RefineRedefineDesign
ڈیزائن کی تعبیرِ نو
From Refinement to Redefinition
نکھار سے تعبیرِ نو تک
Design has spent decades strengthening its methods, evidence and professional practice. That refinement matters. It gives designers ways to understand people, develop ideas, evaluate outcomes and exercise judgement.
UX Pakistan 2026 asks how those foundations should evolve as artificial intelligence changes what we create and how we work, while environmental pressures demand greater attention to the consequences of design.
Redefinition means reconsidering the frame within which refinement operates: whose needs count, what belongs within the project, what success means and who has the authority to decide.
For a conference in Lahore, these questions begin with the realities around us. Pakistan’s languages, communities, institutions and everyday practices can generate knowledge that helps reshape the discipline.
& refined by AI
Design scholarship has established the importance of both systematic methods and professional judgement. Cross articulated design’s distinctive ways of knowing;1Schön examined how practitioners work reflectively through uncertainty.2In HCI, Gould and Lewis helped establish early attention to users, empirical evaluation and iteration as central commitments.3These remain valuable foundations for practice.
Design has also long questioned how problems are defined. Rittel and Webber challenged the possibility of definitive formulations and objectively correct solutions for complex planning problems.4Dorst’s work on frame creation offers practical approaches to reconsidering a problem situation.5Refinement and redefinition therefore belong to an ongoing practice of inquiry, making and revision.
A project identifies participants, establishes responsibilities, allocates resources and decides which outcomes will be measured. These choices make action possible. They also influence whose experiences remain outside the brief.
The task is to make those boundaries explicit, open to challenge and revisable.
Design justice foregrounds the participation and leadership of communities affected by design.6Escobar’s work similarly challenges the assumption that one account of design can adequately serve different ways of living.7
In Pakistan, this invites attention to multilingual communication, shared technologies, informal infrastructures, disability and unequal access. A service organised around one person using one phone, for example, may overlook assistance, shared access and household relationships. Such situations can become starting points for developing and testing different design assumptions.
We invite examination of how using AI in research, prototyping and production affects evidence, craft, professional judgement and the value of designers’ work.
Designing systems that incorporate AI raises another set of challenges. Their behaviour depends partly on trained models and deployment contexts, and individual outputs may be difficult to anticipate. Yang and colleagues identify uncertainty about capabilities and the complexity of outputs as distinctive challenges for human–AI interaction.8
Human–AI interaction guidelines and accountability frameworks already provide useful approaches.910The question is how well they work in particular settings, what evidence supports them and where further development is needed. Responsibilities must remain clear across those who build, integrate, deploy and operate these systems.
Digital products depend on physical infrastructure, energy, materials and labour. Crawford’s account of AI makes these dependencies visible.11Climate and Earth-system assessments establish the urgency of considering environmental consequences across longer time horizons.1213
For Pakistan, exposure to climate impacts makes resilience an immediate concern. The World Bank’s country assessment documents substantial climate vulnerability alongside a comparatively small contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.14This makes the distribution of benefits, resources and environmental burdens especially consequential.
Design for sustainability and transition design offer ways to connect individual interventions with wider systems and longer processes of change.1516They invite consideration of what should be maintained, repaired, transformed or discontinued, alongside what might be created.
UX Pakistan 2026 invites practitioners, researchers and students to explore these questions through research, projects and shared experience. We welcome accounts of methods that remain useful, methods that need adaptation and possibilities that emerge when a familiar problem is framed differently.
Refinement and redefinition are ongoing responsibilities: strengthening how we design while remaining willing to question the purposes and assumptions guiding our work.
For talks and workshops, we invite contributions addressing one or more of these questions:
When behaviour depends on models, data and deployment contexts, what are designers and organisations responsible for, and how can that responsibility be demonstrated?
How does AI affect research, making and evaluation? Which methods remain useful, which need adaptation and what evidence supports the change?
What resources does a design require, what effects does it produce over time and who benefits or bears the costs?
What can local knowledge and practice contribute to design's theories and methods? Which assumptions do they invite us to reconsider?
What happened when you questioned a project's boundaries? What changed, what remained useful and what can others learn from the outcome?
UX Pakistan 2026 · 21–22 November · LUMS, Lahore
ڈیزائن کی تعبیرِ نو
- 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. Later Routledge edition.
- Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311.
- Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
- Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.
- 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.
- Yang, Q., Steinfeld, A., Rosé, C. P., & Zimmerman, J. (2020). Re-examining whether, why, and how human-AI interaction is uniquely difficult to design. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. ACM.
- Amershi, S., et al. (2019). Guidelines for human-AI interaction. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper 3, 1–13. ACM.
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0). NIST AI 100-1.
- Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. IPCC.
- Richardson, K., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.
- World Bank Group. (2022). Pakistan Country Climate and Development Report. World Bank.
- 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.
- Irwin, T. (2015). Transition design: A proposal for a new area of design practice, study, and research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.
Conceptual note: defined by Suleman Shahid and refined by AI.