B[e]y[ond] Human Design
The committee speaks for a camel, as a camel?
“Human-centered design” is an approximation for our work; its limitations reveal the need to institute terms that more fully articulate our vision. This is not an exhaustive exploration, but we hope it is robust, covering large moves made in industry research and design frameworks. This sets the stage for new directions.
Summary
Most industry research and design frameworks are guided by their commitment to humans or human-centered design thinking. The “human” more accurately refers to a product, service, or system’s end user. In recent years, whether explicitly named or not, expansions have been explored in line with posthumanist theory. Products, services, and systems that advance the public interest require an expanded understanding of who we are designing for and better tools to bring them to life. Instead of just designing for the end user, we track and offer rudimentary expansions that include plants, animals, the environment, bacteria, viruses, affected humans outside the end user, future beings, as well as the interaction among beings.
This is a multi-part exploration. While we stand by these expansions, we begin to toy with the concept of more complex beings with multiple subjects acting under some shared and cogent set of values, such as organizations. We lay the groundwork to further motivate our need for an ethics (or beyond?), as we identify shortcomings in industry uptake and a disconnect in academic theory.
Background
We don’t have the language to fully describe a framework that encapsulates all of our values for change. One example of this in our previous publication was the term “human-centered design.” “Human-centered design” is imprecise but gets us close to what we are alluding to. While it contextualizes our approach, by calling to mind tools and frameworks, it ultimately doesn’t fully capture all relevant subjects in our processes.
“Human-centered design” refers to a range of research and design frameworks that seek to understand and center humans in design; through iterative research and design processes, it optimizes human experiences (by satisfying needs and eliminating pains) with a product, service, or system. It is a paradigm that encapsulates many distinct frameworks, each with its own set of tools.
For those outside of industry, human-centered design may seem like the obvious standard for design. If not for humans, who would we design for? Forks make it easier to eat. Lamps allow us to see and work at night. Even leashes are more for us, less for our dogs. It would appear that all design is [human-centered] design. We feel the necessity and can more fully understand it through a look at its absence—early social scientist research.
In the late 1930s, social scientists began investigating alternative ways of conducting interviews. Some social scientists had doubts about the accuracy of traditional individual interviews that used a predetermined questionnaire with closed-ended response choices. 1
There is only so much information that can be accumulated through a process that relies upon “predetermined questionnaire[s] with closed-ended response choices.”2 The responses were likely based upon the expectations of the researcher, which would lead research subjects to choose responses that might not be wholly representative of their actual feelings.
To be charitable, we could consider the former example human-centered design, just bad human-centered design, but at its core, it fails to strongly capture the experiences of the humans who actually use and experience the product, service, or system, instead forcing subjects’ experiences to conform to the notions of the researcher. While still in line with humans, it fails to capture the right perspectives and will not create strong designs or solutions in line with a user’s values. From this interrogation, human-centered design seems to imply that research and design must come from the humans who use the product, service, or system. This really means “end [human] users.”
Traditionally, human-centered research and design frameworks in industry are contained to a handful of departments (if not only one department) within an organization. It is unusual to see entire companies with a mind toward human-centered design. There are degrees though. Some departments may blatantly ignore human-centered research and design principles, instead employing something of (to use, a nontechnical fuzzy term) a “founder’s mindset.” (i.e. “I think it should be this way because that makes sense to me, and that will make sense to the client!”) Others may think they are addressing customer needs, but their research is often anecdotal and not rigorous. More often than not, human-centered research and design will be reserved for a single department at an organization.
While departments without human-centered design often solely focus on implementing business priorities that maximize profit, human-centered research and design departments will have to balance these business priorities and stakeholder needs with the needs and pains of end users. This is something of a privileged position, but it is not an exclusive position. While it comes with its complications and drawbacks, realistically, any department could begin to implement research and design frameworks into their department’s work. This may even be very successful when implemented under the guise of “profit maximization.” After all, happy customers should in theory maximize profit.
As human-centered research and design frameworks in industry, such as service design, UX/UI research and design, etc., have been in use since the 1980s, they have had time to reconceptualize and expand the confines of their work. The remapping that comes with the wearing-in of theory. Industry developments over the past decade or so have sought to transcend these traditional roots. While one such expansion may not explicitly use these terms, the efforts can often loosely be attributed to “posthuman” or “more-than-human” theories.
“Posthumanism” and “more-than-human” theories are part of a broader paradigm that seeks to expand our understanding of the world by decentering humans and human experiences. It draws in non-human subjects and highlights the interaction between beings. This seems like a natural framework for human-centered research and design to engage with and grow from; it threatens the very nature of how this work is done.
Industry research and design frameworks (influenced by broader societal change, trickling down from academia) have caught wind of the need to adapt, but the uptake of these theories has lost some of the potency they once had while confined to academia. And by uptake, we do just mean taken up. This work is still highly theoretical, and at least, in our traditional places of employment, we have never engaged with them. Change is slow, and we are still hooked on the human. Researchers and designers are not to blame. The theories are woo-woo, and research and design is always undercut. Advocating for the research and design department and process is already hard enough, and from a business perspective, the human is the profit maximizer, not dogs and pigs and bacteria.
This work shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to readers. In our previous publication, we explored Karen Barad’s posthumanist theory. Recall, Karen Barad’s framework specifically relied upon agents—a term that (while we grounded in humans) Barad keeps intentionally vague to include humans and non-humans. Their agency and existence emerge in the moment of intra-action. In other words, when we hone in on the moment of interaction among beings, some factors entrap and affect them (socio-historical and environmental factors). This creates their shared understanding of this moment and leads them to be entangled in ethical responsibilities to each other.
There have been attempts to unite theory with practice—to re-conceptualize the state of human-centered design in the face of posthumanism. For instance, Human-Computer Interaction put out an edition that called for researchers and designers to build anew. This is a budding field with many opportunities to build better tools, but we must tackle shortcomings in uptake and creation across industry and academia to meaningfully enact these principles.
The Limits of Designing Solely for and from End Users
A lot of the attempts, to explain why people should care about things and beings other than themselves, feel insulting. Most people will tacitly agree that we should care about other beings. We aren’t interested in explaining why you should care about things and beings outside of yourself, we’ll leave it to the philosophers. The real disagreement will lie in whether it is useful for designing better systems and, maybe most importantly, how it is achieved in negotiation with other priorities.
In line with our guiding principles, we are committed to building better systems to advance the public interest. This work is not solely tied to business priorities, such as profit maximization, so it requires a wider lens through which to research and design.
Even if there is an attachment to human-centered research and design, the environment, plants, animals, and viruses will affect the end user. Industry researchers and designers saw this most clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, a virus became another criterion to consider in design, designing for the end user meant considering their health and safety in entirely new ways. While we never gave moral consideration nor extended agency to the virus (as posthumanism seems to call for), it became a “third party.”
Stronger Research through Recognizing More than the Human [End User] and The Interaction of Beings
Human-centered research and design is not human-centered; human-centered research and design is end user-centered research and design.
Potential expansion: Include humans affected by a product, service, or system development, not just the end user [human].
End user-centered research and design does not account for the non-end users greatly affected by the development of products, services, and systems. For instance, the environmental effects of technology, particularly computers and artificial intelligence are well-known —from air and water pollution to greenhouse gas emissions to energy consumption to resource extraction to improper e-waste disposal. These factors affect many non-end users, especially those from low-income communities and the Global South. While these issues may feel “out of a tech team’s scope,” these considerations reshape how research and design are approached, they shift our percept. Once considered and solidified as constraints, there are ways that designers can approach these problems.
Potential expansion: Include plants, animals, future beings, viruses, and the environment.
We need a fuller approach to create systems that actually affect meaningful change. Other beings and things, such as plants, animals, future beings, viruses, and the environment, are affected by the products, services, and systems we build.
Potential expansion: Include the interaction among beings.
As is common in research and design, there is a negotiation. Considering not just subjects and stakeholders but how these subjects and stakeholders interact and intersect is essential to finding effective, middle-ground solutions. This is not unlike current research and design processes, and we see this as a natural extension for research and design when other beings are brought in the fold.
Potential Actionable Pathways for Researchers and Designers
Impacted by COVID-19, “environment-centered design” was featured in a viral Medium article a couple of years ago;3 it called for researchers and designers to engage with the environment (as they had to design with a virus in mind) and provided tools to carry out this work: actant mapping canvases and non-human personas. All the credit for these expansions goes to Monika Sznel and Marta Lewan.
Actant Mapping Canvas
The actant mapping canvas is based on actor-network theory. It lays out the interconnectedness of humans to non-human actors/actants to inform design. It is a four-part approach in which researchers: (1) define a problem, (2) identify all the direct actants that will be impacted (humans and non-humans who are directly impacted by this problem), (3) identify all the indirect actants that will be impacted (humans and non-humans who are less directly impacted yet still impacted by this problem), and (4) connect actants to show how they may be related. It is through this process that a researcher hopes to motivate design. The work is built more on the interaction of subjects instead of a static user and on the principle of empathy, which underpins much of UX research. The designer advocates for an “‘everything is connected’ mindset,” especially to tease out some of the less identifiable non-human actants.4
Non-human persona
The other tool is the non-human persona, which should be very recognizable to industry researchers and designers. It is a repurposed user persona to capture the needs and pain of a non-human. The development of environmental personas anthropomorphized environmental pain points and needs to motivate design.
Motivating the need for difference, an ethics (and beyond)
Currently, industry research and design frameworks are dependent upon an empathy-first mindset. Researchers and designers are told to “lead with empathy,” when building. Empathy is great, but as we see it, it is also built upon sameness. While the conditions and situations may be different, it requires a designer to connect with some universal feeling. We fear this downplays the importance of difference and codifies everything in purely human contexts. Empathy-driven approaches might not get us too far, especially when we bring in beings outside of ourselves that aren’t so easily understandable rocks (the environment) or COVID-19.
This critique is in no way meant to be disparaging of the work that has been done (perhaps, anthropomorphizing the environment and animals are viable and even practical ways to move forward—with trial and error and evidence that it works, we are happy to fold it in), but, this feels like a disservice when held up next to the work in posthumanism—work that seeks to recognize and extend moral consideration and agency to other beings. Researching and designing with other beings in mind cannot be skin deep. It may require entirely new ways of seeing.
Posthumanism has grappled with these complications, and for this reason, just advocated for an ethics. We say “just” because we find this exhausting. Researchers, subjects, and designers may be ethically bound, but organizations and businesses may not be, to varying degrees. This passing off of responsibility on the consumer or those with less power is too simplistic for a framework. We hope to expand our understanding of posthumanist theory further next time, by bringing in more complex “beings” (i.e. multiple subjects acting under some shared and cogent set of values, such as organizations) and exploring their place within an ethics because, to a large degree, they seem ethically unbound.
We stand by the expansions that human-centered research and design frameworks flirt with. We find them valuable, but we also find the ways in which they have been implemented to be limited and the academic theory to be out of touch. We will continue sorting this out in the coming publications.
We still encourage using these tools as needed, as research and design are context-dependent. Depending on the audience, they may be valuable for doing better research.
Cite this Publication
APA
MIdST LABS. (2025, Feb. 12). B[e]y[ond] Human Design. MIdST LABS. https://midstlabs.substack.com/beyond-human-design
Chicago
MIdST LABS. "B[e]y[ond] Human Design." MIdST LABS, February 12, 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/beyond-human-design
MLA
MIdST LABS. "B[e]y[ond] Human Design." MIdST LABS, 12 Feb. 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/beyond-human-design
Krueger, R. A., Casey, M. A. (2000). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. India: SAGE Publications.
Krueger, R. A., Casey, M. A. (2000). Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research. India: SAGE Publications.
Sznel, M. (2020, May 5). The time for Environment-Centered Design has come. Medium. https://uxdesign.cc/the-time-for-environment-centered-design-has-come-770123c8cc61
Sznel, M. (2020, May 5). Tools for environment-centered designers: Actant Mapping Canvas. Medium. https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/tools-for-environment-centered-designers-actant-mapping-canvas-a495df19750e
Actant mapping canvas and non-human persona courtesy of Monica Sznel.
We invite you to share your insights and further develop these ideas, especially to meet your contextual needs; we value multiplicities, context, and nuance. Your feedback is a valuable part of this project, and we are excited to collaborate with you.
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