I am currently writing a book chapter for a book in which theoretical perspectives and  practical experiences meet. The book is about design, research and user involvement (e.g. co-design and participatory design). It is not a ‘positive’ book in the sense of a methods book or a straightforward plea for co-design, rather it is more critically ‘opening the box’: what are the real problems of putting these ideas into practice and what are some of the more fundamental reasons why some things might or might not work.

In my chapter I am going to challenge the naive goal of designers to try and ‘understand’ the end-user. Much of the work in ‘user centered desin’ is focussed on that: the designer organizes research-activities in order to better ‘understand’ the end-user. But the question is whether we can really understand ‘the other’ in a way that goes beyond the obvious, or in a way that goes beyond that which you already put into the explanation yourself.

When you consider that the way I use a product - and whether that gives me satisfaction - is determined by a complex web of interactions between my brain, my body, the structure of the environment and the properties of the product, the goal I have currently in pursuit, the things I had just been doing, how I socially relate to other people and my role in the organizational system, my culture, and so on, then you realize that “understanding the user” is just three words standing in for a very long story.

Instead of saying how you should do your best to try and ‘understand’ the user I propose to by-pass understanding altogether. Because what we are after all doing is designing a product. So if we can do that without mutual understanding, then all the better, because understanding is difficult, perhaps too difficult.

So instead of understanding each other, consider that the user and the designer will *work on the design* together. In between the designer and the user, then, would stand the evolving product (prototype) itself, and that prototype would serve as an interface between the thoughts and actions, well, the ‘life’ of the designer on the one hand and the thoughts and actions, well, the ‘life’ of the user on the other. The designer’s interpretation of what ‘we are doing’ might be very different from the user’s interpretation of ‘what we’re doing’, but that doesn’t matter so long as everybody is satisfied about ‘what we’re doing’.

One of the interesting questions emerges is whether we know of examples in which it was clear that the resulting design (product, building, service) was relevant, good, high quality work, and yet at the same time it was also clear that the contributing people *did not understand each other at all*.

Does anybody know of such examples?

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