Eudaimonia and UX
Reflections on UX practice, “inner capitalism,” and the problem of professional ennui
What makes work meaningful? That question has vexed management theorists for decades, who have tried time and again to unlock a formula for making workers feel more energized and engaged, and encouraging us to (as the management cliché goes) “bring your whole selves to work.”
This question weighed heavily on my recent doctoral research with UX practitioners, in which I conducted a series of interviews and workshops with more than 150 UXers—to explore potential pathways to incorporating longer-term, societal perspectives into their work. Along the way, one theme surfaced again and again: A sense that UX practice is losing its way.
The practitioners I spoke with— designers, researchers, writers, and assorted other digital workers who fall under the broad rubric of “UX”—consistently expressed a striking degree of dissatisfaction and disillusionment with their work. Many spoke about how they felt their work was increasingly constrained by performative business pressures, in part due to the rise of Lean/Agile software development methods, the rise of big data, and a growing sense of discomfort with the destabilizing effects of the Internet on society at large.
These tensions also seem to have begotten a kind of collective inner conflict: a sense of deep unease, impinging on their sense of purpose and fulfillment at work. More recently, the widespread layoffs in the tech sector have undoubtedly intensified this seemingly widespread sense of professional ennui.
It was not always thus.
Back in the heady days of the early dotcom era, a kind of day-glo optimism prevailed. UX practitioners saw themselves at the vanguard of an exciting, emerging new field, mastering new technologies that would transform society for the better. Big change was afoot, and many newly minted UXers saw themselves as happy warriors of the working day.
Today, many of those hopes have given way to more dystopian and skeptical views. The profession has matured (some might say calcified) and business imperatives—towards growth, scale, and ruthless efficiency—have asserted themselves as the dominant paradigms under which UX practice now takes place. As a result, many practitioners report feeling dejected, dispirited, and ready to move on.
This sense of dissatisfaction manifests not just in their outward relationship with their jobs but, more importantly, in their inner lives as well. Many report lacking a sense of purpose and inner fulfillment, what Aristotle called eudaimonia.
Webster’s defines the term as follows:
noun. 1) Happiness; well-being. 2) Aristotelianism. Happiness as the result of an active life governed by reason.
According to a recent MIT study, most people find a sense of purpose and satisfaction in their professional lives in highly individual and idiosyncratic ways: One person’s tedium is another’s labor of love. Yet those who report finding meaning in their work seem to share a common trait: They perceive their work as “self-transcendent,” contributing to society in a way that matters to others more than it does to themselves.
Happiness and its discontent
All of these obstacles notwithstanding, UX practice is nonetheless ripe for transformation. UX practitioners — now numbering well into the hundreds of thousands — occupy positions of growing influence in organizations of all stripes. They are well-positioned to exert a deep and lasting impact on the lived experiences of billions of people. But in order to effect a broad-based shift towards addressing wider-angle societal problems, UX practice must move beyond the simplistic, deeply consumerist construct of “the user” — to embrace more systems-oriented perspectives. But for such a transition to take root, the process of change must start from within.
This intersection between the inner and outer dimensions of work forms a core component of my thesis: That by helping practitioners explore and articulate their inner values, they will discover a sense of agency and purpose that will enable them to start influencing organizational goals to align more closely with those values.
In recent decades, the science of human happiness has emerged as a field of study unto itself, perhaps nowhere more wholeheartedly embraced than the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, where the nation has for decades refined its Gross National Happiness framework (which has influenced a number of corporate employee engagement survey methodologies) draws a distinction between “affective happiness” — relating primarily to momentary feelings of pleasure — and “evaluative happiness,” which points towards more reflective, self-reported states of satisfaction that are more closely related with the individual’s perceived relationship to society at large (e.g., health, trust in institutions, and a sense of community).
In a similar vein, pioneering alternative economist E.F. Schumacher argues that the transition towards a more just, human-centered economy cannot happen through organizational planning and process improvements alone; rather, this transition can only take place when it passes through the transformative filter of individual human experience: through a process of inner reflection and transformation whose effects will ultimately reverberate across the wider, interdependent systems that connect us all.
“We shrink back from the truth if we believe that the destructive forces of the modern world can be ‘brought under control’ simply by mobilizing more resources,” he writes. “The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order” (Schumacher, 1979, 249–50).
UX practitioners, like any number of other people toiling in contemporary corporate environments, also have to contend with a subtler problem of mindset: the phenomenon of “inner capitalism.” When organizational goals revolve around profit and efficiency, these deeply capitalist imperatives inevitably seep into our own conceptions of self-worth. The performative demands of capitalism can foster an internalized sense of pressure that links our productivity and output with measures of self-worth. As the immortal Pogo put it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Challenging the inner capitalist
How then might we facilitate a process of change to help UX practitioners challenge these received values, and begin to reimagine the role of their practices in effecting social change? If practitioners can shift their perceptions of self-worth towards assessment of, say, personal well-being and societal outcomes — alongside traditional measures of productivity — they may be able to help influence wider organizational measurement frameworks around employee engagement, retention, and impact.
Meadows ranks mindset or paradigm as the single most powerful leverage point for change in a system. “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system … but there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond” (Meadows, 2008, 163).
As proponents of human-centered design processes, UX practitioners would seem uniquely suited to apply such a lens to their own work: to identify the strictures and mitigating forces that prevent them from finding meaning in their own work, and to consider how to design organizational systems and processes that yield improvements in their perceptions of professional satisfaction and lead to a closer alignment of their work with their professed values.
Moreover, the potential influence of UX practitioners in a post-capitalist society should make them uniquely well-suited to take on a role as agents of change within commercial enterprises. But the nature of UX practice itself — taking place as it does in a highly privileged professional setting — may also militate directly against this transformation.
How, then, might the dominant organizational paradigm of measurement be employed to good effect: to explore how shifts in UX practitioner mindset might foster meaningful engagement and a longer-term impact on the shifting of corporate goal-setting processes? Most major corporations now run regular employee engagement programs, to assess employees’ self-reported quality of life, confidence in management, and likelihood to stay at the company. These metrics provide important tools for employers to assess the collective health of their organizations and identify focus areas to help improve employee engagement and retention.
Transition Design theorist Gideon Kossoff points to Max-Neef’s matrix of needs and satisfiers, a model of human motivations and desires that bears some resemblance to the better-known Masloff hierarchy but features a level of nuance that seems far more actionable for working designers.
Max-Neef’s model proposes a classification of satisfiers that all human societies rely on for addressing these fundamental needs. Applying this lens, it is clear how much of contemporary interaction design work takes place at the base levels of subsistence (buying and selling), participation (exchanging social signals), and protection (ensuring security and privacy), while higher-level needs such as understanding, identity, freedom, and leisure — let alone transcendence — go largely unaddressed.
Moving beyond problems and solutions
How then might UX practitioners start to address these higher-order needs? Just as transitions in design practice may necessitate decentering the satisfaction of individual user needs in product planning processes, so too it may be necessary to consider decentering the designer as well — to create more fluid, less deterministic pathways within a given system.
What might such a transition look like in practice? John Keats famously celebrated the virtues of “negative capability,” that elusive state of being “when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” An irritable reaching after fact and reason seems to have become a chief preoccupation of UX practice in recent years: the urge to produce results, demonstrate ROI, and ultimately justify the designer’s existence (and paycheck). This orientation towards measurable outcomes tends to beget a lot of short-term thinking, limiting the capacity of designers to factor in the social, cultural, and environmental considerations that could broaden and deepen the impact of their work.
How might UX practitioners combat this tendency? Anne-Laure le Cunff offers a useful prescription for incorporating negative capability into one’s work — and battling the fundamental arrogance that can come from an overly deterministic approach — by embracing a set of inner practices including:
- Embracing ignorance
- Suspending judgment
- Sitting with doubts
- Questioning assumptions
- Revisiting ideas
“Through this process,” she argues, “we can connect deeper with ourselves, with each other, and with the world. (Le Cunff, 2022).
Such a shift in posture might feel inherently uncomfortable to practitioners accustomed to working in business environments that place a high premium on bold, decisive action and measurable outcomes. But such an open-minded, reflective, humble mindset aligns well with the generative, exploratory nature of strategic UX practices.
One useful reference point comes from Chia and Holt, whose Strategy Without Design (2009) makes a provocative argument for a new approach to strategic planning: one not driven by a desire for “spectacular strategic interventions,” as the authors put it, but rather evolving through a nuanced process of inner reflection.
Grounding their argument in the Greek notion of metis, a state of mind that demands “alertness, sensitivity and a peculiar disposition,” they advocate for a disciplined, spacious practice of observing, staying open, and seeking understanding rather than charging headlong into action. Transformation, they argue, happens only through a process of “tireless continuity and pervasiveness, and that is what makes it eventually effective. Transformation, because it is continuous and operates at a mundane everyday level, normally passes unnoticed. The skills and knowledge are absorbed unconsciously” (Chi and Holt, 1992).
In a similar vein, Kees Dorst’s landmark book Frame Innovation (2015) posits an approach to problem-solving rooted in what he calls “design abduction” — or approaching a problem without a particular process or method in mind. Dorst cautions against the fetishization of process, or a reliance on “fossilized frames” that tend to beget bureaucratic, institutionalized approaches to problem-solving. For Dorst, reframing is the key to design thinking. Quoting Einstein, he writes, “A problem can never be solved from the context in which it arose.” Instead, “this means moving away from problems and solutions.”
As long as we continue to speak in terms of clear-cut problems and solutions, we remain in the rationalist culture of idealized linear engineering design, and afford it ‘remarkable power,’ as we cover our creative skins with managerial masks.” (Dorst, 2015, 19). It is therefore the job of the designer (or design researcher) to question assumptions and to explore new discourses and themes as a means to reframe problem spaces. He lays out a nine-step process for doing so, deeply rooted in qualitative research methods — including ethnographic fieldwork, secondary research, and trend analysis — to help designers shift their perspectives on a particular problem space to open up new lines of inquiry. The practice of direct observation and a posture of openness (or negative capability) form the backbone of this approach.
Business theorists Peter Simpson and Robert French have explored the application of Keats’ notion of negative capability to the practice of business management, formulating a powerful critique of business leaders’ well-known tendency to charge into action. “Negative Capability is the ability to resist dispersing into inappropriate knowing and action,” they write. Instead, they argue that business leaders should strive to cultivate a capacity for operating at the “edge between knowing and not knowing” (Simpson and French, 2006). In an increasingly mechanized world, they write, “the active and the technical dominate over the passive and the humane.”
The pressures of “performativity” are wreaking widespread havoc on families, institutions, the environment, and other complex systems that humans are barely beginning to understand. Furthermore, the values of speed, efficiency, and profit-making are no longer as self-evident as they might once have seemed. “In such an environment,” Simpson and French wonder, “how is one to attribute value to low status aspects of behaviours such as waiting, patience, passivity, observing, illusion, imagination, detachment, disinterest, desire, trust, withdrawing, tempering, adapting, indifference, humility?”
Charting a path forward
The literature of meaningful work points the way towards opportunities for UX practitioners to engage more deeply in a process of inner-directed inquiry into their own values, posture and mindset. By interrogating their own values, identifying obstacles to realizing those values at work, and considering how shifts in posture and mindset might enable them to reorient their work practices, UX practitioners may yet discover a heretofore unrecognized level of agency in their work.
The opportunity to redirect UX practices towards more regenerative ways of working seems to sit at the intersection of several overlapping problem spaces: the identification and alignment of internal values with outer work goals; the reorientation of design practice away from “heroic” and productive modes of working and towards more co-creative, facilitative modes of engagement; and finally, in reckoning with the European heritage of universalism and cultural imperialism that is inherent in the heritage of contemporary UX design practices (more to come on this in a future installment).
Engaging with these inner dimensions of work isn’t easy, but it may provide a starting point for enabling UX practitioners to begin effecting change in their work lives — by recognizing their agency as actors with real power to influence the trajectory of complex systems. Such a process may also enable them to recognize the ways in which they may have internalized capitalist values, and begin to interrogate and activate their values at work in ways that lead to more fundamentally regenerative ways of working.
Previously: Regenerative UX | Next: Cybernetics and You
