How do you design “good” design? Does it come from lone genius? Is it luck? Is it the result of hard work? Where does all of this stuff that humanity makes actually come from? Here’s one (somewhat glamorizing) articulation of what design is:

The video gets a lot of things right: design is a way of thinking, a mindset, a form of optimistic approach to imagining better worlds. The video argues that it is something fundamentally human. But what makes design  good ?

To answer that, we have to delve into the history of design. Starting in the 20th century, people started to think about these questions and come up with names and definitions for “ways” of designing we’ll call  design paradigms . Some of these paradigms are things you might recognize from your own practices and some are things you might have already encountered in classes or in industry. Each paradigm has its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s talk about some of the more notable ones and how they differ.

Let’s start with one of the most basic approaches to design:  appropriation ^{6 6}

Dourish, P. (2003). The appropriation of interactive technologies: Some lessons from placeless documents. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

A cousin of appropriation is  bricolage ^{9 9}

Louridas, P. (1999). Design as bricolage: anthropology meets design thinking. Design Studies.

In modern design education (found primarily in schools of design and art) we see another form of design process that some have called  “designerly ways of knowing ^{5 5}

Cross, N. (1982). Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies.

This takes us to more explicit design paradigms, which arguably combine all of the skills above. One of the most common in the world today is  human-centered design ^{1 1}

Bannon, L. (2011). Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centered perspective. ACM interactions.

One critique of human-centered design is that it narrowly focuses on people and their needs rather than a systems-level view of the activities that people engage in, and the multiple people and systems involved in those activities. For example, consider the activity of driving a bus: it’s not just the driver that matters, but the dispatchers that communicate information to drivers, the other drivers on the road, and even the riders occasionally. One paradigm that addresses this more directly is  activity-centered design ^{12 12}

Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. ACM interactions.

Some design scholars have questioned whether focusing on people and activities is enough to account for what really matters, encouraging designers to consider  human values ^{7 7}

Friedman, B., & Hendry, D. G. (2019). Value sensitive design: Shaping technology with moral imagination. MIT Press.

Some design scholars are skeptical about human-centered design because they don’t believe modeling and verifying people’s needs through a few focused encounters is sufficient to actually address people’s problems, or systems of activities ^{12 12}

Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. ACM interactions.

Participatory design, of course, has the risk of overlooking key stakeholders, and therefore producing designs that do not work for everyone.  Universal design ^{3,11,13 3}

Burgstahler, S. (2009). Universal design: Process, principles, and applications. DO-IT..

One critique of all of these approaches, however, is that no design, no matter how universal, will equally serve everyone. This is the premise of  design justice ^{4 4}

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.

You can think of all of these different design paradigms as simply having a different  unit of analysis .  Whereas human-centered design focuses on an individual, activity-centered design focuses on a system and the activities in it, value-sensitive design focuses on human value tensions amongst diverse stakeholders. Universal design focuses on all of humanity, whereas design justice focuses on power structures, oppression, and communities. Each different unit of analysis exposes different aspects of a problem, and therefore leads to different types of solutions.

If you’re engaging in design, how do you choose from these paradigms? If you have the freedom to choose, you have to consider your values: if you’re concerned with social justice, it is hard to recommend anything but the design justice perspective, as it places justice at the center of design. Other paradigms might be easier, since they involve giving up less power, working less with affected communities, and therefore taking less time. But that just means designing something that may be less effective, sustainable, and successful. In most professional design contexts, however, you might be forced to work within design paradigms that are less justice-focused, with more attention towards profit and speed. In these contexts, you’ll have to decide whether to compromise on just and effective outcomes to optimize speed and profit, or whether to advocate for change.