FREE PUBLIC DISCUSSION EVENT

Panel:

Claudia Garduño García, Partner, Design Your Action, Mexico City
Sampsa Hyssala, Professor of Co-Design, Aalto University
Rose Matthews, Helsinki-based designer specialising in underserved populations

Chair: Guy Julier

The term ‘user-centred’ design comes with a range of associated practices, including human-centred design, participatory design and co-design. As with these, user-centred design has a mixed pedigree, including Scandinavian and other developments in the 1960s stemming from ergonomics to human-computer interaction (HCI) explorations of the 1980s. It therefore covers a variety of expected ‘users’, objects and situations as well as politics.

But does the term risk reducing conceptions of users to mere consumers? How does it engage, if at all, with social practices beyond the individual? Does it capture the complexity of economic, social and cultural contexts and actions? Who is the user in any case!!??

These and many other questions will be debated.