What is a human? the ontology of personhood and human-centred design

Abstract

For the last few decades, human-centred design has increasingly been a dominant paradigm in communication design. The Human-centred Design Movement (HCDM) is broadly motivated by three core ethical concerns: (1) environmental sustainability, (2) sustainable social development, and (3) designs that improve human lives by one metric or another. Despite these lofty concerns, the field continues to be beleaguered by unethical practices—even in the sub-disciplines that developed within HCDM. I argue that HCDM has faltered in its aims because it is based on human centred design principles (HcD) that fail to grapple with its primary subject: namely, to understand what a human being is, at an ontological level. Its current approach is to describe humanness in terms of design epistemology, but this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of ethics, which is necessarily personalist. In this study I form a multi-disciplinary hermeneutic drawing on Schelerian phenomenology, Ricoeurian hermeneutics and Franklian existenzanalyse to form a more robust and coherent picture of the ontology of personhood. I critically examine the claims and commitments of HCDM through these disciplinary lenses to identify the gaps, false dichotomies and false equivocations that have hamstrung its attempts to improve disciplinary ethics in communication design. By the end of the study, I make recommendations for the way ahead, suggesting falsehoods that HCDM scholars need to stop perpetuating, truths they need to tell, and questions they need to answer.