I keep returning to my recent thinking on design, especially the latest one on rendering experiential intent.
In that latest post, which focuses on a landmark 2014 article by Jared Spool, where he introduces the definition, my complaint is about emphasis.
While “rendering of intent” is a necessary condition of anything called design, it is not sufficient to illuminate what makes human-centered design (HCD) so incomprehensible to people who haven’t participated in HCD.
And I argue (maybe a little shakily) that when a designer is asked “ok, so what is it that you do, again?” that this is not a request for the common characteristic of every activity describable as design, but, rather, something closer to, “If your job is to make things, then why are you always flying around the world to visit people in their homes and workplaces and get them to teach you about their lives?”
Qualifying the intent to be rendered as including experiential intentions helps for sure, but this qualification not only buries the lede — it buries the lede alive. It creates the impression that what human-centered designers do is just like what everyone else does — because everyone renders intent, everyone designs, everyone is, in fact, a designer — it’s just that what human-centered designers design carries an additional set of experiential intentions.
My argument is that the difference between general rendering of intent and rendering experiential intent across subjective difference is decisively, ontologically different, and it is this ontological difference that matters most.
It is the difference missed by builders of systems, and, in fact, is what these builders often reject as nothing, or at least something of negligible importance.
This difference is what ought to be emphasized in any definition of design as human-centered designers practice it.
And further, the difference is so profound that human-centered design oughtn’t be treated as a qualifier of “design”, but rather design is the qualifier of what, in a design context, has been called human-centered.
More and more, though, what design seems to me to be is not human-centered but polycentered.
We are humans. We are each born into the center of reality as given to each of us. We are essentially, inescapably human-centered, and never more than when we understand truth in that most human of ways: objectively.
What is much, much harder for us is to recognize that we are not the only center of the universe. And that our objective understanding of objective reality is not the only given objectivity. Objective truth does not exhaust truth and truth does not exhaust reality.
Design is one of many possible responses to the polycentered insight.
What design has lost is polycenteredness.
Design has degraded to monocentered rendering of managerial intent.
Spool’s definition masks this degradation.
Polycentered design renders a plurality of interlapping intents.