Designers, Users and Justice

Description

How do we design for users? How might users best participate in the design process? How can we evaluate the user's experience of designed products and services? These fundamental questions are addressed in Designers, Users, and Justice, through a series of dialogues between a design scholar and a designer. In a series of conversations, the scholar and the designer address the concepts and practice of user centred design, examining whether a 'just method' necessarily leads to a just design, consider different models for understanding user experience and socially productive design, including the capability approach and utilitarianism, and ponder how an ethical framework for evaluating design might be developed. Throughout, the scholar and the designer draw on their particular experiences in design practice and design education, and propose alternative conceptualisations of the key ideas of user centred design, highlighting and seeking to address the ethical shortcomings of mainstream user centred design practice.

Turkka Keinonen is Professor of Design at Aalto University, Finland.

Keinonen introduces a sophisticated politics of use that is both ethically engaged and politically empowered; showing how users are so much more than servile button-pushers in pursuit of hedonic pleasures. * Jonathan Chapman, Professor of Sustainable Design at the University of Brighton, UK *