Against User-Centered Design?
In the UX field, user-centered design isn’t just universally acknowledged as the optimal method, it is Dogma. If the user experience designer does nothing else, she at least puts the user first throughout the design process. So, it’s extremely surprising to find anyone that pushes back against this, but Betti Marenko does just that in her piece “Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis, and the intelligence of the Technodigital Object.”
…Right? Don’t worry about the jargon. This piece comes out of Deleuze studies where an esoteric lexicon is used as a minor language to deterritorialize a multiplicity of machines in the hopes of producing emergent lines of flight to be reterritorialized though nomadic trajectories that smooth striated spaces. But in all seriousness, I’ll do my best to avoid the jargon.
Marenko’s bold claim is that design and especially UX/UI need to push away from user-centered design because it is, overly anthropocentric. User-centered methodology fails to take into account the real nature of interfaces. A human does not just use an app for example. Instead she comes in contact with it in a much more mutual engagement of agencies. What then takes center-stage, instead of the human is the event (jargon!). In other words, the connections, interactions and mutual changes between all the things and forces at play. According to Marenko, a focus that takes processes and events, rather than things and objects as the primary mode of existence in our world implies that “as objects become open-ended, relational, intelligent events, so the user subject is shifting accordingly” (109).
More simply, the processes that make up our technological objects are evolving to a point that their complexity and capacity for change - their adaptability - rivals complexity ad adaptability of the processes that make up the human users. Technologies are no longer inert pieces of flint to be used to create fire for warmth. I generally think there is a lot of value in this line of thinking. Digital things/processes are complex agencies that function in our ecosystems. They are no longer things to be mastered, but things to with which we enter into mutual engagement. Living in a time of ecological crises does a pretty good job showing us that when human’s try to master complex ecosystems of which they are a part, they are more likely to fuck it up, and one of the kernels of the such behavior is the belief that humans are outside and above everything else. That there is us, and then there is the environment. Perhaps the idea that we are fully separate from technology we use isn’t far off.
So what does this mean for Users? I think there is a weak claim and a strong claim, both of which have consequences for how we go about design. The weak claim is that the user is one bundle of processes amongst many bundles that enter into an interaction. Each bundle of processes has its own specific capacities, but no bundle generally has more agency than the others. When interacting, bundles connect to share with each other, enable each other to do things they could not have done alone, and provide each other feedback on the fitness of recent adaptations. From this point of view, design is then a matter of facilitating the connections and directing the flow of interaction. It is a matter of taking the strengths, weaknesses, capacities for connection and adaptability and patterns of behavior into account, not just for the user but for all the bundles of processes involved. In a way, it is an extension of empathetic design - a principle of stepping into the shoes of each of these bundles of processes in order to design the interaction. Additionally, connections end up taking center stage as opposed to the user. The right types of connections and interactions enable the capacities and adaptability of the various bundles of processes. In the same way that social media can be extremely useful by connecting humans, connecting other sets of processes, and creating more useful feedback loops amongst them has the same type of potential. Marenko gets at her idea when he says, “design as a problem-finding activity has to do with an increase in complexity, problematization of the existent, and development of a material sensitivity via design.”
The stronger version of the claim that processes and events are more critical than users is that we have to take each process in into account on its own instead of thinking of them in terms of bundles. This would lend itself to a much more fine grained analysis - to the point of considering how particular algorithms interact with the ecosystem of bacteria in our guts. This is probably too fine grained for an industry leaning in toward lean UX, but it might be worth considering the how particular features of an app affect certain processes in a user . For example, some music has been found to increase the production of particular white blood cells. Perhaps an app used for self-diagnosis could be improved with music that will help the user fight off the disease or infection that prompted him to open the app in the first place. It can go the other way, too. User reviews are biased by mood, this is can be a problem that for places that provide experiences that put people is less happy moods - like an indie theater that specializes in heart wrenching documentaries. Connecting ticket apps, movie data, GPS, and Yelp could result in expectation of being in a lower mood when about to write a review. There could then be funny funny prompts or pictures to lift the mood of the user for the sake of a fair review of the business.
All of that said, I’m a human, and there is something to be said about feeling an imperative for the reproduction and continuation of my species. Not just physically, but through a drive for the continuation of what some have called the “human refrain” (something like the essence of being human). This leads me to a bit of species provincialism. Just because I logically recognize, that humans are not a special form of agency, doesn’t mean I don’t want humans to do well, to have a better experience of existence. So maybe the trick is to hold in mind the experience of all the process and bundles of processes coming into an interaction, lean toward connecting them so they enable each others capacities, but preferencing the human experience. Less human-centered, but still user-focused.
