Designing for Others, and the Trap of HCI Methods & Practices
Bert Vandenberghe, Karin Slegers · 2016
HCI research often (cl)aims to do good for others, but does it actually? We discuss two cases that exemplify how designing for others can in fact be harmful: the Games Against Health paper by Linehan et al. and the Uninvited Guests video by Superflux. We feel that user-centered methods are often considered as a safe-conduct, simply because the end-user is involved one cannot do wrong. We plead for explicit transparency about the origin of research projects and technology designs to put a critical reflection about underlying values of the work into practice.