👩🏻‍🎤Design Won’t Save the World

Human-centered design is great for mops and phones, but it won’t solve society’s biggest problems

By Jesse Viwer

When I was in design school, this statement filled me with incredible energy and pride. I felt it in my core. How could I not? Over the last few decades, design — and design thinking — has ascended to the point of being routinely viewed as one of the differentiators for companies and products.
Behind this ascension lies design’s anointed operating system: human-centered design.

The fundamental idea behind human-centered design is that, to find the best solution, designers need to develop an empathetic understanding of the people they are designing for.

Designers do this through user interviews, contextual observations (watching users go about their business in their “normal” life), and a number of other tools that help designers put themselves in users’ shoes. Once you can paint an empathetic picture of a user’s needs, the next step in the process is to identify a few key insights and use those to create a solution.

Earlier in Milan Fashion Week, it was Armani that had show attendees amusedly scratching their heads. In a triumphantly swooning all-caps note, Armani wrote that the legend of the nymph is “A METAPHOR OF FEMININITY, BUT ALSO THE REPRESENTATION OF A GRADUAL LIGHTENING.” It noted that the collection’s transparent shoes were a reflection of “THE SEARCH FOR A NATURAL FEMININITY,” and that “THE LONG DRESSES SWAY LIKE HALOES OF MIST, UNTIL THEY RISE IN THE GENTLE, POLYCHROME SPARKLE OF THE LONG EVENING CLOAK GOWNS, SWATHED IN EMBROIDERED DETAILS.” Imagine Tilda Swinton in I Am Love reading it and you’ve basically got yourself a nice afternoon of Italian bourgeois ASMR.

One famous example is the development of the Swiffer mop. Designers, tasked with improving the process of housecleaning, observed customers cleaning their homes.

A key insight was that time was critical. Cleaning often cut into time for other activities, and any time savings would be a boon. Mopping was identified as an especially time-consuming part of cleaning, with multiple steps and multiple pieces of equipment, not to mention waiting for the floor to dry. So designers created a “dry mop” (the Swiffer) that simplified the process and saved time. It was a huge commercial success.