Roberto Verganti has written an article for HBR where he says “User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable”.
Verganti argues:
But one thing is certain: User-centered innovation has helped conduct us into an unsustainable world. The reason is sustainability is not embedded in the anthropology of our existing culture, society, and economy.
He says that Toyota’s Prius was not developed from a “user-centred” process (which was pulling car makers “toward heavy, gas-guzzling SUVs”) but instead was:
a vision that came from a better understanding of the future evolution of the socio-cultural and economic scenario.
And Verganti is particularly complementary about his colleague at Politecnico de Milano Ezio Manzini:
Ezio is not at all user centered in his approach. He does not look at what users want and need. He is one of the most visionary and design-driven innovators I can think of. He wants to find sustainable behaviors. Therefore, he refuses to look at dominant consumption. Rather, he explicitly searches for the needle in the haystack: local fringe communities that have already found sustainable solutions for everyday living. He then engineers these solutions and proposes them at a larger scale.
The difference that Verganti wants to make is that “user centred” design is bad because it reinforces the status-quo by studying unsustainable practices and producing unsustainable practices. But a “design centred” approach is good because it studies and produces sustainable practices. Verganti also calls “design centred” processes “vision centred”:
It is only within the framework of a vision-centered process that users can provide precious insights.
The only difference I can see is that, by Verganti’s definition, “user-centred” design starts in the wrong place. By his definition “user-centred” design magnifies current bad practices but “design centred” processes magnify good practices.
Ignoring the (pointless) terminology war, this distinction between re-inforcing the status quo and promoting change revisits long-running questions of what innovation actually is, how it occurs, and how you promote it. Verganti says that bigger, faster, newer versions of current stuff aren’t innovative. But we knew that.
