While I was writing an essay on the question “How is the user as a person differently constituted within the fields of HCI and Anthropology” I realized that from an anthropological perspective the industry’s view of ‘user-centered’ design is in many ways a pretty misleading idea. I stumbled upon a few interesting articles, some from STS scholars, but the most interesting ones by anthropologists working in the design industry analyzing their and their colleagues work with a sharp ethnographer’s eye.

Typically, within a company setting the groups of actors involved in a design project are well defined and kept (mostly) separate. The work of developing, say, a technical product, then, always becomes one of mediating between technicians, designers, and possibly, ethnographers. In this mediation, the seemingly good- natured idea of ‘user-centered design’ works to conceal significant power relations between so-called ‘users’ and ‘producers’. In one HCI study I looked at, the designers used questionnaires as a way to explore what users wanted. But this alone did not seem to be enough to define system requirements, because later on, it was pedagogic experts who were consulted to speak on behalf of the ‘user’ and to further explore how future use could be envisioned and how the technology should look like. This is very similar to what STS scholars Grint and Woolgar describe in their ethnography of a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes. They observe ”an effective rationale for not placing too much emphasis on users’ views.” And they note:

The ‘user’ here is an outsider to the company that does not understand the technology. This position is reinforced in the stage of usability trials. Here, users are directly exposed to the project, but only when a prototype is ready for use. This is important to highlight, as usability trials confront the user with an already black-boxed technology, that he or she has to somehow try to relate to. In light of this, in this blog post Seavers goes even so far as to parallel the commercial idea of the ‘user’ to that of the ‘savage’, signaling that both terms designate “a class of people disempowered in relation to technology”. 

An anthropological understanding of the user, then, recognizes that a lot of technologies are “inflected by the sensibilities of technical elites” (Nafus 2014). It could be argued that designers, in their naivety of ‘user-centeredness’ are complicit in reproducing this power imbalance. As Nafus notes, users “who do not fit the mold must work even harder as they appropriate technologies for their own purposes”. The so-called ‘user-centred’ design process, then, produces ready-made products that set rules to the game and thus constrain users to play by their own rules. But this is no easy work, as users are not simply on the receiving end but actively interact with products and constantly negotiate and modify the rules that are inscribed in the technology and thus the developers’ idea about who they are and what they do. Anthropologically, the ‘user’, then, can be better grasped with the idea of a designer.

Nafus’ article “Design for X: Prediction and the Embeddedness (or Not) of Research in Technology Production.” was published in: Subversion, Conversion, Development : Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design, which I highly recommend.
And this is Grint and Woolgar’s ethnography “The Machine at Work : Technology, Work, and Organization” from 1997.