We Are Not Users: Dialogues, Diversity, and Design

Description

A call to reclaim and rethink the field of designing as a liberal art where diverse voices come together to shape the material world.We live in a material world of designed artifacts, both digital and analog. We think of ourselves as users; the platforms, devices, or objects provide a service that we can use. But is this really the case? We Are Not Users argues that people cannot be reduced to the entity called “user”; we are not homogenous but diverse. That buzz of dissonance that we hear reflects the difficulty of condensing our diversity into “one size fits all.” This book proposes that a new understanding of design could resolve that dissonance, and issues a call to reclaim and rethink the field of designing as a liberal art where diverse voices come together to shape the material world. The authors envision designing as a dialogue, simultaneously about the individual and the social-an act enriched by diversity of both disciplines and perspectives.The book presents the building blocks of a language th