Human-centered design considered harmful

Reviewer: Panagiotis Louridas

Articles with "considered harmful" in the title [1] have a tradition of provoking controversy [2], but this article by Donald Norman will raise few eyebrows among attentive readers. Norman is among the pioneers in human-centered design and can be credited with bringing the subject to the mainstream through his deservedly popular books [3-8]. Human-centered design stresses the importance of designing by knowing your users. We must not forget that artifacts are made for people, the argument goes, and that unless we take people into account and understand their motives, needs, and behavior, we will rarely succeed in making successful products. The danger, according to Norman, is that listening to the users does guarantee good products, but does not lead to great design. The reason is that great design is rarely the result of focusing on the tasks a single user group needs to perform. Great design is the result of a spark of genius that heeds to the activities people engage in, in which the specific tasks are embedded. Writing an email is a task; communicating is the activity that encompasses it, and this should be our focus when designing a personal communications application. Hence, from human-centered design we should move to activity-centered design, which has an interesting history of its own, motivated by early Russian and Scandinavian research on activity theory [9]. More provocative is Norman's contention that sometimes a "benevolent dictator" will know best what to design. As anybody who has been around for the last 15 years knows, benevolent dictators have led spectacularly successful open source projects. It might very well be that a visionary designer can create revolutionary products that alter the very fabric of everyday experience. This, however, does not mean that great designers do not listen to people's needs; for instance, studies of architectural practice show that the image of the great architect as a solitary genius is misleading [10]. What makes designers great may be the fact that they are able to sense what people are not yet able to tell them. By urging us to move to activities, Norman does not reject the basic tenets of human-centered design. Artifacts are made for humans, but we should be careful; if we focus too closely on some of them, we will lose sight of the bigger picture. Activity-centered design may prove a good counterweight. Design, though, is mostly a creative endeavor, and as such it requires the ability to think out of the box. George Orwell said that to exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment. Online Computing Reviews Service