What If Human-Centered Design Isn’t Enough?

Jarrett Fuller:

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. My name is Jarrett Fuller, and I’m your guest host for With Intent‘s second season. This season, I am turning the mics back on ID’s faculty for a series of roundtable discussions and interviews that explore questions facing designers, design educators and design students today.

Today we are talking about human-centered design. Across every design field, at every level, we can hear about this idea of human-centered design, but what does that term really mean? How is human-centered design different than just any other type of design? And perhaps more importantly, is human-centered design really the goal that we should be focused on? Does it somehow overlook non-human design, for example, or ignore environmental issues? How can we think about design that is perhaps ecology-centered, or as one of my guests refers to it today, humanity-centered design?

To talk through these questions, I am joined by ID faculty, Ruth Schmidt and Carlos Teixeira. Ruth Schmidt has been teaching at ID since 2009 and developed courses in behavioral design, communication theory, and semiotics. Her current research is on the intersection of what she calls humanity-centered design with behavioral economics.

Carlos Teixeira joined ID in 2016 and works across design strategy, open innovation, and sustainable solutions, and is the faculty director of Action Labs. His current research revolves around the question, how can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environment, finance, and social networks? And that is the question that we use in many ways to guide this conversation. So here is my conversation with Ruth and Carlos.

Ruth, I want to start with a question for you. This episode is centered around human-centered design and what that means and the limits of that and where we go with that. And as I was preparing for this, Ruth, I noticed in your bio that you say that you’re interested in something called humanity-centered design. And I was wondering if you could talk about what humanity-centered design is and that choice of the word humanity over the more common usage of human-centered design, if there’s some thinking behind that.

Ruth Schmidt:

Yes. So it is intentional. And it’s funny because when I was learning about human-centered design, I actually graduated from the program that I now teach. So I got a master’s here at ID, and human-centered design was the name of the game. That really was where the action was at the time. But yeah, more recently, I think partly because of where human-centered design as a whole is going, and also partly because of where my natural interests and research were leading, it’s been demonstrated in a variety of settings, some ways more dramatic than others, that only designing for humans can actually lead us down a dangerous path because we satisfy human needs at the expense of others; and others being non-human elements like the planet, it can also mean that we’re not thinking about systemic effects. And you could argue that human-centered design has actually led to a bunch of dangerous habits when it comes to using digital devices, for example.

We can lean into human tendencies by having them use infinite scroll, and we all know that that’s actually not such a great thing for people to do. So yeah, humanity-centered design is intentional. It’s probably also a part step to the right place where we want to go. But essentially the intent behind it was to say, okay, look, humans are still important. And my particular area of research is around behavioral design. So yeah, there are people. Where there are people, there’s behavior. Where there’s behavior, there are people. So we’re not throwing them away. But it’s also an effort to connect what has normally been centered on people to say, okay, humanity is a much bigger set of concerns because it’s about maybe the sustainability of our planet or how we interact and work in systems. So it’s a part step there, but at least, it’ll be the bigger picture I think than human-centered design is capable of saying.

Jarrett Fuller:

Right. And I want to come back to a lot of things that you actually said there. But let me ask you one other quick question before I turn it over to Carlos with another question. So much of your work is about this intersection or overlap or relationship between behavioral science and design. Could you talk a little bit more about those two fields and how you sort of work across them and how you see those coming together? What does that actually look like in your work?

Ruth Schmidt:

Yeah. The behavioral design is a fairly new field. So it came out of… I sometimes joke. I’m actually older than behavioral science. Because the field itself started in the ’70s, and basically it’s a much more scientific way of understanding people’s behavior. So it’s looking at all the ways in which we’re, quote unquote, irrational by saying, okay, we grab the cookie instead of the apple, even though we know we shouldn’t. We’re terrible about planning for the future, even though we know better. So there’s a whole field basically that’s saying, how do we understand all of these tendencies that we have that are not necessarily in our best interest? And we know that, and yet, we still act in ways that are unhealthy. And that field hit the mainstream in about 2008, which is when I was here getting my master’s. So part of the answer to your question is that, I was already steeped in human-centered design. I started to become aware of this other field, and they’re a beautiful complement.

For people of a certain age, when I say it’s like peanut butter getting in your chocolate and chocolate getting in your peanut butter, not everyone gets that commercial metaphor anymore. But it’s a really beautiful way of understanding different aspects of how people act, make decisions and make judgments. So I rode that wave basically. So what I do now, after spending a bunch of time using those insights in professional practice, I now focus on essentially how do I make designers conversant and comfortable with behavioral science so they can bring that into their practice. And then the other half of it is how do I talk to behavioral scientists and help them understand the importance and the value of design, that if you’re only designing for behavior, you’re actually leaving a bunch of really, really important stuff out. So it’s cross… I talk to different audiences in different ways, but it’s really the conversation between those two fields that I think is really rich and really exciting.

Jarrett Fuller:

Maybe this is an interesting way to connect to the work that Carlos is doing. So Carlos, on your bio, it says that your research is centered around this question, how can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environment, finance, and social networks? And so I’m going to ask you that. How can design affect the lives and wellbeing of people and communities by leveraging the interconnectivity of markets, technology, environments, finance, and social networks? What does that research look like right now?

Carlos Teixeira:

Great, great question.

Jarrett Fuller:

It’s your question, Carlos. That was your question.

Carlos Teixeira:

That’s true. That’s true. To put a little bit in context, this question, it’s based on trying to move the understanding of products and services beyond the initial industrial design that was focusing a lot on the product in itself, designing the products for industrial production. And then on the second stage, you have the human-centered design approach, understanding those products as they interact with humans in their daily lives and their experiences. But what we are saying is that those products, in reality, they happen at the intersection of multiple systems. So I like to think about projects and service as things in context, things in a larger context, and then playing a major role of being at the intersection of those multiple systems. The examples of that is, if you just think about bike sharing, bike sharing, we can think about a service for micro-mobility. But in reality, it is something that has multiple intersections.

It’s related to payments that you do; it relates to exercise that you use the bike; it relates to mobility and it relates to commerce depending on where you’re putting those bike stations and the local commerce that you are enabling around that. So when you start to look about those products and service in the larger context that they exist, not only as it relates to the user experience, then you’re going to see that there are multiple intersections happening over there. The type of challenge that we have now require us to think this new paradigm of products and services, those large intersections.

Jarrett Fuller:

There’s something that’s coming through in both of your answers to that first question that I would love to run by you. I’ve said this to my students, and I say this flippantly, and it’s a little bit of a joke, but not really, is that a lot of what we call human-centered design is really a corporation-centered design. And so Ruth, that’s your example of the infinite scrolling. And I think when we don’t think about design in these systems and in these contexts, often this what we are centering is profit, attention, eyeballs, kind of things like that. And I’m wondering if either of you have thoughts on that. And Ruth, I want to take it to you first because you said something about the direction that human-centered design was going was why you were interested in this new term humanity-centered design. What do you think about this trajectory of human-centered design and its relationship to, in most cases, to profit and business use cases?

Ruth Schmidt:

It’s a really wonderful question in part because there are probably many causes. Part of it though, and it’s interesting, because even this I think is part of the DNA of ID, where design and business and strategy were very much part of… Jay Doblin was here and led the school for several years. So generations of designers ago at this point. But the idea that you could combine business and design and strategy was at the time really new and exciting and novel. And maybe what we’re seeing is that urge and that instinct, which is interesting and powerful, but also has maybe gone off and taken on a life of its own. Because yeah, it’s interesting, even as I think about where our students graduate or where they go after they graduate, many of them are now very excited and interested in things like social innovation and civic design. But they’re still a pretty hefty set.

And I was one of these people who went into consulting, for example. And so I think how clients have directed human-centered design or have human-centered design because people need to get jobs after graduating, ends up. You end up being working in the service of somebody who, yes, is there to make a profit. And using human-centered design may be in ways that are not… It’s not about evil or good, but certainly taking the skillset of what designers are good at and sending it in a direction where there is a lot of capitalist momentum behind where design is going. Because getting eyeballs on things and selling things that people want to purchase has gotten very, very intertwined, I think, with where human-centered design has kind of led. So it’s not exclusive to that, but that’s definitely been a contributing factor.

Jarrett Fuller:

Carlos, I want to hear your thoughts on this. But I want to come back to what you’re saying about the business side of this, because I think it’s easy to just push that aside. But that’s a part of it also. Carlos, do you have thoughts on this? Especially just thinking about this contextual thinking about design, how that maybe shifts, what we mean when we say human-centered, or my tongue in cheek term, corporation-centered?

Carlos Teixeira:

Yeah. No, I think that Ruth already covered very important and relevant points. I would like to expand on what she was saying by saying that one of the key novelties about human-centered design was the idea that when we are designing, we need to shift our focus from looking at the product in itself and considering more of the products in the context of daily activities. So this notion of human-centered design was not a commercial issue, was not a corporate issue. It was more about how to understand the products as they exist and the role that the agency that they have on the daily life of people. So the shift towards activities, we have to keep in mind that products in the past, they were designed as the result of industrial production and as also part of market competition. So everything was about what is the market share, where and how do we beat the competition.

When you start to shift… And this not necessary always created the best type of product for the consumer. It’s just creating something that competes better in the marketplace. The shift into the activities made everybody start to focus on the user. This became picked up by the corporations as a business strategy. So innovation started to emerge by looking at the activities and finding products that fit better in the daily life of people and entire markets could be created around that.

So we didn’t have much about this concept of breakthrough innovations because it was all about competition. The other thing that I want to highlight, that human-centered design and the focus on activities was happening at the same time that digital technology was emerging. And digital technology was very disruptive in terms of how we do things in our daily lives. We might think about the digital natives these days, but if you go back 30 years ago, the fact that you could buy a airline ticket online [inaudible 00:15:41] something that was very different from you having to plan ahead, go to a travel agency and get a paper ticket and all that.

So a lot of behavior was changed. So daily activities were being changed. And so there was this perfect marriage between design, the transformations of digital technology, the disruptions of daily practice through the digital technology and the ability of design focused on the activities rather than the products. So it was interesting marriage that corporate America pick up that and then it roll out. I think that there is still a need for all the other sectors such as government and society to pick up on that focus on the activities.

Jarrett Fuller:

Do you have a sense of… And I’m making a blanket statement here because I think there are still certainly designers who are operating that way, but how to get back to this idea of focusing on activities about making things more streamlined, easier, et cetera, responding to the needs of people as opposed to market share. It seems like some of that has gotten lost in the discourse and the education. How are you making sure that stays a focus in the classroom? Or do you see ways to course correct some of this a little bit?

Carlos Teixeira:

I think that this know-how of designing, of doing human-centered design, I think it’s very well established. So it’s a matter of educating a larger group of professionals, leaders in all sectors. So I think this is still an ongoing process. The problem with that direction is that, at the same time, they [inaudible 00:17:27] still growing the use and application of human-centered design, we also discovering what the limitations of that. So there’s this kind of disparity and this kind of dichotomy between these focus on activities are very important and they can really improve the quality of life and the products. But we are detecting also that there are unintended consequences of focusing on the user experience. For example, when we design for the user, a lot of the drivers of that is convenience. So making everything very convenient for the user. One of the unintended consequences of convenience is that we generate a lot of waste. For us to make… Think about when you carry out food, you’d have a lot of package, and you eat a meal, and 5, 10 minutes later, you are disposing a lot of materials.

So convenience is an example that it’s made wonders focusing on the activity, but it started to create unintended consequences such as environmental degradation and the ways that we generate. If you think about the bike sharing example that I gave, and people having the convenience of paying with credit card, this is fantastic. But this is also discriminatory because people that don’t have credit, they don’t have a credit card. And so people with without credit and financial inclusion, financial access, they are discriminated on the ability of using bike sharing. So those are things that we were not aware that we were creating as a consequence of focusing so much on the daily activities and became something that privileged, the ones that can be consumers, consumers that can afford the better quality products.

Jarrett Fuller:

That’s so interesting and I think it hits to what Ruth was talking about with this sort of slight shift from human-centered, which sounds like a single person, to humanity-centered, where it is about all of us collectively. What does that mean when we’re thinking about us as a species as opposed to us as a human? Which our default is to think about convenience and streamlining. And I’m wondering if that can even be pushed further. And Ruth, you started to get to this in your first answer. But what does a eco-centered design look like or a environment-centered design, where it is not saying that humans are not important or are not the user, but de-centers that immediate convenience in realization to all of those unintended consequences that Carlos is talking about? Ruth, do you have thoughts on that?

Ruth Schmidt:

I have lots of thoughts.

Jarrett Fuller:

Go for it. Go for it.

Ruth Schmidt:

No, I think part of what… And this is maybe building on what Carlos was saying also, that’s a key aspect to this. Because Carlos, you mentioned the rise of digital technology, and I would even argue that questions about what progress even looks like are really important to consider here because we tend to consider progress. How do I do it faster? How do I get more, cheaper? All of these things that feel beneficial to that end consumer maybe, but are at the risk of or at the expense of larger systems. So I think that’s one piece of it, is even to think about what progress really should mean and not to equate it with technology or with bigger, faster, cheaper, which is where it tends to go. But yeah, another aspect, again building off of Carlos, what you were describing too, is that in trying to make things faster, more streamlined, A, we don’t always recognize the importance of reflection.

I actually think that’s an incredibly important part of design, both as a designer but also just, well, as a person, as a human. We don’t often get the chance to reflect when things are happening in a speedy way. This is not to pick on Amazon, but anyone who has one click Amazon setup, it [inaudible 00:21:48] as soon as you click it and it’s purchased. There’s no friction to that process. And that can be both for the sustainability reasons and the waste reasons, but also, it can mean that we don’t always temper our own behavior. And we don’t always think as carefully as perhaps we ought about do we actually need that thing, or are we just getting it because it’s quick? And one last thought maybe to add on to that is that this question about who has access is also incredibly important because increasingly, there’s the recognition absolutely that who is considered a viable consumer or who has purchasing power.

Things like the switch from cash to credit cards, which has been coming up in a variety of ways over the past couple of years is a really great example of that. Because it can seem again like we’re leaning into progress. Everything is, you wave a phone, it’s something you can buy it. But it leaves whole swaths of populations out and it means that the increased difference between who the haves and the have nots are enormous. And when that gets built into the infrastructure, I sometimes talk about this notion of choice infrastructure, which is basically not targeted behavior change, but the whole set of conditions that surround how we make decisions or what we have access to. So again, yeah, I guess that sense of humanity is not just about what’s good for me or people like me, but recognizing the inequity that gets built into those systems altogether. If human-centered design is not focusing on those things, it’s not doing a great job of making sure that we as a society are actually standing up for what we should.

Jarrett Fuller:

It reminds me of… There’s a line from the systems theorist, Stafford Beer. He wrote that, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” And at face value, that seems like, yes, of course. But it raises all these questions about unintended consequences. The purpose of a system is not what we say it does or what it is supposed to do or what we set out to do, but actually what it does when it is in the world doing what it does. And so it raises all these questions about, well what were these unintended consequences? Is this actually what it was designed to do? And this hits to what you were just talking about with this idea of reflection. And I’m wondering if you could talk about that just a little bit more, and the need for that, not just in consumers, but also in designers and in the design process. How do you think about that or how do you encourage that in the classroom and with your students?

Ruth Schmidt:

So in the classroom… Yeah, so, A, I agree. Yeah, it is actually something that I think designers can and should do. And we’re maybe the barrier between not letting things go forward that really do need to be thought. I find it very important. And I realize this is very much from my personal background too. But I think being a good designer means being a good critical thinker. When I look back to my own classes, whether it was in college, graduate school, or even learning, I realize that the things that make me a really strong designer are less about specific skills, but it’s because I’ve trained myself. And I’m not putting myself on a pedestal here. I realize the things that I find important are about really looking at all of these things and interrogating the choices you’re making, and having different lenses to understand the implications of choices. Because even the term unintended consequences, you could argue, maybe they were unintended. But sometimes we could’ve seen that that was going to happen.

Jarrett Fuller:

Right, exactly. Exactly.

Ruth Schmidt:

It’s not totally mysterious. So sometimes, yes, in the rush to put things into market, that can be one component of it. But I find also in my behavioral design classes in particular, a lot of what we work through is how to understand both what it is that we’re designing into, but also how to understand, for example, where there are uncertainties and how to design for uncertainty both the humankind, but also, again, what are the conditions, what are the infrastructures and how is that going to support things that maybe we didn’t intend but are likely to happen because we’re functioning in spaces that encourage certain kinds of behavior over others.

Jarrett Fuller:

I a hundred percent agree with all of that. I think that’s exactly right and speaks to my own background also. And so it was really nice to get some confirmation in my own thinking. Carlos, I want to connect this to something that you said earlier about thinking about these design systems within particular context. And it strikes me that this reflection that Ruth is talking about is a very valuable skill that I think designers tried to have. And I’m wondering if you see a sort of responsibility or role of the designer to be part of the space for that reflection when they are working in these complex systems where everybody is moving really fast and there’s all these different parts and different teams have different goals, where designers or design generally can step into say, “Hey, wait a minute. We need to think about this.” Or there’s something about the designer who can have that overall view of how these systems are coming together, that seems like an interesting place to start to raise these questions. What do you think?

Carlos Teixeira:

So this is something that we engage in very deep and extended conversation with our students because the tendency when we look about those systems is for us to try to be the superhero. Position design is the one that can understand the whole, can understand all the specifics, can be fully interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and be at the center and do everything and solve all the problems. So there is this kind of [inaudible 00:27:57] of the superhero in overloading with design with multiple areas of expertise. I think this is one very dangerous and very problematic extreme.

Jarrett Fuller:

We’re going to do a whole episode on the problems with designer superhero, Carlos. So thank you for previewing that.

Carlos Teixeira:

Wonderful. And this also brings the notion that every time that we’re talking about those complex issues, we tend to think about that we have to have a theory for everything or the theory of everything. So everything connects to everything. Everything can be related. And there are a lot of talking points and reflection points. But this is not a liberal arts school. So when we are exercising multiple perspectives about the same thing, design is about [inaudible 00:28:45]; design is about integration; design is about coming up with solutions. So for me, what designers have as a unique position, at least that’s how I approach with my students in the classrooms, is to bring the expertise on products and service. I think we have a long history of that. I think we need to be able to leverage that expertise as it relates to systems. So for example, I see a lot of other fields that they can deal with systems much better than designers.

For example, policy makers, engineers, and many others, they can think the totality of systems, they can think about the parts and their connections. They have ways of measuring those things like climate. This is something that designers are not going to be expert, period. Okay. But you can bring systems thinking to that. What I think is exclusive to designers is that most of the people that are thinking about systems, they are thinking at the macro level and the meso level. But they’re not thinking at the micro level, where products and service exists. And when I see everybody explaining complex issues, they always stop at the meso level, and they can never explain how the like button has a major impact of how people are categorized in different groups, and they create echo chambers of discussions that create this kind of very conflicting interaction in social media. This [inaudible 00:30:24] less, as Ruth was saying, of the button is an example.

So for me, I think that we have the unique ability of understanding product, service, and communications as they happen at the activity level in everybody’s daily life. But we need to be able to connect that into the largest systems, understand how this is related to races and to [inaudible 00:30:50] practice, to economic systems, to climate systems, and work with the other disciplines to show how those things in daily life, they have agency in the largest system. So whatever we create here will have impact and have agency. But there is very little talk about that. So for me, as we are entering this new era of design, I strongly believe that designers need to leverage the expertise on product, service, and communication. But they need to contextualize that in larger systems and work with the other disciplines to show the role that those things play in creating [inaudible 00:31:33].

Jarrett Fuller:

I love that. I think that’s great. And I have a question. This question is for both of you. And I’m not totally sure how to ask it. Ruth, you mentioned this earlier about having a consulting background and both of you have talked about students going into business settings. And I think it’s really easy to… Capitalism like, that’s just like, stop working in business. And it’s not that easy. That’s a really complicated problem. And I’m wondering… I want to be careful to not villainize businesses or people who work in those contexts. And I’m wondering about how design can help if they even can. Businesses think beyond short term profit or, Carlos, what you were just talking about, about how the service level, the product level can speak to these larger systems. How do some of these ideas that are thinking about climate change, thinking about inequalities, thinking about democracy, using this lens of human-centered design in a business context, how do you see those things fitting together? Do you have thoughts on that?

Ruth Schmidt:

I can give a stab and we can maybe go back and forth on this because, A, it’s just a huge question.

Jarrett Fuller:

Yeah. I know.

Ruth Schmidt:

So part of it is that, similarly to Carlos, what you were just describing where there’s the macro, meso, micro in terms of systems. If we also think about what’s happening within commercial organizations, there are decisions that are happening at that high strategic level. There’s the middle level of deciding how to execute on things or how organizationally they’re organized to do that. And then there’s the lowest level of let’s actually do those things and get stuff out the door. Essentially we’re making decisions around whatever it is, how to build an app or how to deliver services. And part of what I think makes it complicated is that when we train our students here, they go into practice and whether it’s consulting or a commercial setting or a civic setting for that matter. They don’t jump right to the top of the food chain.

So part of it is also I think having… How design is conceived and seen as a valuable component of making things broadly, whether it’s experiences, services, offerings. The value of design may look very different and be talked about in a very different way when you’re thinking about designing an app versus how it works and that mid-level of how to bring design and distribute design knowledge within an organization versus how to think about design at a more strategic level. So part of, I think, what makes it a very complicated question… I guess I’m answering your question by asking more questions.

Part of what makes it so challenging is that there’s not one kind of design. So how people are thinking, the people who are at the top levels of organizations are there primarily to make sure that the business is sustainable, not so much that the world is sustainable necessarily. So there can be conflicting tensions there in terms of how people see the value of design, which is itself a Pandora’s box. ‘Cause I think how people even think about how design is valuable has always been a little tricky because it’s not always easily measurable. And so whether that’s value towards really positive, beneficial ends that are more broad in societal or how we think about design use to create individual services or offerings.

That’s another part of it too. I do know just to close this, and I’d love Carlos to hear what you’re thinking as well. But we’re having so many more conversations at school about these issues than we certainly did when I was here as a student. So for what it’s worth, I don’t know. Maybe I’m forgetting something. But when I was here about 13 years ago as a student, we just didn’t talk as much about power or equity or how design can both contribute to those or help to get them to be more [inaudible 00:35:53].

Jarrett Fuller:

I see that. For what it’s worth, I see that too. I see that too here. It’s the exact same thing.

Ruth Schmidt:

So there’s been a real change I think just in terms of like, “Hey, this is something that we can’t control only by ourselves.” It is a much wider range of things, but, damn it, we better talk about it because we can’t be sending people out into the world who are not considering the implications of what they bring. So, yeah, Carlos, I’m going to pass it to you because I would love to hear what you think.

Carlos Teixeira:

To build up on what Ruth is saying, I think that we have evolved a lot on the aspect, for example, of human-centered design, service design, and there is a growing sector of the civic design. So all those things are very useful for what they are for. But I think that there is a need for us to deconstruct all those practices and start imagine new practice. Because the type of thing that we were discussing before about those infrastructures, about these intersections, about those systems, about those unintended consequences, the new types of solutions. And we haven’t even talked today about all the technological developments that are going on, and how they transform the things that we do, that we create, and the design practice that are needed. So for me, I think there is a need for deconstructing a lot of the design practice and rebuilding them around the new needs.

That’s one point. The second point is, I strongly believe that what is going to be the way that we’re going to deal with those large systems, what I call complex spaces of innovation, because they are at the intersection of multiple systems, we’re going to depend on large corporations or large organizations, let me say in that way, to be able to deal with this type of problem. I say large organizations because they are the ones that have the resources; they are the ones that have the talent; they are the ones that can do long-term investment; they have the expertise to do implementation, and they can stand resiliently through a process of transformation. So it can be government agencies, can be universities, can be corporations, foundations. So I strongly believe that those transformations is going to happen through those large organizations. And we have to think about where design is situated in them and how can we have the greatest impact by situating design strategically in where those reframing are happening, and the strategic decisions are also taking place.

Because I strongly believe that design is the field that’s going to bring choices rather than just decisions to those organizations. And the last point about that is that one of the areas that we haven’t considered design at all, and this is a whole new area that we are starting to explore an Institute of Design, is to understand how design works in investments. So private long-term investment on infrastructures is going to be one of the most transformative forces of the 21st century. And design is not there. Design is not participating on the decisions where investments are made and where large sums of capital is put on that is locking in what is going to be supported and develop and encourage and incentivize it in the next 30 to 50 years. So we have been starting to work on this notion of design in capital markets, design as it relates to investment, and working on the design abilities and design competencies in that area. That’s what I’m saying that, we need to deconstruct a lot of the current design practice and we imagine new design practice in different kind of organizations.

Jarrett Fuller:

I think that’s exactly right. And I think this conversation had a risk of being a real downer and being really depressing talking about the problems with human-centered design and the problems with the environment and social inequalities. And that ended on a really, really nice way forward. And so I think that’s a really nice way to end this conversation. Ruth and Carlos, it was really great to hear more about your work and your thinking around these ideas. So thanks for doing this with me.

Carlos Teixeira:

Thank you very much.

Ruth Schmidt:

Thanks for having us.

Jarrett Fuller:

With Intent is a production of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. This season is produced in collaboration with the school’s 85th anniversary as part of the 2022–2023 Latham Fellowship. A special thanks to all of our guests this season and everyone at ID for their support. My name is Jarrett Fuller. Thanks for listening.