Toward Humanity-Centered Design without Hubris
arXiv:2402.11576 · doi:10.1145/3613905.3644060
Abstract
Humanity-centered design is a concept of emerging interest in HCI, one motivated by the limitations of human-centered design. As discussed to date, humanity-centered design is compatible with but goes beyond human-centered design in that it considers entire ecosystems and populations over the long term and centers participatory design. Though the intentions of humanity-centered design are laudable, current articulations of humanity-centered design are incoherent in a number of ways, leading to questions of how exactly it can or should be implemented. In this article, I delineate four ways in which humanity-centered design is incoherent, which can be boiled down to a tendency toward hubris, and propose a more fruitful way forward, a humble approach to humanity-centered design. Rather than a contradiction in terms, "humility" here refers to an organic, piecemeal, patterns-based approach to design that will be good for our being on this earth.
arXiv commentPaper for the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in the alt.chi session; see "CHI EA '24: Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems" (May 2024)