our understanding of “practical
action.”
Is replacing a digital technology
with a non-digital technology
interaction design? Is replacing a high-
tech digital display with a paper display
interaction design? Is removing Wi-Fi
interaction design?

 

What about eliminating a harmful interactive technology? Or making an interactive artifact to cast doubt on technology itself? Or designing products that give people options to inhibit their own use?

Can merely refraining from design be a substantive mode of doing design?

Can the introduction of literally no thing be a good design?

 

At the very least, such intentions, actions, and outcomes suggest both opportunities and responsibilities for interaction design—regardless of whether we call them undesign, design, or something else altogether.

WHY NOT DESIGN?

As designers and researchers of
interactive technologies, we’re
concerned with designing things that
solve problems, enrich experience, and
add value to people’s lives. We work
with some of the latest and greatest
This article has no pictures. 1 I
don’t want to disappoint readers
who are expecting glossy images,
straightforward examples, or
prescriptive methods. I’m not going to
give any. 2

Instead I want to reflect on exclusionary action as design. Typically we think of design in positive terms such as creation, introduction, production, and object. But what about design as negation, destruction, removal, elimination, absence, inaction?

The point of this article is to motivate “undesign thinking” and rethink the familiar forms of interaction design. I want to recast with positive connotations the words we have for articulating what is objectively negative. Doing so will hopefully allow us to speak and write more openly and productively about designing to inhibit, displace, erase, or foreclose.

But beyond speaking and writing about design, I want to suggest practical design action. Not just the type of practical action we typically think of as interaction design, but forms of design that may seem too different or else too trivial to fall within the scope of interaction design.

Indeed, thinking in negative terms
about design may require us to broaden
Interaction

James Pierce, Carnegie Mellon University

Notes

1. But I have included many notes, and plenty of negative space. (Thanks to the Interactions editors in chief, editorial staff, and art department for working with me to accommodate my layout proposals for this submission.)

2. And my reasons—which will hopefully become clearer—are only partially for dramatization. (How else is an article without images to vie for attention here?)

3. Concerns with environmental sustainability in HCI exemplify a design imperative for undesigning. Concerns with busyness and overwork exemplify design ambiguity motivating undesigning. And design that challenges the status quo to create more pleasurable and meaningful experiences exemplifies negative critique recast as positive design opportunity.

4. See Carl DiSalvo’s recent discussions of “adversarial design” and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s writings on critical design.

DiSalvo, C. Adversarial Design. MI T Press, 2012; Dunne, A. and Raby, F.

Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. August Media, Boston, 2001.

5. Written “(un)design,” this term simply reminds us that designing anything entails undesigning something else, and any design process involves making decisions about what to design and what to undesign.

6. This idea is captured in the concepts of creative destruction and disruptive innovation. Tony Fry has recently argued that creative characterizations of design overshadow its equally destructive nature: “The very way design is reduced