Designing love-based systems
I was in Vancouver’s Railtown Cafe a couple months ago, in town to help facilitate a design sprint for a non-profit.
Powering up for the day with a breakfast sandwich, as smells of fresh baking and coffee wafted over the counter, I encountered this article from Jesse Weaver: “Human-Centered Design Dies at Launch.”
The perspective goes like this: we say we’re doing “human-centered design,” but inevitably, business goals trump the user’s needs. Every time.
In the comment section, one user washes the criticism away as being misguided: “Of course it does,” they say. “Human-centered design is a business tool. And a business exists to make money. You want change, go work in the non-profit sector.”
On that very day, where I was running a design sprint for a non-profit, it included an executive leader who was dead-focused on questions about return-on-investment, without a thought towards his team’s health, his non-profit’s impact or sense of purpose. I will assure you that he felt no freer to …
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