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

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