From human-centred design to designer-as-human
There’s no view from nowhere: embracing our humanity as design expertise.
Last week, I listened to Keke Palmer’s podcast episode called Couple’s Therapy, Narcissism, and Open Relationships with Dr. Orna Guralnik. When Dr. Orna went off about the evolution of psychotherapy, I couldn’t help but say to myself, ‘this is what design needs.’
While I’m a firm believer in therapy, I’m even more passionate about connecting themes from diverse disciplines — like therapy — to design thinking. My thesis last year was entitled Maybe We’re Creative: What I Learned about Co-creation in Design by Dancing with My Dad. When I’m designing, which is almost always, I bring my perspectives from business, social service work, community arts, and other lived experiences, like dance, into my practice. These perspectives don’t just inform my work; they expand it.
Feeling the connections between the experiences that shape how I practice design comes as naturally as breathing to me. This is also why existing in the domain can sometimes feel incredibly frustrating.
In Design Journeys Through Complex Systems, Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael (2022) write,
“Designers, social innovators, and business leaders are now called to address transformational challenges for which we have no relevant academic or practice training… these challenges are fascinating, but not quite welcome.”
The challenges we’re facing have only become more complex since 2022. However, I’d argue that we have always had relevant training; we just aren’t taught to look inward to find it, at least not in traditional institutional spaces.
Relevant training is everywhere. Yet, I’m often met with resistance when I suggest designers integrate knowledge from outside traditional design methodologies, specifically our lived experiences. I wonder if this resistance might come from the fear of losing our expert status, of being taken off of our design pedestals, when we decentralize expertise in this way. Scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, also argues that dominant design practices reinforce existing hierarchies of knowledge and advocates for the redistribution of power in her work.
My approach is aligned with work in design justice and participatory design, focusing on collaborative meaning-making. By embracing this approach, we move beyond extractive design practices and towards co-creation, where a range of knowledge can be shared and valued rather than singularly imposed. All of this might sound similar to the verbiage around human-centred design, but the gap I’m witnessing isn’t in verbiage, it’s in practice and applicagtion. Designers’ are really good at talking about inclusive theories but in application and follow-through we, as a discipline, still uphold traditional, extractive, designer-as-expert foundations underneath the tools we use.
Similarly, Lilly Irani, in her critique of human-centred design, notes that though there is an increasing emphasis on empathy in design practice, human-centred design still privileges the designer as the central “problem solver” and the participants are assigned roles such as “consumers”. A “human-centred appraoch” is insufficient when the basis of the approach has not been reorganized and power re-distributed. Whether in consulting or teaching, despite efforts towards participatory research and co-design, ultimately, designers tend to defer to “expert” tools almost exclusively to solve complex problems, desiring clear-cut answers — answers they can trust. Furthermore, lately, trust has been increasingly placed in AI. But the question remains: what are we sacrificing when we outsource our inquiries to systems that, by design, distance us from ourselves?
Trust, design, and the search for answers
In the On Being episode On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose, Latanya Sweeney, founder of Harvard’s Public Interest Tech Lab, asks:
“Our need for a north star around truth is just fundamental to democracy. We can’t really survive if all of us come to a table with completely different belief systems and [are] not even able to find a common fact that we agree on…how do we build trust at scale?”
Individual desires for universal truths and the reality of our mixed lived experiences will constantly be at odds and challenge designers everywhere. We often assume trust should be placed in external systems — research methods, industry best practices, and AI-generated insights to simplify and neatly categorize those mixed lived experiences. However, I’ve noticed that using current research methods and tools facilitates an erasure of complexity more than a simplification or generalization attempting to capture complexity. But I find collectively, designer or otherwise, our most harmful behaviour isn’t our desire for simplicity; it’s the assumption that someone else, somewhere else — some expert — holds the answers we seek rather than ourselves or the people we design with.
When we rely on unquestioned authorities, we risk diminishing not only our agency as designers and as human beings but also our multi-faceted existence. I’m tired of hearing about the world becoming more polarized when the reality is that, specifically, rhetoric and media are increasingly polarizing. Humans have and will remain complex within polarized political and economic systems that simply don’t capture our lived realities. The tension between us and these systems is increasing, but we are by no means polarized by nature. Designing with tools that don’t capture this multi-facetedness only increases this tension.
Designer-as-human: moving beyond objectivity
Design thinking is often framed as a problem-solving process guiding practitioners toward optimal solutions to complex problems. But foundationally, how do our tools define the complex issue, and what are “optimal” solutions? Even in participatory sessions, whose knowledge is privileged? Furthermore, does the end “solution” adequately capture the participation?
Rather than positioning the designer as a neutral expert, I argue for Designer-as-Human — an approach that embraces subjectivity, uncertainty, and relational knowledge. This shifts the focus from mastering frameworks to cultivating self-reflection and trust in ourselves, our collaborators, and the communities we design with.
Dr. Orna describes her therapeutic approach as relational and interpersonal — the therapist is not an all-knowing authority but an active participant in the room. Similarly, designers are never separate actors in the design process. Yet, in professional practice, we act as if we can remove ourselves and act as third-party facilitators — leaving the organizations we touch without a trace other than a brief, as if expertise requires distance and objectivity.
I ask, what if acknowledging our own humanity sharpened our expertise rather than discredited it?
Lived Experience Cartography: A tool for relational design
I do believe in healthy boundaries in professional settings, but I do not think that complete dissociation is necessary or possible for design to take place. Furthermore, attempting to compartmentalize ourselves weakens our designs and the future of design thinking practice.
Years ago, when I was working in a non-profit, I learned that one in three people will experience gender-based violence in their lifetime. Historically, I thought that I had to be working at a non-profit to be of service to humans. But I remember this statistic being a light-bulb moment for me. If one in three people have these experiences, then every workplace with more than three people working needs some sort of trauma-informed care. Complex lived experiences rooted in our humanity are the reality of our workplaces, educational environments, and communities, and by denying the existence of their overlap in ourselves and our designs, we are missing vital pieces of how to build truly life-centred, adaptive, flexible, and caring systems.
Choreographer Twyla Tharp (2006) in The Creative Habit writes that anything a person creates will reflect ten items: ambition, body, goals, passions, memories, prejudices, distractions, fears, ideas, and needs. These ten items shape a person’s life by how they’ve learned to channel their experiences into them. Tharp says when she walks into a room, she is alone, but with these ten things.
I saw parallels between these ten items and the evolution of my thesis research. I used the spirit of Tharp’s interpretation of expression as inspiration for coding 14 in-depth participant interviews and the three-month autoethnographic reflective dance study and reflection practice with my dad. Some of Tharp’s items fit into larger themes from the interviews, and conversely, some of the interview themes fit into Tharp’s items. The result was a visual, conceptual framework: Lived Experience Cartography.
This preliminary framework is more than just a checklist. It’s built to be nuanced and ever-changing to help individuals and teams reflect, visualize their experiences, and engage more deeply with others. It slows down conventional design processes, making space for relational engagement and acknowledging diverse lived realities. This framework is currently being tested in a workshop setting to develop an iteration of an interactive prototype.
At the core of this model are collective Ideas, Needs, and Fears — aspects of self that are most immediately visible in collective settings. Surrounding them is an outer layer of individual lived experiences, including memory, identity, translation, future, collaboration, environment, and measure. These shape how we see and participate in the world. As lived experiences change, so does how we relate to each section. The model contents will constantly be changing in relationship to the rest of its parts, and instead of being static and controllable, its movement is what we’re made aware of.
Two key reflection questions guide the process:
- Outer layer: “How do my experiences shape how I see…?”
- Inner layer: “Are any of my experiences present in our collective expression?”
As you can see from the model, the idea is to keep individual lived experiences in tact and referencable so that designers can trace back whether what is collectively expressed captures the rich outer layer. Rather than extracting insights from participants, this tool encourages reciprocal meaning-making. Perhaps two people express similar ideas or fear but they may stem from completely different lived experiences. How can we gain more insight into better more nuanced and informed design by not losing those vital pieces of experience?
The model will help designers and participants resist the impulse to force singular solutions onto complex challenges, instead embracing the ambiguity that emerges in real co-creation. I see this work sitting next to Naomi Rothman and Shimul Melwani’s work on social functions of ambivalence and embracing paradoxical thinking. Rothman shared an episode of Hidden Brain how mixed emotions, or being pulled in different ways can be a good thing for groups. It can lead to rich, complex thinking, a ‘both-and’ not ‘either or’. If we want rich designs that better capture the world we’re sharing, then we must face the reality that yes, a process of collaborating with the multitudes and validity of experiences might be overwhelming at times, but it does not have to be immobilizing. We can do this, but we need to be intentional and patient with it.
Natalie Loveless in How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, turns to academics King and Haraway’s respective works on stories to ask:
- How are we remade by all we speak and hear?
- How are we remade through all we touch and are touched by?
Lived Experience Cartography does not explicitly aim to change any outcome, even though the outcome may inevitably change through engagement. Specifically, this tool aims to commit design teams to acknowledge more information about who and what experiences are in the room when we gather and honestly ask if they are represented in the collective ideas, needs, and fears that more visibly inform the system's design.
It’s about prioritizing seeing and hearing the people around you and being open to flexibility in what we’re working towards. It underlines that sometimes, it isn’t a revolutionary new idea or innovation needed to change group dynamics or relationships. Sometimes, being seen can radically shift a dynamic or environment. However, we rarely slow down enough in our social environments to know that, and from my experience, we lack visual tools to aid group dynamic theories. Hence, the development of Lived Experience Cartography.
Accountability, failure, and reimagining design
Designers — like therapists, educators, and technologists — must reckon with their role in shaping not just solutions but relationships. If we continue deferring to external authorities without questioning the foundations they are built on, we risk reinforcing existing hierarchies and narrow stories rather than reimagining new possibilities in the present and future.
Legacy Russell, in Glitch Feminism, asks:
“What does it mean to find life — to find ourselves — through the framework of failure? To build models that stand with strength on their own, not to be held up against those that have failed us, as reactionary tools of resistance? Here is the opportunity to build new worlds.”
Trusting our own humanity as designers means embracing the process despite having unknown outcomes— it’s seeing failure along the way not as an endpoint but as continuous openings. It means recognizing that knowledge is not just something we acquire through learning but something we have in our lived experiences and further expand with others. Ultimately, developing relationships means shifting from human-centred design to a deeper, more accountable practice of Designer-as-Human.
