RefineRedefineDesign
ڈیزائن کی تعبیرِ نو
From Refinement to Redefinition
Design has spent decades becoming a discipline: developing methods, standards, evidence, and a language for describing what designers do. That refinement matters. It gave design rigour and legitimacy.
But professional design also became effective by placing boundaries around complexity: defining the user, bounding the artefact, identifying the team responsible for it, and limiting the horizon across which consequences were measured.
Design theory has questioned those boundaries for decades. Today, artificial intelligence and planetary constraints are making them increasingly difficult for practice to maintain.
Redefinition does not mean abandoning refinement. It means reconsidering the frame within which refinement operates.
& refined by AI
Design did not simply emerge as a discipline; it was deliberately constructed as one.
The post-war design methods movement attempted to make designing describable and systematic. Alexander proposed decomposing design problems into structures of requirements,1while Jones documented methods for approaching them systematically.2Simon gave this project a scientific frame, defining design as concerned not simply with how things are, but with how they ought to be.3
The discipline subsequently corrected and complicated itself. Archer positioned design alongside the sciences and humanities as a distinct area of knowledge.4Cross described “designerly ways of knowing” as a legitimate form of inquiry.5Schön located rigour not only in procedure but in the reflective judgement of practitioners working through uncertain situations.6
Human-computer interaction followed a similar trajectory. Card, Moran and Newell modelled human interaction with computational systems.7Gould and Lewis articulated principles of early user focus, empirical measurement and iteration.8Norman and Draper consolidated the idea of user-centred system design,9and these commitments eventually became established methods, heuristics and international standards for human-centred design.10
This refinement produced something valuable: shared methods, accumulated evidence, professional standards and a defensible role for design inside organisations.
None of this should be surrendered.
Design has never truly assumed that problems are simple.
Rittel and Webber described complex planning problems as “wicked”: difficult even to formulate definitively, with no simple stopping rule or objectively correct solution.11Buchanan extended this argument into design, observing that design continually reconstitutes its own subject matter.12Krippendorff located design in the making of meaning rather than the satisfaction of specifications.13
Yet professional design has often needed to bracket this complexity in order to act.
A conventional design commission tends to assume that an artefact can be bounded, that someone can be identified as responsible for shaping it, that intended users can be identified, and that its consequences can be evaluated within a manageable horizon.
These were never universal truths about design. They were useful working boundaries.
Two contemporary conditions are making those boundaries increasingly unstable.
Artificial intelligence is frequently described as a new material or medium for designers. It may be more consequential to understand it as a change in the relationship between designers and designed behaviour.
Traditional digital systems largely depend on behaviour specified in advance. AI systems increasingly generate behaviour from models trained on data, producing outputs that cannot always be individually anticipated.
Design therefore moves, at least partly, from specifying behaviour to shaping the conditions and distributions from which behaviour emerges.
Yang and colleagues identify uncertainty about AI capabilities and the complexity of AI outputs as distinctive challenges for human-AI interaction.14Amershi and colleagues respond with practical guidelines for designing such systems.15These methods are useful and necessary.
But they do not remove the deeper question of responsibility.
When behaviour emerges from training data, models, prompts, interfaces, policies and deployment contexts, authorship becomes distributed. Suchman’s work on situated accountability already challenged simple accounts of responsibility in technology production.16Bender and colleagues demonstrated how training corpora reproduce the politics of what and whom they represent.17Crawford extended the boundary further, showing that AI systems also depend on labour, infrastructure, minerals and energy.18
AI therefore does not invent the political nature of technology. Winner argued decades ago that technological arrangements can embody relations of power,19while Verbeek showed how technologies mediate perception and action.20
What changes is the scale and opacity at which these effects can now operate.
The design problem is no longer only how to make an intelligent system usable. It is also how responsibility should be understood when consequential behaviour has not been individually authored in advance.
A similar expansion of boundaries is happening materially.
Papanek argued in 1971 that design could not separate what it produced from the harms those products created.21Contemporary climate and Earth-system science make the material limits within which design operates increasingly measurable.
The planetary-boundaries framework describes limits within which human societies can operate with lower risk of destabilising critical Earth systems.22Subsequent assessments have shown multiple boundaries already exceeded.23The IPCC has established unequivocally that human activity has caused global warming.24
These measurements do not resolve the ethical questions. They make those questions harder to avoid.
What should be produced? At what material cost? Over what time horizon should consequences be evaluated? Who benefits, and who bears those consequences?
Digital design cannot place itself outside this accounting. Large computational systems depend on data centres, energy, supply chains and physical infrastructure. Software was never weightless; AI is making its material dependencies more visible.
Design for sustainability has consequently expanded its unit of analysis over time: from individual products, to product-service systems, to social and technological systems.25Each expansion asks designers to reconsider where the object of design begins and ends.
Fry describes design as either sustaining or eroding possibilities for future life.26Willis makes the relationship reflexive: we design our environments, and those environments subsequently shape us.27
This is particularly consequential in Pakistan. The country contributes a small share of global emissions while remaining highly exposed to climate impacts. Here, sustainability cannot be treated as a stylistic preference imported into design practice.
It is an operating condition.
Redefinition does not mean replacing human-centred design, usability, research or craft.
It means reconsidering the boundaries of the design situation itself.
Several traditions already point in this direction.
Dorst describes frame creation as the ability to reconsider the problem when existing formulations no longer produce meaningful solutions.28Nelson and Stolterman position design as its own tradition of inquiry and action.29
Manzini argues that in a connected society design is increasingly distributed, shifting the professional designer from sole author toward facilitator and enabler.30Irwin’s transition design places long-term societal transformation within the design frame.31Costanza-Chock’s design justice asks who participates in design, who benefits from its outcomes and who bears its burdens.32
Escobar goes further, questioning the assumption that one modern design tradition can provide universal methods for many different worlds.33Decolonising design scholarship similarly challenges the idea that historically situated approaches should be treated as culturally neutral or universal.34
For a conference in Lahore, this question cannot remain abstract.
Pakistan should not simply be the place where design theories developed elsewhere are applied. It can also be a place from which different theories of design emerge: shaped by multilingual societies, shared technologies, informal infrastructures, unequal access, climate vulnerability and forms of social organisation that conventional UX frameworks do not always describe well.
The question, then, is not whether the methods of design still work.
Many of them do.
The question is what they are working toward.
The history of design is therefore not a story in which designers once believed problems were simple and suddenly discovered complexity.
Design has recognised complexity for a long time.
What changed is that professional practice became successful partly by containing it: defining a user, bounding a product, measuring an interaction and improving an outcome.
AI and planetary constraints are making that containment increasingly difficult.
The artefact can now generate consequential behaviour that was not individually specified in advance. The consequences of design extend through infrastructures, labour, energy, institutions and ecosystems. The “user” is no longer sufficient as the only unit around which responsibility can be organised.
Ten editions of UX Pakistan offer an opportunity to ask what follows.
Refinement gave the field standards, evidence, craft and a seat at the table.
Redefinition asks what that seat is for.
Both require method.
But execution can be delegated.
Responsibility for the frame cannot.
If you are proposing a talk or a workshop, these are the questions the committee is reading for. You do not need to answer all of them. You need to have taken a position on one.
When a system's behaviour is trained rather than specified, what is the designer accountable for, and how would you show it?
Which parts of the refined toolkit survive probabilistic material, and which have quietly stopped working?
What does your work put into the world in material terms, and who absorbs that cost?
What does designing from Pakistan give you that the imported canon does not, and what does it demand instead?
You changed your frame on a real project. What did it cost, and what happened next?
ڈیزائن کی تعبیرِ نو — ۲۱ اور ۲۲ نومبر ۲۰۲۶
- Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Harvard University Press.
- Jones, J. C. (1970). Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures. Wiley.
- Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
- Archer, B. (1979). Design as a discipline. Design Studies, 1(1), 17–20.
- Cross, N. (1982). Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies, 3(4), 221–227.
- Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
- Card, S. K., Moran, T. P., & Newell, A. (1983). The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311.
- Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (Eds.). (1986). User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- International Organization for Standardization. (2019). ISO 9241-210:2019 Ergonomics of Human-System Interaction — Part 210: Human-Centred Design for Interactive Systems. ISO.
- Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
- Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21.
- Krippendorff, K. (1989). On the essential contexts of artifacts or on the proposition that “design is making sense (of things).” Design Issues, 5(2), 9–39.
- Yang, Q., Steinfeld, A., Rosé, C. P., & Zimmerman, J. (2020). Re-examining whether, why, and how human-AI interaction is uniquely difficult to design. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–13). ACM.
- Amershi, S., Weld, D., Vorvoreanu, M., Fourney, A., Nushi, B., Collisson, P., Suh, J., Iqbal, S., Bennett, P. N., Inkpen, K., Teevan, J., Kikin-Gil, R., & Horvitz, E. (2019). Guidelines for human-AI interaction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paper 3, pp. 1–13). ACM.
- Suchman, L. (2002). Located accountabilities in technology production. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(2), 91–105.
- Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610–623). ACM.
- Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
- Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
- Verbeek, P.-P. (2005). What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Pennsylvania State University Press.
- Papanek, V. (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Pantheon Books.
- Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., III, Lambin, E. F., et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 472–475.
- Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S. E., Donges, J. F., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.
- IPCC. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, Switzerland.
- Ceschin, F., & Gaziulusoy, İ. (2016). Evolution of design for sustainability: From product design to design for system innovations and transitions. Design Studies, 47, 118–163.
- Fry, T. (2009). Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Berg.
- Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92.
- Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.
- Nelson, H. G., & Stolterman, E. (2012). The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (2nd ed.). MIT Press.
- Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.
- Irwin, T. (2015). Transition design: A proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.
- Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press.
- Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.
- Schultz, T., Abdulla, D., Ansari, A., Canlı, E., Keshavarz, M., Kiem, M., Prado de O. Martins, L., & Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S. (2018). What is at stake with decolonizing design? A roundtable. Design and Culture, 10(1), 81–101.
Conceptual note: defined by Suleman Shahid and refined by AI.