[ 2] Arieff, A. and V. Casey. “Merging Design, Business, and Sustainability: The designers accord.” interactions 15, no. 3 (2008).

[ 3] Fry, T. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008.

[ 4] Blevis, E. “Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention and Disposal, Renewal and Reuse.” Working Paper. CHI 2007. San Jose, CA, 2007.

[ 5] Willis, A.-M. “Editorial.” Design Philosophy Papers 1 (2004).

[ 6] Norman, D. A. “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful.” interactions 12, no. 4 (2005): 14-19.

May + June 2009

[ 7] Architecture for Humanity, ed. Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.

Environmental concerns are clearly a dominant theme here, and designers have recently started thoughtful and promising initiatives like the Designers’ Accord [ 2] to address problems of sustainability in design, while theorists and educators have raised these issues in the literature with greater frequency [ 3, 4]. But my criticism is more than a call for greater sensitivity to the environment; it is also an acknowledgement that reliance on our understanding of our users’ needs has gotten us into this mess. In her call for papers for a special journal issue on user-centered design, Anne-Marie Willis explicitly raises the unanswered question of whether user-centeredness and conservation are at odds [ 5].

Another obvious example is the SUV. People wanted more interior room and a more commanding position on the road, so the cars became larger and larger. Not only do SUVs pollute the atmosphere at an alarming rate, but they also make it more dangerous for the rest of the people on the road. Pedestrians and small-car passengers are no match for a 7,000-pound truck. Wanting to protect your passengers in the event of an accident is understandable, but a valuation of the worth of human lives is not something that should take place on the floor of a car dealership. It’s 2009; we understand this now. But what about Detroit? It seems they built their businesses around users’ immediate desires with no planning for the future. And now we are all paying the price.

SUVs and Wal-Mart are obvious examples of off-center design. But to bring the discussion closer to home, consider the desktop printer software I installed yesterday. Its interface is probably the result of thoughtful user testing. I imagine the interaction designers compiled data reflecting the most often used settings and set the defaults accordingly, which seems reasonable. But the defaults are for single-sided printing at high quality, using more paper and ink than is probably necessary for most tasks. On the operating system that I am using, those defaults cannot be changed.

Centering design decisions around what a user wants, or even what a user needs, is misguided. Giving precedence to a single person, or group of people, instead of taking everything else into account as well, is the root of our major problems. Side effects from poor design decisions are killing us. This might be obvious on a political, social, or even economic level, but it is every bit as germane in design.

As interaction designers, we often intend to support the behavior of our users as well as possible. We might feel that it’s not our place to suggest duplex printing, that decisions like that will eventually be motivated by cost or by law or by, really, someone else. And at that point, we can reflect the change and support the changed view. But this just marginalizes us. There is nothing wrong with trying to change behavior. That’s what designers are supposed to do.

How can we do it? I believe that it’s up to us, the design community, to articulate this change. As a group, we can reduce the emphasis on the user and broaden the scope of our process. We need a new direction to guide our work and to educate our students in design schools. Don Norman has proposed “activity-centered design” [ 6], but this is similar to the current philosophy, with more context taken into account. Inspiring work by Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr might suggest “humanity-centered design” [ 7], but that sounds like we’re ignoring the welfare of sea turtles. We could try “decentered design” or, “centered design,” but instead of more buzzwords, I vote simply for a concerted effort to take a broader view in our design process. To take into account the effects of our decisions on nonusers, secondhand users, animals, and the Earth. To take a wider-eyed, equitable look at design problems and to take efficiency, sustainability, and public safety into account at every design decision.

It’s great to make things usable. I’m frustrated trying to open clamshell packaging or redeeming frequent flier miles on a poorly designed Web page. But many decisions are not win-win; a gain for a single user is often a loss for others. Design is not all about ease of use and convenience. We need to determine when to make things difficult or unpleasant for users. We must question the assignments we work on to see whether better problem formulations exist. This is difficult. But it is the type of work that designers, more than anyone else, are capable of doing. Designers are skilled at working on multiple, concurrent solutions. We are skilled at taking the views of multiple stakeholders into account. We are often good at thinking about tangential effects of our work, of unintended uses and circumstances.

This call to expand our focus just might not resonate for some interaction designers. The layout of a GUI might have tremendous influence on an end user’s productivity, and the placement of but-