Human-Centred Design and its Inherent Ethical Qualities

Human-centred design (HCD) is an approach which enables designers, developers and engineers to focus their projects on prospective users of the products or services they are working on. It enables them to focus on users’ experiences and to involve them throughout the process of design and development, in an iterative and multidisciplinary process. This chapter explores the ethical qualities that are inherent to HCD. Three HCD projects are discussed, using the lenses of virtue ethics, ethics-of-alterity, and philosophical pragmatism in order to foreground these ethical qualities in terms of, respectively, the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the people involved, the face-to-face encounters and interactions, and the managing of a project and its iterative cycles. It is argued that HCD is based on cooperation, e.g., in the process of collaborative problem-setting and solution-finding, and that the people involved need to allow for inward directed moves, e.g., for curiosity and learning, and for outward directed moves, e.g., for creating and decision-making.