Kevin Slavin’s Design as Participation is one of those articles that stays with you for days. There are multiple ways to read it, but I view it as a thoughtful critique of my primary field of focus: user-centered design (UCD). There have been other discussions on this topic, most notably Cennydd Bowles’s excellent Looking Beyond User-Centered Design, and Mike Long’s Stop Designing for Users. Kevin’s is a worthy addition to the debate.

Kevin’s main thesis is that UCD is selfish (since it puts a user at the center of everything), and we should instead see users as active participants in a design:

Broadly, UCD optimizes around engagement with the needs, desires and shortcomings of the user and explores design from the analysis and insight into what the User might need or want to do. Simply, it moves the center from the designer’s imagination of the system to the designer’s imagination of the user of the system.

But we are no longer just using computers. We are using computers to use the world. The obscured and complex code and engineering now engages with people, resources, civics, communities and ecosystems. Should designers continue to privilege users above all others in the system? What would it mean to design for participants instead? For all the participants?

Also:

Some contemporary work suggests that we are not only designing for participation, but that design is a fundamentally participatory act, engaging systems that extend further than the constraints of individual (or even human) activity and imagination. This is design as an activity that doesn’t place the designer or the user in the center.

If this all seems overly academic, fear not, practitioners! Kevin shows several examples of “Design as Participation” in his essay, and also ends with this call to action:

A new generation of designers has emerged, concerned with designing strategies to subvert this “natural default-setting” in which each person understands themselves at the center of the world.

These designers do this by engaging with the complex adaptive systems that surround us, by revealing instead of obscuring, by building friction instead of hiding it, and by making clear that every one of us (designers included) are nothing more than participants in systems that have no center to begin with. These are designers of systems that participate – with us and with one another – systems that invite participation instead of demanding interaction.

We can build software to eat the world, or software to feed it. And if we are going to feed it, it will require a different approach to design, one which optimizes for a different type of growth, and one that draws upon – and rewards – the humility of the designers who participate within it.

It’s always hard to see one’s views challenged, but Kevin does it in the best possible way here. He understands UCD and why it came about, he presents a compelling argument about its issues, and then he shows us how we can do better.

I don’t think this means the end of UCD (or even that we should stop using its basic methods like personas and usability testing). But I do agree that we need to shift our thinking so that we’re less concerned about the success of an individual user (or groups of users), and more concerned about how different systems interact with each other. Alan Cooper touches on this topic in his wonderful essay The Edges:

What each organization has to do today is to regard the edges of its products with as much diligence and attention as they give the center. The quality of both their outside system connections (known as application program interfaces, or APIs) and their user interfaces demand levels of expertise and investment that have historically fallen short.

As nebulous as Kevin’s idea of “building software to feed the world” sounds, I like the sound of it. I like the hope and the desire to do good in the world that it communicates. We need to make that idea concrete in our daily design worlds, and I don’t think we quite know how to do that yet. But every practical mission starts with a grand vision, and I quite like this one.