Design Fundamentals in Two Questions: Part 2: Asking Who?

Determining the use, users, and impact of your designs

In my previous post, I introduced two questions that are at the foundation of designing for health:

What are you trying to improve?

Who are trying to improve it for?

We explored the what by, oddly, asking a lot about why?

Today, we look at the who question for design.

The User: The Dawn of the Who

It might seem strange, but there was a time when design was far more concerned about the products of design than the humans who were meant to use them. The result was a mis-mash of products that didn’t fit, were awkward, and often served a very limited need for a large number of people. When we think of bad design today, we usually point to the tools, products, and ill-fitting program choices that were designed to serve administrative needs or some creative whims.

While the concept of human-centred design traces its origins to the early 1950’s, it wasn’t until the 2000’s that the concept became widely used. That adoption came after another concept was introduced: user-centred design.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, with the wide proliferation of personal digital tools like the desktop computer (and then the Internet), we saw the marriage of scale and specificity come together. Digital products -- hardware, software, services, and supports -- provided a vehicle for customization at the level of the individual user (hence the name given to this way of design as “user-centred”). This unleashed an entire movement toward placing the product user at the centre of what we designed and created an entire form of design research that looked at people’s needs, desires, aspirations, and context.

It’s not that these issues were entirely ignored before, but they weren’t addressed systematically or made explicit. User-centred design put the product user at the centre of the action.

But this isn’t the end of the story, because what we started to learn is that focusing on the user isn’t the only way to answer the question about what we are making : who are you trying to improve it for?

User to Use, People to Planet

The idea of focusing on a specific person sounds reasonable, laudable, and functional. But what can work as a design strategy for individual consumers, can fail us at the collective level.

User-centred or human-centred design are about meeting individual needs, but some designers have prompted us to consider something more. What about the use of things for more than just individuals, but groups?

Inclusive design goes beyond making things for individuals, to making things that work for people with varying needs and capacities to ensure accessibility is not restricted to just a few. OCAD University’s Inclusive Design Research Centre defines it this way:

Design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference.

It recognizes that there are a diversity of needs, capacities, preferences, and skills and that -- when we design for certain ones as a privilege, we can exclude or restrict others. Inclusive design recognizes that we need to consider the “who” broadly.

Bruce Mau takes this further. His argument is that focusing on human needs and wants means we risk creating products and outputs that might serve us, but harm the planet. Whether it’s the air, the water, the land, or the plants, animals and organisms that live on it, our designs can be toxic when manifested into the world. What if our “who” included those parts of the natural world?

This life-centred design approach isn’t new. John Thackara was writing about it in the early 2000’s, and ecologists have been remarking on the role of our human creations on the planet for decades, if not centuries. But what happened with user-centredness was that the “life” part of the user was pushed aside for greater emphasis on the individual.

Even Don Norman (no relation) has changed his approach from advocating for human centred design to humanity-centred design. This is meant to widen our view to include humanity’s place in the natural ecosystems around us.

What I’m pointing out is: we have choices about what to privilege when we create anything. Asking who is the means to exploring those things.

The Non-Obvious User(s)

Every service and product involves multiple touch points for interaction, and thus, multiple users. For a service, product or policy (a “thing”) to be beneficial, it has to be useful to many different users. We must design for them, too.

To illustrate, consider hospice care. In designing beds, we need to make them sturdy and comfortable for those who are to lay in them, but we also need to make them moveable and able to be operated by care workers.

To impede the spread of germs and maintain cleanliness, it needs to be shaped in a manner that allows for easy cleaning. In order to make these available and cost-effective, the bed has to be made to be durable, low-maintenance, and accessible to many types of patients, contexts, and settings.

To allow visitors and loved ones to engage with the person in the bed, it needs to be designed to allow people access, while also creating the kinds of barriers to ensure that the patient is protected from falls.

If we are designing a bed, we might want to focus on any combination of these users.

How we do this is create a user or stakeholder map, modeling out visually the different potential users and their ‘stake’ in the design. To use the earlier example, existing beds might be already comfortable for patients, but very difficult for staff to use or to keep clean (and safe). The design issue here is creating a bed that maintains comfort levels, while increasing the useability for staff, and improve the ease of keeping clean.

No matter the context -- a child care setting, a mental health context, dentistry, cardiac rehabilitiation, sports medicine -- the user questions matter. So, too, does our design choices to consider what kind of values we wish to impart upon in our design.

By asking the question of your design situation, Who are trying to improve it for?, we open up enormous possibilities to create products, services, policies, and systems that are not only fit for the humans that engage them, but maybe our planet, too.

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash and Cameron Norman.