tons might not affect anything else. But our current focus on the user didn’t originate with these stereotypical interaction design tasks—they were introduced in the 1950s by Henry Dreyfuss [ 8] and popularized by Don Norman [ 9]. An oft-cited example in Norman’s book is of his lab’s experiment to improve the usability of their lighting system by rewiring so that the lights are controlled by a bank of centralized switches, laid out on a diagram of the floor plan. This makes sense, but is getting around the inconvenience of having to flip a switch on and off (or of learning which switch goes with which light) worth several hundred feet of copper and PVC wiring? With all things equal, I’m in favor of making things easier to use, but most of the time, all things are not equal. One might respond to this criticism that the book was written before concerns about waste became so urgent. But more likely, the response would be the research was focused only on usability issues, ignoring other factors like cost and material waste. That is precisely the problem.

User-centered design is wrong. But the current myopic view of a designer’s responsibilities is not anyone’s fault. I don’t believe people make short-sighted decisions out of laziness, but because they lack the appropriate tools and information to make better ones. It’s not trivial, for example, for designers to accurately predict the side effects of using plastic or paper wrapping on a product because the network of impacts and stakeholders involved in these decisions can be mind-numbingly dense. Not only do we suffer from a lack of design theory that takes emergent, complex systems into account, but we also lack solid analytical theories of these systems. Life cycle assessments are valuable tools for understanding long-term effects, but they are complicated processes and not accessible to designers making everyday decisions. We will certainly see new tools that can help us make more informed decisions, but it would be a long stretch to imagine that we will be able to use them as a basis for a prescriptive theory of design.

Engineering offers “Design for X” as a way of managing the complexity of design problems, where X represents one of the “-ilities.” These are

items in a long list of quality attributes ( accessibility, reliability, usability) that engineers must take into account in their designs. Due to the size and scope of some projects, engineers need to switch focus between different “-ilities,” improving certain aspects of their design while balancing each

particular goal. Keeping multiple objectives in mind without centering on a single one leads us to a promising model for interaction design. The distinction is important: “Design for usability” must be in our set of “-ilities,” but centering design problems on the user leads to off-center solutions.

A call to bring balance into design is nothing new. Buckminster Fuller is widely credited as a genius, and his designs were notable for effecting broad change, even if they were ahead of their time. He called himself a “deliberate comprehen-sivist” and advocated a broad view, questioning the formulation of design problems. Even Don Norman writes, “If everyday design were ruled by aesthetics, life might be more pleasing to the eye but less comfortable; if ruled by usability it might be more comfortable but uglier. If cost or ease of manufacture dominated, products might not be attractive, functional, or durable. Clearly, each consideration has its place. Trouble occurs when one dominates all the others” [ 9].

These shifts in the focus of design may seem cyclic. Many of the poor designs that Norman identifies in The Design of Everyday Things exist because of a need to save money. Now, after a period of intense focus on the user, it may appear that I am advocating a return to the old days of cutting costs and materials. But this is not the whole story. I am advocating a balanced design process that considers as many factors as possible instead of focusing foremost on the end user’s needs. Design is by nature a series of trade-offs, and while every situation is unique, always trading in favor of the user is rarely a smart idea.

[ 8] Dreyfuss, H. Designing for People. New York: Paragraphic Books, 1995.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Eli Blevis, Dan Boyarski, Mark D. Gross, and Gabe Johnson for their comments and conversations on this controversial subject.

[ 9] Norman, D. A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, Doubleday, 1990.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Eric Schweikardt is the designer of roBlocks, a modular robotic construction kit for education. He is also a visiting scientist at the Computational Synthesis Lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University.

Schweikardt recently completed a Ph.D. in computational design from the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research looks at complex, concurrent systems and how our notions of design change when working with thousands and thousands of tiny robots.

May + June 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516019
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00