In this post I will describe a workshop course that I took last semester. I am keeping the details relatively vague for purposes of anonymity.

The focus was designing safety interventions. In this course we went through a design process: define the problem, understand the users, ideate, prototype, present. This framing separates the “designer” from the “user” of the design—it is clearly design for, not design with. The designers were totally isolated from the user community, as the user research component (phase two—understand the user) basically just consisted of interviewing people about their general feelings on safety. An orientation towards innovation was a given, as there was no attempt to look for what is already working. The “problem definition” framing at the outset exemplifies this.

We were then told to develop “personas,” imaginary users who could generate some use cases for our designs. This is sort of the opposite of the design justice principle to “center the voices of those who are directly impacted,” as we actually centered our voices even when we were supposedly designing for others. Though we were meant to assign real responses from our interviewees to our invented personae, we were essentially instructed to speak for an imagined other. In the ideation and prototype stages, our reference point was our personae, not any real user.

Certainly the design process was done with the best of intentions, and to some extent, design justice principles #1 and #9 were followed. But I cannot see how any of the others were—somewhat troubling for an introduction to MIT’s design philosophies.