OK. I’ve said it. I’m not a user-centered designer* anymore.
After getting stuck into the conversation here, it became clear my identity has shifted.
I’ve been lucky to be amongst the first wave of interaction designers and human factors specialists who earned a seat at the table, as a UX profession distinct from engineering and marketing.
And we had to do that by relentlessly using UCD methods to drive down support calls, find defects earlier, tighten development cycles, and keep usage errors from happening. And the methods work brilliantly to do that.
And then, I was privileged to collaborate with brilliant anthropologists, social psychologists and semioticians to start turning the language from users to people and contexts to culture. And we managed to push ethnographic and observational techniques to the very front end of fuzzy product design and innovation problems.
And boy, has it been fun and interesting and rewarding to do this. And we’ve designed some good stuff. Really good stuff.
But it hasn’t been great stuff. It solves problems. It fills holes. It makes things better.
But it doesn’t make things different. It doesn’t radically innovate what things mean.
If I want to design change. If I want to make change happen, I need to be more than a user-centered designer. If I want to help businesses make change happen, I need to be more than a consultant.
What’s this new thing? What’s our new movement? Where are we headed with concepts like advanced semiotics, design-driven innovation, and ideological vision?
Somewhere that still uses all the great work that’s come before in the places and the way that it works best, but that doesn’t stop in an endless loop of observe, design, test. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Somewhere we can stop the waste and that voice in the darkness saying, “it won’t make a difference” no matter how many post-it notes you write.
Somewhere we can admit that one school of thought doesn’t have to be all things to all people. That as designers and innovators, we can apply radically different approaches to radically different problems.
Somewhere we make things that people love. Things mean something to them they never could have imagined.
Somewhere difficult to get to, but just within reach.
*Or “user-centred”, for that matter.I’m not a “design thinker” either, but that’s another post!
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There was a hint in your closing statement when you dropped ‘design’ off of the term. Indeed, that’s the reality. I always got sideways with my co-workers when I went to the first rule of the design, which is to question the question…they just want to run off and start ‘decorating’.
That’s the issue. Many of the practitioners are decorators rather than designers. That said, it’s not really their fault. The measures of success are more about the artifacts of ‘decorations’ than the challenges of real design. All symptoms of broken business practices — chasing the money and not the results.