Abstract
The product design process focuses on features that engage and retain people (users) whose needs are at the heart of the design initiative. The workflow includes precise budgets, schedules, and dedicated design teams to engineer requirements. The design process aims to combine business and user objectives that drive the workflow to a user-centric product. This enthusiasm for featurism inevitably nudges designers to develop superfluous functions for users’ prescribed behaviors. The drive to create an abundance of functions is to have a competitive advantage; instead, it furthers technological misuse, abuse, and subversion. A product’s function can exceed utility, efficiency, and optimization into unintended use and exploitation of its intention. The function can be dynamic and dependent on social contexts. This article provides a potential solution to technological misuse by applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a paradigm for developing products and services. A translation of Maslow’s Hierarchy in product design called the Design Hierarchy of Needs centers on progressive, creative enhancements. The framework in this paper is a new integration of a needs model that prioritizes people’s well-being. The new structure will better predict a product’s diverse usage based on human capabilities. The rearrangement of Maslow’s Hierarchy may be necessary to address the Hierarchy’s universal generalizations that all people are the same. Three case studies are reviewed to illustrate how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs impacts the unintended consequences of technology: Airtag’s coercive control implications, the long scroll’s replacement of the next button, and Instagram’s Face Filters.
Presenters
Scott DunayStudent, M.S., Pratt Institute School of Information, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Technological manipulation, Functionalism in Design, Product Design Workflow, Design Knowledge
