A design provocation for humble designers and empowered users

Abstract

Designs are ultimately imbued with the values and judgments of the designers who made them. This means that there is an inherent power imbalance between designers and users. Some design philosophies embrace the position of designer as empowered architect (libertarian paternalism), while others try to shift power to users by integrating them into the design process (participatory design). In this paper we present a third approach called “use-time nudge,” which maintains the authority of designer at design-time, yet grants the users more power at use-time. Use-time nudge challenges designers to question the values they imbue into their work at design-time and respond by deliberately deferring those judgments to the user to be made at use-time.