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