Camera Obscura: Beyond the lens of user-centered design

offloaded on to others whose experiences are less visible or less privileged.

Second, by focusing on ease of use, the approach obscures the friction in an experience. Often that friction doesn’t disappear, but instead gets

First, by focusing on the user, UCD has a tendency to obscure the experiences of other participants in the systems we design — those who aren’t end users, per se, but who interact with or are affected by the system.

There is a whole set of second-order experiences that we don’t actively design, but happen as a consequence of what we design. Which means that there’s the potential for a great deal of positive change that can be created simply by shifting how we look and what we look at.

Finally, UCD’s focus on “successful” experiences obscures possibilities that lie outside of predetermined success metrics, preventing us from designing for uncertainty, failure, or experimentation in the ways we might.