What It Means to Be Human
Human-Centered Design is aging like stale bread. Once a noble guiding principle, it's now mostly a buzzword often wielded to virtue signal rather than guide meaningful action. “Human-centered” gets thrown around in decks, but the people it’s meant to serve are rarely the center of the work.
The depth of interaction design knowledge that brought us here is often ignored or unread.
Why This Matters
Tech has inverted our priorities: business growth steamrolls over genuine human needs. Scott Berkun writes in Bad Design Makes Money, and John Maeda notes in his Design in Tech Report, design is being industrialized, diluted, and stripped of the humanist core that once defined it.
Maeda urges us to return to a more thoughtful practice that genuinely prioritizes human needs over technical novelty.
Where it Goes Wrong
These days, we audit UX with speed-first metrics. We skip process. We sacrifice ergonomics and empathy for delivery deadlines.
User-Centered Design is still the best tool we have to understand the real problem before chasing a solution. But too often, teams skip it. Pressure from leadership, tight timelines, and lack of training lead to products that miss the mark.
Six years ago, Erika Hall wrote Conversational Design. The book is about what makes conversation among humans work and how to keep those principles in mind when designing any interactive system.
As of 2024, most people are familiar with UX, but few seem to practice it with care.
Nostalgia
Retro tech aesthetics, lo-fi interfaces, hand-drawn type, chunky web layouts are everywhere from product launches to fashion campaigns.
At this year’s Figma Config, Jessica Hische, a lettering artist, spoke about slow, deliberate craft. That resurgence of lo-fi, human-made visuals reflects a cultural yearning to reclaim emotional connection in digital experiences.
This isn’t just an aesthetic trend. It’s a longing. A memory of when we were in control of tech, rather than the other way around.
1999
My high school friend Jason once came over to work on a school project. But first, he had something important to show me.
We went into the guest room where my family’s Mac sat. We opened Napster (a free ‘90s version of Spotify), played Disco Devil, and then launched a browser: Netscape.
He typed in: google.com.
It was the first time I saw Google. It was strange, it felt new.
Design as Conversation
Design is often framed as a problem-solving process. And it can be. Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, the Bauhaus, and the rise of “Design Thinking” helped shape design into something structured, repeatable, measurable, and low-risk. Very business-friendly.
That’s not bad. Frameworks like these make engineers and executives feel safe. We speak the same language, and we ship things faster.
But designers know: the real work isn’t so linear.
Design is a conversation about what to keep and what to change.
As we prototype and test, we often realize the thing we thought we were solving wasn’t the actual problem.
The New Horizon
If HCD is losing meaning, we need to rekindle it and broaden it. We need an expanded mindset.
We need to think about ecosystem impact, sustainability, and social responsibility.
Designers are uniquely equipped for this work. We ask better questions. We look beyond outputs.
I'm starting to look at the horizon, toward long-view design that considers impact across time and community,
We need to figure out what to keep from our existing practices and what needs to change to meet the complex challenges ahead.
What do we keep, and what do we change?
New is nice, always.
Eva ツ