Does userdriven design drive designdriven users? Reflections on the conceptual framing of user informed design processes

During recent years much has been said concerning the qualities of a user centered approach to design. Obviously, use is of key importance to designers, and obviously an open, searching and negotiating attitude to complex problems is of value. But the products and places that are most treasured by culture, the most popular, often are not the more usable. Clearly, ‘user-driven’ is in itself neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for success in design. How, then, is the concept of user involvement to be framed in the context of design?

The design problems that many user-involving processes are designed to adress, are those of making complex and hidden functionality comprehensible for users. In other words, the design of use-signifying properties or affordances. As a basic taxonomy of affordances, this paper suggests applying Peirce’s three characteristics of signification: The index, the icon and the symbol.  This allows us to see the parts of the material world where shared human understanding rules. Where it is not a question of ‘making sense of things’, since they already make sense. Denotations are accounted for.

Examining examples of indexical, iconic and symbolic areas of design, it is argued that connotations, in all their richness and multifacetted misbehaviour, are the primary operators af design language. Furthermore, referring to philosophy of art, the characteristics of cultural significance is discussed. Cultural significance - one among many possible design virtues - is identified as a certain syntactical and semantic density. A manifold web of denotations and connotations, wherein a tight and rich set of coordinated connections constitutes complex meaning. The implications of these notions for both user-driven innovation and design-driven innovation are outlined.

     The main argument of the paper supports a negative answer to the question posed by the title.