Keeping it 100 When it Comes to Human-Centered AI Design

Don Norman was right— human-centered design is harmful.

Thirteen years ago the king of modern interaction design wrote a purely provocative piece calling into question the sacred tenet of the design empire he created. In the now infamous article for the Association for Computing Machines “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful,” he put a pitchfork in the budding design movement of the early 2000s when he wrote that human-centered design was problematic because…

“… first, the focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves; second, too much attention to the needs of the users can lead to a lack of cohesion and added complexity in the design.”

The article got so much backlash that Norman had to write a “clarification,” others might call it a retraction, to clear up what he meant by what he wrote. I won’t belabor the debates that ensued but I mention this provocative stance here now because it’s a prime example of the myths and misunderstanding that can infiltrate an industry when principles and philosophies become catch phrases and pithy slogans.

It seems we’re at that harmful crossroads again, where the very codification and myopic principles that Norman saw popping up in interaction design all those years ago, are now resurfacing in the race to inject some humanity into artificial intelligence design.

The same design misinterpretation and malpractice that pushed Norman to reinvent a new…