott, Pickering, Wagner
Key theorists: Latour, Callon, Law, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Barad, Ihde
Object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism
(NB: often grouped with new materialism, but actually quite different — included here for sake of comparison)
Ideas: Focuses on the ontologies of objects: there is more to objects than humans’ knowledges and understandings of them. Monism (flat ontologies). Objects can rely on and relate to each other, but these reliances do not exhaust their capacities. There is a reality of objects beyond human perception. What a thing is is more interesting than what it does. Sees objects as independent from other objects (the ‘thing-in-itself’, ‘objects, not actors’, ‘immaterialism, not materialism’ [Harmon]). Less interested in relations or epistemologies. Privileges form over matter.
Key researchers: Harman, Bogost, Bryant, Morton
Key theorists: Whitehead, Latour, Heidegger, Husserl
Design aims at change. But change isn’t grounded in the individual.
What I am suggesting here is that design, and especially UX/Product/Service design need to move from practices heavily focused on the solution, the individual and purely transactional interactions between the two, and move towards more sociological and ecological considerations.
Rather than focusing in characterising individuals by generalising them to personas and archetypes, we should do so with the very places they inhabit, their environment, the flux, interactions, and both positive & negative constraints which happen within them. Starting from the context to derive what’s possible and what’s not, to identify patterns.
In How to change a culture: Lessons from NUMMI, John Shook describes how they changed the Culture at a joint General Motors/Toyota manufacturing plant [17], back at the time Lean Manufacturing practices started to be imported from Japan.
What my NUMMI experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave — what they do. Those of us trying to change our organizations’ culture need to define the things we want to do, the ways we want to behave and want each other to behave, to provide training and then to do what is necessary to reinforce those behaviors. The culture will change as a result.
This is what is meant by, “It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting.” […]
If we as management want people to be successful, to find problems and to make improvements, we have the obligation to provide the means to do so.
When NUMMI was being formed, though, some of our GM colleagues questioned the wisdom of trying to install andon there. “You intend to give these workers the right to stop the line?” they asked. Toyota’s answer: “No, we intend to give them the obligation to stop it — whenever they find a problem.”
– John Shook 2010, “How to change a culture: Lessons from NUMMI”
One might read a confirmation that, indeed, change happened through individuals, but this is anything but.
What Shook is pointing out is that people had to first change what they do to change how they think and what they value as a group, and to do so they needed an environment with affordances to enable new behaviours. Much like more lanes on a highway afford more traffic (induced demand), environmental constrains -artificial or not- increase the likelihood of certain behaviours through their affordance.
Change happen at the interaction level, the connective tissue between all the individuals –or rather, the actant– their environment and the objects that composes it [18] [19] (see also the Actor-Network Theory [20]).
Now, that is not to say individuals have no agency. On the contrary, they have agency and autonomy, but within both enabling and limiting constraints. Every individual has a different threshold at which enough environmental constraint (built environment, social pressure, etc.) will be effective at changing their perceptions, behaviours, and narratives (see Mark Granovetter’s work on “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior” [21] [22]).
Design + Sociology
Design sociology is different in that it looks at understanding people through their environment and the stories they tell about it as a starting point. The objects created through design (products, services, etc.) are therefore understood and analysed as catalysts for social interactions and social change, rather than a neatly isolated single-point solution.
Design Sociology is a term coined by Deborah Lupton, Sociologist and professor at UNSW Sydney, and developed in her 2017 review essay titled “Towards design sociology” [23]. The approach is proposed as a meeting point between design research and sociocultural research, which, as Lupton explains, hardly ever crossed before. As she points out in the introduction:
“Many design researchers have become progressively open to incorporating sociological and anthropological concepts and theories in their work. Sociocultural research drawing on design methods has also been developing over the past few years.” — Lupton 2017, Towards design sociology
Lupton’s proposed approach is three folds [23]:
- One, it can focus inward to design, that is, understanding the “social worlds and material practices of designers” from a sociological perspective.
- Second, it can involve “conducting sociological research through design”.
- Lastly, design sociology offers a transdisciplinary collaboration between sociology and design disciplines, enriching them both.
Although Lupton’s work is clearly directed at the sociological research discipline as a means to enrich its research practices, this has the potential to address our granularity issue, and even cover some of my Solarpunk-inspired design principles [14] –or rather New Materialism-inspired principles:
- ✊ Design principle #4: Design for human and non-human autonomy
- ✨ Design principle #5: Design within multi-world-views
Indeed, world-views are not simply intrapersonal, meaning it is not defined by what a specific individual believes, experienced, and behaves (that would be a granularity issue), but, as the story of Zapatistas suggests (see “‘Worlds within worlds’ and the need for multi-ontological approaches” [14]), they are instead a set of shared narratives and sub-cultures which are permeable-enough to hold and porous-enough to co-exist within various others.
Design sociology works around two core concepts:
- Design sociology creates cultural probes as a means to generate shared understanding of a cultural landscape;
- Design sociology relies on participatory design methods to maximize the inclusivity and diversity of the approach.
Cultural probes is a technique that is used as a means of gathering inspirational data about people’s lives, values and thoughts. The probes are “small packages that can include any sort of artifact (like a map, postcard, camera or diary) along with evocative tasks, which are given to participants to allow them to record specific events, feelings or interactions.” [24]
Cultural probes aren’t new to design practices, on the contrary, and if you have a HCI or interaction design degree you might already be somewhat familiar with this approach, sometimes under the label “design probes” [25] [26] [27] . It seems, however, this has become a lost practice in the current professional UX design landscape.
Participatory design methods are nothing new either and has been largely developed in the field of social design practices, a largely (but not limited to) European movement. There is a very real and interesting tention between a social design and a more techno-solutionist design approach that characterises the current UX design field:
Published in 1971, designer Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World introduced critiques ostensibly about consumption and green politics. […] as summarized by Whiteley, there was no justification for designing trivial and stylish consumer items for the affluent of the advantaged countries, when the majority of humankind was living below subsistence level” […]
Design is for the most part still complicit with constructing the social for good or ill, and while designers may attempt to address manifold issues of inclusion and representation as these unfold in the “real world,” they are part of complex, technocentric, and market-driven systems of governance and production that typically streamline and reduce the complexity of social issues in representations, in what is still broadly perceived as a process of reductive “problem-solving.” — Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice, Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research 2022 [28]
In Lupton’s Design Sociology, “design” is in act of probing itself. Design serves to generate and capture qualitative and meaningful relationships, for and by participants: design here is a form of public ethnography. It is framed, after all, from a sociological perspective –and this is a good thing. Design can and should be used to create shared understanding rather than only seek validation.
From a design perspective, however, this is seems only half the path towards catalysing change –I‘ll address this point later.
In the 2022 book “What People Leave Behind — Marks, Traces, Footprints and their Relevance to Knowledge Society” [29] published on Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, part 1, chapter 3 “Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice” [28] discusses the limitations of cultural probes in social design practices:
Contemporary ideas of social design utilize a broader mandate for change through participatory approaches and collective outcomes in addition to market objectives (Armstrong et al., 2014: 15). […]
However, designers (as a worst-case example) often choose a particular method from the book to use as a quick exercise with potential “users” to lend validity to a design proposal. This “toolbox mentality” stems from an acceleration and acceptance of instrumentalist values that have become the core of design, business, and education to assert control in response to increasing conflicts in social and cultural realms. Consequently, design interventions and modernist-inspired solution finding continue to be critiqued as abstracting and devaluing lived, material experiences, instrumentalizing community knowledge, and compromising people’s agency while potentially exacerbating complex problems (Escobar, 2018). […]
This calls for an open, explicit negotiation of the relationship between researcher and participants, starting from a recognition that both parties carry their own cultural, social, professional perspectives and interests and, subsequently, that the outcomes of the research process reflect such a negotiation of cultures and intentions (Palaganas et al., 2017).
Ezio Manzini […] discusses the process of “sensemaking” to eventual “problem-solving” as a co-design process of catalyzing existing context-specific knowledge in communities. — Rethinking Cultural Probes in Community Research and Design as Ethnographic Practice, Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, 2022 [28]
In short, the medium is the message, and the act of choosing the medium of expression of one’s lived experience is often determined by the motivations of the one in charge of collecting the data. This can remove or limit the mediation of different interpretations. Designers often seek validation rather than true sense-making through navigating different world-views, forcing interpretation to be reduced to pre-established tacit assumptions (the tool-box mindset).
Something quite interesting when we look at collective meaning creation is that it is linked to the notion of narratives (semiotics). Narrative-building works on the underlying cultural and tacit understanding of one’s environment and its meaning attribution. This means, narratives are emergent cultural objects which can reveal environmental patterns and constraints.
Using narrative research mixed methods, such as Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) [29], developed by Cynthia F. Kurtz, we can blend qualitative and quantitative data, overcoming the limitations of cultural probes (see figure 1 and 2).
On a side note, my research, together with Krasi Bozhinkova and Daiana Zavate, on “The Multi-Ocean Strategy Framework” [30] was intended to directly work with narratives as a means to explore adjacent spaces (innovation). Although it is limited as a fixed canva, in the form of a board game, it allows people to use abstractions to inject their own meaning and connect various perspectives, and surface weak signals.
Conclusion: Towards a more social UX design practice
Here I want to address the missing part. As said, design aims at creating change. Building knowledge and understanding can be part of design but is not sufficient to serve this purpose. So what could a more social design UX practice looks like?
Here‘s my humble attempt at consolidating an approach (Social Experience Design?):
Probing
- Collecting narratives
- Cultural/design probing
Sense-making
- Pattern identification: assemblages & metaphors
Futuring
- Design fiction
Scaffolding
- Entangled Trios
- Adjacent prototyping
Evaluating
- Narrative-based evaluation (change in narratives over time)
Thanks for reading!
This is a long time exploration on my side of various topics of interest to me. This might sound theorical –and perhaps, it is– but I always try to apply my thoughts as best as I can in my work and/or through the Design & Critical Thinking community. Feedbacks, comments and criticisms are more than welcomed!
Kevin
