Technology and More-Than-Human Design

As digital technologies such as big data, the internet of things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence increasingly challenge and even disrupt the everyday job of design—not to mention everyday life—there comes a need to raise critical questions about the ways we design. Design as we currently know it and practice it was born out of the logic of industrial production. Although initially mimicking the form and expression that were characteristic of craft and making by hand, it soon became obvious that making by machine required something else. In places such as the Bauhaus, ideas about a unity of art and technology started to evolve. Over time, design came to develop methods meant to ensure that a product was “right” by working iteratively with prototypes and minimizing the risk of mass replicating faults and shortcomings, and to form an industrial aesthetic celebrating (rather than hiding) what “new” machines and technologies brought to the making of everyday things. Contemporary technologies of networked computational things and artificial intelligence, as well as the data capitalism they have made possible, differ from the logic of industrial production. Not only that, they fundamentally challenge the conceptual space designers have created to cope with complexity. For instance, with runtime assembly of networked services, constant atomic updates, and agile development processes, the boundary between production and consumption is almost fully dismantled. No longer is the design process something that happens before production; rather, we see a complete intertwining of development and deployment, sometimes as frequent as daily releases. It appears that this characteristic of a constant becoming is going to be further accelerated by technologies that actively “learn” while in use, changing and adapting over time at an even more fundamental level than is currently the case. As is already evident, not least in the public debate around what to consider a fair and secure use of data, this emerging technological landscape brings up many issues we need to tackle. One of them is that we might be reaching the limits of what our current primary framework for design can cope with—that is, the boundaries of what can be conceived within the frames of human- and user-centered design. In what follows, we discuss what happens if human-centered design is unable to effectively give form to this new technology, why this might be the case, and where we could look for alternatives