What if we saw economics as a user-centred design discipline? What role can UX design play in economic social change?
Could we look at Economics as a design discipline?
Making a series of 1 page provocations
My question
I asked this question as part of taking part in the first iteration of the peer-peer learning journey Enrol Yourself.
User-centred design is about seeing an expert’s work as an evolving process of involving users. I wanted to ask what if economics, the industry, underwent an industrial revolution - how would our experience of the economy matter if a cultural shift to user-centred economics took place? Could this create a different relationship of ‘experts’ and public for Economics? And better experts?
Secondly, I wanted to investigate whether the idea of ‘UX design’ for the economy was possible. What’s the interaction design language of Economics? What stock does Economics take of interaction design and its users? What could change?
What did I do?
I looked at economics as a product or service design discipline (for the economy as a service or product of policy design), not as a descriptive science of the market.
To break this down and make it tangible, I first posed the question: if the economy was a product, how would we expect to interact with it? Is the economy useful, delightful and usable?
During the investigation I sought to describe what ‘the UX of the economy’ was:
‘The UX of the economy includes encounters with the economic system - not only active, personal use but also being confronted with a system in a more passive way - for example seeing others affected by the system (observing what happens in the economy). It attempts to look at these as a whole and always ask: what’s the sum of these parts?’
To create a dialogue around my ideas, I created a paper prototype of an interactive exhibit challenging us to reassess the way we collectively view economics in society and offering a way to explore your own relationship to that thing ‘the economy’. In the exhibit, I described what an Economics Design Agency could do in a manifesto mock-up:
An economics user-centred design agency would:
Envision the UX of the economy as part of a design practice
Conceive of itself as being user-led, positioning working with the ‘economic user’ as its central methodology
Evaluate the UX of the economy as a phenomenon. Research with the target group in context, rather than model them in the abstract
Deliver economic and public policy design and changes aimed at enabling a certain UX
Develop these iteratively, based on insights drawn from testing with users
Outcomes