Article Review

Technology and More-Than-Human Design

September 22, 2020

By Johan Redström and Elisa Giaccardi

Ideas

Human-centered design rests on a foundation that a designed object is there to serve a specific person with a specific need. It is predicated and focused on the interaction between one person and one product. This approach makes sense when you can take into account that only the person has agency and chooses to interact with something

Contrast this to today's objects of design: networks, marketplaces, protocols and infrastructure. These things are not "standing by" for us to use, but they are reaching out to other things all the time. They all have their own logic, needs and operating principles. They are "agents" on their own terms.

What is needed is to change the aesthetic from so that it can take into account the changes in:

This "more than human design" approach is one where we address the materials and objects of design in an appropriate way: we can deal with them as enablers rather than roadblocks.

Summary

we primarily want to make it appear as a straightforward tool: something standing by to be ready for us when we need it

The perspective of human-centered design implies that the interaction between a person (or multiple people) and a technology forms the basis for how the designed artifact should be presented.

In unfolding a future in which networked computational things come to expression by being actively implicated in doing the stuff that includes design, we need to start accounting for their worldview, for the set of values, principles, and logics that determine what actions they take

For this, the aesthetics of immanence of networked computational things require dimensions of openness: things need to be designed so that they can become “some-thing else” (e.g., a different route to a familiar place). It requires also dimensions of variety: things need to be designed so they can become “some-thing more” in terms of their value in different contexts of use

things connect and respond to one another—just like people—and in this responsiveness, they are also “response-able.” In this sense, if we are to bring aesthetics and ethics together on a new ground, it is not so much the interaction that joins things up into assemblages that matters (“and . . . and . . . and”), but the “contrapuntal relations” (“with . . . with . . . with”) that join things with one another and us together with them.

Responsibility is then not about locating right response but the ability to respond—in other words, “a matter of inviting, welcoming, and enabling the response of the Other." It is not about functionality (e.g., the fairest machine learning model or the most explainable algorithm); it is about the relations and interactions that enable us to situate, tune, and negotiate those ethical responses and assessments recursively in both design and use.

If the core skills of prototyping a product were about narrowing down, isolating the key design decisions, and then presenting in material form an outstanding synthesis worthy of mass production, then the ethos of what is now emerging is much more akin to taking care of something—realizing that not one single intention or perspective will be defining but that the overall process and its outcome will depend on how we deal with the diversity arising from complex interactions.

Highlights

No longer is the design process something that happens before production; rather, we see a complete intertwining of development and deployment

It appears that this characteristic of a constant becoming is going to be further accelerated by technologies that actively “learn” while in use, changing and adapting over time at an even more fundamental level than is currently the case.

We might be reaching the limits of what our current primary framework for design can cope with—that is, the boundaries of what can be conceived within the frames of [[human-centered design]] and [[user-centered design]]. In what follows, we discuss what happens if [[human-centered design]] is unable to effectively give form to this new technology, why this might be the case, and where we could look for alternatives.

It is important to clarify, though. Approaches such as participatory design primarily stem from ideas about democratic processes and fundamental human rights, whereas the notion of participation referred to here has nothing to do with technology acquiring rights or a position in that sense.

if we follow the idea of machine agency and artificialintelligence far enough, we have to revisit the idea of [[human-centered design]]. Not because humans matter less but because it is no longer exclusively humans that act, design, make use, change, and thus create new possibilities. To explore the futures we might face, we need to inquire into what a more-than-human world might look like, and what happens when technology is not just material but participant.

Today, most of the designing that happens in the industrial and technological sectors rests in some way on a notion of human-centered design. This is not necessarily in the sense that someone’s actual needs, desires, dreams, and hopes govern the design process, but in the sense that the things designed are meant to present themselves to their users as primarily “useful” things—as things to be used for a particular purpose.

Today we design and use technologies that involve systems and networked components, sometimes with millions of people using them simultaneously. But if we look for central design ideals and the designs that exemplify them, the absolute majority relates to a use scenario wherein the interaction between one person and one device is cardinal.

As we expand beyond this one-to-one setting, this particular instrumental relation is no longer the only one to consider. A thing has to relate to a number of other things (which it actually already does, it’s just that we are typically not meant to see this when we use it; we don’t see the many different connections our smartphone constantly makes, or the many different services it communicates with to share data). It is also evident that a thing’s design needs to acknowledge that not all people use it for the same reason

we primarily want to make it appear as a straightforward tool: something standing by to be ready for us when we need it

human-centered design (no matter the scale of the design) is conceptually grounded in the relationship between a person and a tool

The primary framework of human-centered design implies a perspective on the world in which technology is something “standing by” for us to use according to our own purposes.

In this arrangement, the relationship between humans and objects is unidirectional: only humans make things—tools with a clear encoded function. All we need is to study some more and iterate until we get it “right”: the right functionality, the best possible user experience, the most effective multistakeholder collaboration.

The perspective of human-centered design implies that the interaction between a person (or multiple people) and a technology forms the basis for how the designed artifact should be presented.

There are many reasons for this, but of special importance to the present is a deep concern for knowing what the thing is, and how it comes to be this thing: what priorities to make, what properties to look for, what qualities to achieve, and so on and so forth. In this, ethics becomes central because it forms the foundation of such decisions: to design is to make something for someone

One reason behind the offset of the previous alignment of ethics-aesthetics is that the current set of issues are no longer “centered” around the user, and thus not around just one set of intentions or ideas about purpose and use.

For instance, when it comes to transparency, what is important is that the workings of a machine are presented in a way that is aligned with the intended user behavior. The more complex the machine, the bigger the difference (...)

While ideas such as honesty and transparency might still apply, we will have to find out how that might apply to knowing how to shape, govern, and care for decentralized interactions rather than just knowing what local functionalities to look for

Understanding what people want or need and making changes to the design to ensure the best possible outcome and user experience are at the core of what is often referred to in current user-centered design practices as “good design.” But in a more- than-human world of design and designing, outcomes and experiences are the result of dynamic interplay between people and networked computational things, as well as between things and other things.

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