THE MEANING OF 'GOOD DESIGN' IN THE AGE OF SMART AUTOMATION - OR, WHY HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN NEEDS ETHICS

The increasing adoption of smart automation has improved people's lives in several ways, but it has also brought a host of new problems such as deskilling, deepening of structural inequalities, new forms of exploitation, loss of privacy and hindering of human liberties. This paper begins by assuming that such issues are the consequence of poor design and takes the opportunity to analyse what "good design" should mean in turn. Following insights from philosophy of technology, it surveys the general inherent complexities of automation and argues that Human-Centered Design (HCD) endorses an instrumentalist conception of technology. This paper shows that such a conception of human-technology relations significantly limits designers' capacity to approach design from a genuinely ethical standpoint. The paper concludes with a sketch of principles that HCD should incorporate to become a truly humanist and ethically minded design approach. Ultimately, this paper argues that designers should seek not only to satisfy users' needs but actively reflect on the role that technologies play in helping humans to attain a "good life". In other words, they should start by asking themselves what our human project for the future is.