How design contributes to toxic individualism, and what can be done about it
The world’s five most valuable brands, which collectively account for nearly one trillion dollars of annual revenue, have one thing in common beyond that they are all tech companies: they all promise to empower people.
Microsoft says it aspires “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” Apple asserts, “Technology is most powerful when it empowers everyone.” Google celebrates how it “organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful.” Facebook claims that it aims to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” And Amazon talks of its famous mission “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
The shared language and sentiment in these mission statements are a testament to the dominance of human-centered design and its philosophy of prioritizing understanding and designing for people’s needs before style and aesthetics. Indeed, human-centered design has been adopted by nearly every industry and has become a ubiquitous topic in business and design school curricula — but not because modern corporations are caring and empathetic. Instead, human-centered design has succeeded because it delivers business results; products and services designed around people’s needs are more competitive and more profitable.
But human-centered design has a blind-spot that can no longer be ignored:
Today, communities, nations, and humankind as a whole face crises that demand collective action: mitigating climate change, combatting COVID-19, dismantling systemic racism, and protecting human rights are just a few examples of issues that won’t be solved by designing for the immediate, narrow interests of individuals alone.
In fact, individualism, which is on the rise, is a fundamental obstacle to our collective ability to address these issues. While human-centered design is (in theory) imbued with the principle that broader systems should be considered, in practice, the needs of individual users tend to eclipse consideration of communal needs. Human-centered design, with its focus on individual needs, risks being an agent of individualism: products are too often designed for pleasure before sustainability; to mirror what people believe rather than broadening their perspective; to make things effortless instead of deliberative. Addressing communal needs requires inspiring collective effort and shifting collective behavior — and collective effort often requires individual sacrifice.
While design’s impact on society is widely appreciated (especially by designers), and it has been at the forefront of the movement to make accessibility and inclusion a corporate priority, it is still far more convenient for a designer or design team not to bother with communal needs, particularly if they are designing a digital product or service for which the material impact on the world might not be immediately apparent. For example, when designing a physical product, the pollution caused by manufacturing, the working conditions in factories, and the recyclability of that product are all things that are more readily apparent or easily anticipated, whereas the potential negative impacts of digital products can be a bit less obvious, though nevertheless just as real. The potential negative psychological and sociological impacts caused by addictive, distracting, and biased information technology are not immediately observable by the designer when designing, nor is AI’s carbon footprint, nor are the challenging working conditions in e-commerce distribution centers.
Social impact is often ignored in large part because successfully designing for an individual user’s need is hard enough without the added complication of considering the potential impact on society at every step. Even if a designer believes that communal needs are vitally important, ignoring social impact is often justified by the fact that communal needs are ultimately the domain of government regulation and public policy. This mindset suggests that considering communal need isn’t necessarily in the designer’s purview; the place to address these issues is the ballot box, and once regulation and policy are in place, human-centered design can operate within those parameters to create solutions that will meet communal and individual needs alike. This is not entirely misguided, as regulation is an essential check on industry to protect the common good, and there are plenty of examples of innovative experiences being inspired by regulation. For instance, Norway places a heavy tax on manufacturers of plastic bottles, but if the manufacturers collectively recycle 95% of those bottles, the tax is lifted. This has provided impetus for the design of an innovative bottle redemption experience, which has enabled Norway to achieve a recycling rate of 97%, compared to 29% in the U.S.
However, the industry has a number of reasons to address collective, social issues independently from or in advance of regulation. First, being an innovative leader is a key strategy to be prepared for regulation; Tesla, for instance, doesn’t have to worry about CAFE standards. Secondly, society and culture advances forward independently from and (necessarily) in advance of regulation, and brands can use their leadership on collective issues as a competitive differentiator; for example, thanks to its early support of Colin Kaepernick, few were confused about where Nike stood on racial equality when protests erupted following George Floyd’s murder. Lastly, workers are increasingly demanding that their employers take action on social issues—and meaningful action, not just sloganeering, is an important means to attract and retain talent.
Designers needn’t solve a societal problem wholesale to make an impact. Indeed, given the scale and complexity of societal problems, collective impact usually consists of incremental contributions. To understand how they might make an impact, designers need humanity-centered methods to identify the ways in which their design decisions might affect larger concerns beyond those of their immediate user — issues of sustainability, inclusivity, accessibility, representation, and more.
There are (to start) three categories of humanity-centered design methods that designers should seek to develop or use in order to elevate their designs beyond the needs of the individual:
1. Context Mapping
Methods to map broader socio-economic, equality, cultural, or ecological issues into user journeys, personas, and other design artifacts to contextualize individual interactions with a product or service vis-a-vis communal needs.
Context mapping is already a standard tool for assessing the immediate environment in which products or services are encountered by customers to make them more usable and relevant. These methods can be readily extended to assess a broader context by deliberately asking key questions: “What’s the cultural context in which a product is used? What’s the context of sustainability? What’s the context of people’s cognitive and physical abilities?”
2. Change Facilitation
Methods to identify the ways in which solutions to a specific user need can facilitate and contribute behavior change in customers in service of collective impact, rather than limiting the purview of design to immediate, surface user needs.
The key behind change facilitation is establishing a vision for the measurable change you seek to affect. A useful tool in articulating, planning, and implementing change is the Theory of Change, a strategic framework often used by governmental and non-governmental organizations to explicitly plan for collective change, and to develop metrics by which to evaluate change.
3. Consequence Anticipation
Methods to assess and consider the costs and consequences of design decisions to individuals, society, or the environment.
In his book Ruined By Design, Mike Monteiro suggests that many of society’s problems, especially the rise of extremism online, result from a crisis in ethics in design, and advocates for a code of ethics to guide designers, just as the Hippocratic oath — “do no harm” — guides doctors. (He even suggests that designers, like doctors, be licensed, an idea put into action in Canada by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, which offers a certification for designers that includes ethics training.) Ethics are, undoubtedly, the first, most important tool a designer has to anticipate the consequences of their choices. Since design, as a creative practice, is necessarily instinctive and id-driven (“wow, wouldn’t it be cool if…”), it’s crucial for a designer’s instincts to also be governed by a sort of superego (“what might happen if…”). One method to actively anticipate and mitigate the potential negative consequences of design — for instance, to mitigate a designer’s unconscious bias — is co-creation, in which users are more directly involved in the design process, making good on the rallying cry of inclusivity activists, “Nothing About Us Without Us!” The perspective gained from co-creation is a helpful input to tools like the Digital Product Ethics Canvas, which is a simple framework to identify the risks of digital products to individuals and society.
Just as putting the individual at the center of an experience embeds products and services with the idea that individual needs matter, considering social, cultural, and ecological impact in design communicates that collective responsibility and collective action are important. Design alone might not be able to comprehensively solve toxic individualism in the face of the need for collective action, but it can be an important contributor to helping our society realize the humanist ambitions that motivate human-centered design — especially considering that everything in society is designed, in some way.
It’s telling that following the Black Lives Matter uprising, the world’s most valuable brands, for which individual empowerment and customer-centricity are core to their mission, have amplified their support for racial equity. Humanity-centered design methods should be key tools in helping each of these companies, and many others, make good on these promises — empowering not only individual users, but people collectively. After all, the most human-centered products and services are those that make our world a better, more livable, more sustainable, more equitable place for all.
