Fifteenth #5: On more-than-human design

Decentering humans to design for a multi-species world

How human-centred thinking produces technologies that exploit and extract; how a more-than-human approach to design is more in tune with ecology and our entangled existence

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There Are Black People In The Future (2019) by Alisha B. Wormsley located above Shadow Lounge, Detroit, USA

Decentering the human in design

What is wrong with human-centred design? The method underpins professional and academic practice and shapes how contemporary software and services are made. A human-centred designer starts by analysing the needs of the people for whom they are designing. Usability, accessibility and efficiency are the basis for assessing how well a system or interface works. In recent decades, supplementary techniques have diverged from the human-centred design process to become specialist skills in their own right, ranging from user experience research and information architecture to service and content design. Each contributes to the delivery of the modern interactive digital product.

Human-centred design is not above critique. The scale of our technological landscape has expanded to such a scale, that is not uncommon for billions of people to be connected by their use of a single platform. Technology encroaches into more avenues of our lives than ever before, meaning a designer must also contend with being part social scientist, ethnographer, lawyer, ethicist, ecologist — or a combination of each! The current rush to AI-powered automation has cruelly exposed the harms that automated and predictive computerisation at scale can cause, especially when automated decision-making can have such life-changing outcomes.

Large-scale cloud platforms are both extractive and exploitative — from the acceleration in the consumption of mineral and material resources needed to manufacture our phones, to an exponential growth in the scale of data centres needed to warehouse our data. The turbo-charged profit motives driving this need for exponential growth are mirrored in supply chains that ensure labour exploitation falls most heavily on the shoulders of low-wage workers who keep the most extreme forms of hate, violent and pornographic content off our screens, perform gig work, or, in a globally distributed and permanently online workforce, compete for digital piece-work for ever-shrinking payment.

Advocating for an uncritical continuance of human-centred design means upholding a performance of design that treats the world, its material and labourers as underused resources that have yet to achieve optimal utilisation. Human-centred design positions humans as the pinnacle of intelligence while also justifying activities that subjugate and exploit other entities — living and non-living. Human-centred design is a product of histories that classified organisms into hierarchies that gave humans moral permission to dominate space — turning lands into territories, and minerals into commodities. These constructed hierarchies can and have been applied towards humans — producing scientific and academic justification for rendering some people less-than-human, justifying their enslavement and theft of land.

Daring to aim at human-centred design and its ideals is a dissenting position. The future our planet deserves cannot be achieved under the auspices of an extractive system that ignores the assemblage of living and non-living beings existing around us.