
We Are Not Users
Dialogues, Diversity, and Design
MIT Press
Published on 29. October 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
200 pages
978-0-262-55332-2 (ISBN)
Description
A call to reclaim and rethink the field of designing as a liberal art where diverse voices come together to shape the material world. We live in a material world of designed artifacts, both digital and analog. We think of ourselves as users; the platforms, devices, or objects provide a service that we can use. But is this really the case? We Are Not Users argues that people cannot be reduced to the entity called "user"; we are not homogenous but diverse. That buzz of dissonance that we hear reflects the difficulty of condensing our diversity into "one size fits all." This book proposes that a new understanding of design could resolve that dissonance, and issues a call to reclaim and rethink the field of designing as a liberal art where diverse voices come together to shape the material world. The authors envision designing as a dialogue, simultaneously about the individual and the social--an act enriched by diversity of both disciplines and perspectives. The book presents the building blocks of a language that can conceive designing in all its richness, with relevance for both theory and practice. It introduces a theoretical model, terminology, examples, and a framework for bringing together the social, cultural, and political aspects of designing. It will be essential reading for design theorists and for designers in areas ranging from architecture to software design and policymaking.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge (Massachusetts)
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
36 B&W ILLUS.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
293 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-55332-2 (9780262553322)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Eswaran Subrahmanian | Yoram Reich | Sruthi Krishnan
We Are Not Users
Dialogues, Diversity, and Design
E-Book
03/2020
MIT Press
€33.99
Available for download
Persons
Eswaran Subrahmanian is Research Professor at the Engineering Research Accelerator and Engineering and Public Policy Department at Carnegie Mellon University and is a cofounder of Fields of View, a not-for-profit research organization that designs games and simulations for real-world social problems. Yoram Reich is Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and cofounder and head of the Systems Engineering Research Initiative at Tel Aviv University. Sruthi Krishnan is a writer and cofounder of Fields of View.