Designers, Users and Justice

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.

Preface
A virtuous method
Instruments and consequences
Adventures and assurances
Competences and virtues
Agendas and maxims
Internal good of design
Quality of use or life
User with a multiple personality
Anti-usability
Neighbour-centred design
Worth of use
Imagining a practice
Impartially opinionated
Applicability
Ignored use
Conviction-critical use
Justified exclusion
Tolerance for emergence
From usability to applicability
Utilitarian user experience
Bentham today
Pleasure and pain
Against utility
User exertion
A word with two meanings
Articulating justice in design
Conductors of justice
Division of labour to ensure justice
Flourishing hybrids
Compromising wellbeing
Trading in human dignity

A transitional position
Controversies and moderations
Design as a contract
References