A 'way of being' in design practice: zen and the art of being a human-centred practitioner

Design's attempts to address social, ethical and environmental concerns of our time have often been marred by well-meaning scholars who have generated hard-line definitions and models of what it means to be an 'ethical designer'. Their arguments often abstract values and advocate ideological and political positions that designers can find difficult to apply in their daily practices. Clearly, it is not as simple as prescribing 'right' or 'wrong' values for designers to have and then translating them through design. Whatever values there are, those values need to matter to people enough to translate them into action.[1] It will be argued that values are not impersonal; they cannot be detached and subsumed under a more universal value or comparable importance. The paper opens with a critique of this prescriptive approach to highlight reasons why ethical design remains stuck in a rut. It then moves on to discuss the close relationship between being ethical and being a human-centred practitioner in design. In doing so, I critique common notions of human-centred design that emphasise ergonomic, 'human-factors' as well as the 'do-gooder' disposition that is associated with humanitarian design. Instead, I offer an alternative framework for human-centred design based on the Japanese ethical concept woven into what it means to be human.