Until Copernicus came along in the 16th Century with his radical idea of Heliocentrism, humans believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe; the sun and the planets revolved around us, not the other way around. That’s a pretty long time to think that only to discover that the opposite is true. And now, for the last 15 years of my career, I’ve been flogging the ideas of Human-Centred Design and realised that, by George, I’ve gone and done it again, like every other human before me, I’ve put us in the middle… sort of.
The human ego is pretty big; our strength and weakness. It seems our default is to try and make everything about us, over and over again, until a new Copernicus comes along and says, hang on a minute, maybe we’ve got it wrong? With the world literally burning up in front of our very eyes, maybe it’s time to take a hint from Copernicus and think about things differently.
How did HCD get here?
HCD (aka Human-Centred Design) was noble in its pursuit. But isn’t that always the way? No one believes they’re doing the wrong thing until 200 years after they’ve gone and displaced an entire race of people or obliterated a 60,000-year-old culture.
HCD was supposed to save humans from the corporate colonialists of our lives who hocked profit-oriented solutions to all of our problems. HCD was supposed to be the counterweight to the gravity of big business – a language and framework for teaching profit-centred businesses that, actually, there was benefit in considering the person who would use their product or service. I mean, it’s just the right thing to do, isn’t it? Not make products for people so they pay more, but do it because, well, we’re all human in the end.
But, those businesses pushed back. They did not say, “Oh, I see your point, maybe we do have a responsibility to listen to our consumers and treat them fairly and with equality”. They didn’t say, “Yes, we should only put things into the world that benefit them, even if it means slimmer margins in the end because it’s the right thing to do.” No, instead, they asked us the question, “How can putting humans at the centre of my product and service lead to bigger profits?” And we, the Designers, answered, “Well, if we can’t convince the business owners to do something good for humans for the sake of doing something good for humans, what if we teach them the value of our skills for profit-making first. Maybe after a bit, they’ll broaden their remit to focus on humanity over profit in the long term? And if not? At least it’ll be better than what it was before, right?”
Is it better than before?
We’re now quite a way down that path. HCD has been around for a good while. We’ve gone and taught those profit-making businesses how humans work – what motivates us, what we fear, how we behave – and the net result, one could argue, has been worse for us, not better.
See, it’s because we’ve put ourselves in the centre, again. We’ve failed to recognise that our species isn’t ruler of all, but in fact dependant on all; that we are just one part of an eco-system upon which we depend, not for happiness or contentment, but for life.
We’ve failed to recognise that our species isn’t ruler of all, but in fact dependant on all; that we are just one part of an eco-system upon which we depend, not for happiness or contentment, but for life.
We have fed the profit-making machines the principles of HCD with the best intentions and they’ve been consumed, chewed up, and spat back into the world, with our consent, as ever smaller micro-improvements on all of the things that, in the bigger scheme of things, don’t really matter to anyone but ourselves. Our work has resulted in improved convenience, usability, scale, and access to many products and services that have increased the rate in which we draw precious resources from the ground or throw pollutants into the clouds. That’s the same ground and the same clouds that we need to use to continue any sort of existence on this planet. We’ve been calling it HCD, but what it’s really been is Consumer-Centred Design (CCD). The truly human-centred approach isn’t about convenience, usability, or infinite corporate growth, it’s about our species co-existence with the environment that sustains us.
How do we counteract our biological need to put ourselves in the middle?
If our default is to think about ourselves, and, yes, accidentally, put our very short-term needs ahead of what’s truly important – the consistent, efficient, balanced functioning of the systems that support life on Earth – then we need some way of countering that deep, biological force within us. Or, perhaps, we can start with countering the force of consumer capitalism. The Earth still has plenty left in it to sustain us, biological systems are remarkably regenerative, but not if we’re taking a consumer-centred approach in the way we’ve been doing it anymore.
This is going to be a hard problem to solve. Let’s be frank, it already is. Frighteningly so, to be perfectly honest with you. There is so much systemic change that has to happen to alter our consumer-centred model to a truly, deeply ecological one. But, if the pandemic has shown me anything, it’s that, when we need to, we can adapt. It’s what kept our species here for so long.
I refuse to think we simply just can’t do it, or we have to wait another 50, 100, 200 years. The decline of our species will not be a meteoric, overnight event. It will banal, painful, boring, slow. Generation after generation will not realise that what came before was better, richer, cleaner. It’s happening right now. We’re living it. Generations before mine had much greater bio-diversity in the planet, a key metric for judging how healthy a living system is.
This gnarly problem of ours
This gnarly problem of ours, and I say ours in the broadest, most global sense of our ecosystem as possible, needs a group of compassionate, open-minded people who are brilliant at thinking about complex systems and the interactions and effects between them. A group that’s got the best interests of our species at heart. Empathy, Humility, Creativity – the best that humans have to offer. A group that’s got the means and a relentless drive to make the world a more sustainable place to live for all of us.
We can no longer refer to our life-support system as “The Environment”. As if it’s something to control, manage, pat on the head or admire from a distance. Without it, we don’t survive. We are the environment, along with everything else in it.
Maybe, instead of waiting for our Copernicus, we’re already able to convince the money-making machine of capitalism that the world doesn’t revolve around us anymore. Maybe it’s already possible to use our design thinking superpowers to create new frameworks and models that interrogate the non-human impact of the decisions we make in boardrooms and workshops. To consider the people who are next in our glorious timeline. To invent ways of demonstrating the ecological, social, political and, let’s face it, bottom-line impact of using a wealth of non-renewable resources to make micro-improvements to the levels of convenience we need in our lives. To ask, “isn’t this enough, already?”
Even as I write these words, I feel an inner-helplessness. The experienced professional in me says, “Yes, sure, you go ahead and try that,” as it mentally books a flight to a foreign country to attend another meeting in person. I know this is hard, but I refuse to believe it’s impossible. Humans are capable of amazing things – both positive and negative. I want to be one of the ones that focuses on the former. I’ll die trying to make some positive difference because the alternative is that we’ll all die anyway, whether we go down trying or not.