What Went Off the Rails With Human-Centered Design?

Human-Centered Design is kinda a feel-good slogan. It sounds lovely. But, the whole thing’s a bit of a myth because we can‘t really focus on people without diving into the messy web of systems we’re tangled up in. We, people, don’t exist in a vacuum – we’re swimming in tech, algorithms, rules, and all the corporate nonsense that shapes how we behave.

• What if the feel-good philosophy of Human-Centered Design is actually a dangerous myth that’s screwing everyone over?
• Companies are weaponizing design to sue critics, scrub bad reviews, and ghost unhappy customers off the internet entirely.
• “Human-centered” design become just a lipstick on a pig – a manipulative tool to rewire users to accept crappy products and services.

When designers pat themselves on the back for being “human-centered” but just ignore all the architecture, code, and economic stuff running the show, that’s not just naive – it’s straight-up bad design thinking. If our big “human” idea keeps pretending the system design doesn’t matter, we’re basically building a house on quicksand.

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Human-Centered Design loves to play with feelings. Why? Because emotions are easy to poke, easy to manipulate, and, let’s face it, they’re the fast lane to customer’s wallet. If companies can tug the right emotional strings, they can nudge customers into buying stuff they probably don’t need. This is fine if the products or services actually make customer’s life better, who cares? Just take my money and stfu. But what about when the product stinks, or the service is trash, and people start lighting up social media with angry rants and one-star reviews? Uh-oh, now it’s damage control mode.

And here’s where it gets shady. Companies don’t just shrug and move on – they start playing dirty. Suing critics, scrubbing bad reviews, even trying to ghost unhappy customers off the internet altogether. Lately, it’s gotten way more dystopian, with businesses and politicians teaming up to throw lawsuits at anyone who dares to spill the tea about their bad products or services. So now, the companies that actually suck are hiding their tracks, while the good companies get shoved out of the spotlight. If nobody hears the truth, the junk keeps selling, and the cycle just rolls on.

These days, whoever controls the information – who gets to decide what’s good or bad – basically owns the market. Lies are dirt cheap and super profitable. Everybody’s in on the act now because, well, it kinda works.

System Design vs. Human-Centered Design

System Design (SD) – is all about sketching out the whole machine: the structure, the pieces, how they communicate between each other, what data flows where. It’s big-picture stuff, super methodical and focused on making sure everything hums along together, whether we’re talking apps, organizations, or whatever. Bottom line it makes the whole system work, it keeps chaos in check.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) – or user-centered design, is all about seeing things through people’s eyes at every step – what they want, what annoys them, where they mess up. There is lots of empathy, lots of tweaking as we go. The mission is to make stuff that’s actually usable, useful, and – if we’re lucky – something people actually want to have.

System Design’s Backstory

Let’s take a bit of a time warp back – system design isn’t some shiny new thing cooked up in a Silicon Valley lab. Nah, people have been doing this forever. Think about ancient Egypt, Rome, the Mayans, all those OG civilizations – they were already obsessing over how to make stuff work better. Roman aqueducts? That’s old-school water engineering. City planning? The Mesopotamians were literally laying out grids before Google Maps was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Basically, humans have always tried to make big, complicated things actually run without falling apart.

If we skip ahead to the early 1900s, suddenly, “system design” starts getting all official. Taylorism (a.k.a. scientific management) – the era where people started treating workers kind of like cogs in a machine, with time charts and stopwatches. Then WWII rolled around and the military needed to figure out how to get a ridiculous amount of tanks and sandwiches to the right place at the right time. Cue operations research – math nerds and strategists teaming up to untangle logistical nightmares.

The ’50s and ’60s were a game-changer. Computers burst onto the scene, and with them came projects like SAGE, where folks had to wrangle hardware, software, networks, and actual humans together. That’s when “systems engineering” became a Thing (like the movie). Bell Labs coined the term – they were basically the Avengers of tech back then.

Fast-forward to the ’70s and beyond – software’s blowing up, the internet’s taking over, and suddenly, everyone’s obsessed with building stuff that won’t just collapse when a million people log in. Waterfall model, APIs, cloud, microservices… System design isn’t just for bridges and dams now – it’s at the heart of every app, every website, every late-night server crash that makes an engineer cry into their coffee and stare into oblivion of his worst nightmares.

Human-Centered Design: How We Got Here

Human-Centered Design (HCD) – or user-centered design – has also been around forever. Way back when, people weren’t making spears and pots just for the fun of it; they cared if the things actually fit a hand or did the job. Function and comfort existed even before we had words for it.

HCD as a “real” discipline happened mid-20th-century. In the ’50s, John E. Arnold at Stanford decided, “Hey, maybe we should pay attention to what people actually need”. Psychology and anthropology joined the party, and suddenly, everyone’s thinking about how humans tick.

By the ’60s, people got extra nerdy about it – Design Methods Movement got created. They wanted to make design super scientific, so they started design studies and even founded the Design Research Society in ’66.

Then came the ’70s through the ’90s – computers started invading homes and offices, so understanding how people interact with machines was kind of a big deal. Donald Norman dropped “The Design of Everyday Things” in 1986, and suddenly, everyone was talking about making stuff that doesn’t make users want to throw it out the window. User-centered design became the gold standard.

From the ’90s on, Norman came back with another winner: “user experience” (UX). Now it’s not just about usability – it’s about the whole vibe, from start to finish. HCD wormed its way into software, business, and even the way we cook up new ideas (design thinking). Recently, the big questions are about ethics, sustainability, and whether AI is gonna help or just confuse everyone more. In other words: the story’s still being written.

Human-Centered Design is Just One Piece of the Machine

Human-Centered Design (HCD) isn’t some standalone magical art form. It’s more like a gear in the bigger machine that is System Design. Its whole job? Make sure the “human” part of the system doesn’t get lost in the tech shuffle, so the whole thing actually works (and doesn’t collapse into chaos).

You see, if we come up through art or UX school, we end up specializing in that human piece – what people want, how they feel… Cool, but if we only focus on that, we’re fixing just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Relying on only the human angle? That’s risky. Kinda like building a chair with just one leg. Sure, it’s a leg, but are we gonna sit on it? Didn’t think so.

Now, folks who study design through IT, multimedia, or those big “faculties” (love that word), they get shoved into the deep end. They’re generalists – full-stack designers. These people can juggle everything: human needs, business rules, software, data, networks, security, behavioral tweaks, the whole circus. They’re not just painting the front door; they’re building the whole house with locks, WiFi, and maybe even a butler. And then there’s cybernetics. It’s sort of brainy framework for keeping everything in check, making sure information flows smoothly and entropy (system meltdown) stays at bay.

If what I said is confusing, here is an illustration:

Imagine ways of how post office will reach us, food delivery, how water installations would need to be constructed and implemented,… it is a mess all the way, everything becomes hard, expensive, impossible, dangerous…, and for what? For the view and coziness?! Human-Centered Design by itself is pointless. If we yank it out of the bigger system it answers to – poof, we get these gorgeous, dreamy things that make us want to whip out our wallet and buy into pure fantasy. And fantasies have a nasty habit of blowing up in our faces when reality finally comes knocking on our door – this is why Human-Centered Design can’t exist outside System Design. Logistics, safety, security, and other stuff are still a thing.

HCD is a service layer – a friendly interface between squishy humans and the cold, hard system. When the whole system is designed well (ethical, robust, all that good stuff), HCD shines bright. It’s the sweet spot. But if the system is garbage? Well, then HCD’s just lipstick on a pig. We can make the user experience look pretty, but underneath it’s still a mess.

Inside System Design, there’re a bunch of specialized subsystems, each handling their own turf:

• Human-Centered Design (HCD): All about the user. Empathy, intuition, making things not suck.
• Behavioral Design: This one’s sneakier. It’s about nudging, manipulating, “guiding” users to do what we want. Basically, Jedi mind tricks with a dash of psychology.
• Software/Data Design: The logic, the code, the algorithms. The stuff under the hood.
• Network Design: Design of communication and connections.
• Security Design: Keeps the bad guys out. Protecting data, making sure things don’t get messy.
• Business/Process Design: The money rules and workflows. Watch out – sometimes this gets hijacked by greedy folks who care more about profit than people (hello, COVID-19 scandals).
• Service Design: Ties together digital and physical experiences so it all feels seamless.

When profit-chasing business design steamrolls over Human-Centered Design (which is supposed to care about people, the actual users), what we really get isn’t better products or services. Nope. It’s Human-Centered Design used as a weird Jedi mind trick. Instead of fixing the crappy product or service, these brands basically try to rewire the user to put up with it – or worse, to get hooked on it, or fall for some sketchy practice. Picture a company so desperate to hide its dirty laundry that it threatens to sue customers who say bad stuff about them. That’s not just mean – it’s an entire system built to keep folks quiet. “Speak up and we’ll make your life hell.” or “Just stfu and keep consuming our overpriced bad products.” Fear, isolation, the whole nine yards. It’s business design weaponizing behavioral tricks to muzzle actual humans through Human-Centered Design, all so the cash keeps rolling in. Brands who pull this, whether they realize it or not, basically tattoo “We’re corrupt” on their forehead. People catch on. Trust vanishes, the brand’s reputation tanks, and honestly? It’s done. Then comes the classic rebrand move – new name, new logo, but surprise, it’s the same old garbage under a shinier wrapper, probably being sold through some “sister company” just to dodge the stink.

If you’re a business owner reading this, don’t make the same mistakes – be better. Care about your business enough to listen, adapt, and continuously improve your products and services based on real customer feedback. Customers who offer constructive criticism aren’t the enemy – they’re your greatest opportunity for growth.

And if your business no longer excites you, it often starts with how it looks and feels. My visual and web design audits uncover the hidden design issues hurting your brand – and can give you a clear, motivating direction forward.

About Convincing Folks That Crap is Actually Gold

Human-Centered Design isn’t the villain here. The problem is how it gets twisted inside late-stage capitalism (which, let’s be real, is about as ethical as a used car salesman with a fake mustache). Corporations swiped HCD’s language – “empathy”, “user needs”,… – and now use it as a smokescreen for some seriously grim stuff: surveillance, data mining, unethical manipulation. That “empathy” pitch, half the time it’s just fancy social engineering.

“Nudge” and “sludge” – sounds cute, right? Well, not so much.

• Nudge is supposed to help people make better choices (like putting the salad front and center in a cafeteria). But in the wrong hands, it’s a tool for emotional manipulation – fear, shame, anxiety, whatever gets people to click “buy” or “subscribe” when they probably shouldn’t. It’s not about helping the user, it’s about milking them for everything they’ve got.
• Sludge is just straight-up evil. It’s always a dark pattern. Think endless hoops to jump through if you want to cancel something, or hiding the “delete account” button like it’s the Lost Ark. The whole point is to trap the user, make quitting or leaving the product/shopping page so painful they just give up.

Once designers and brands start playing dirty with design systems, it’s not about helping people anymore. It’s about tricking them into choices they’d never make if their brains weren’t being played like a fiddle. And yeah, maybe it works for the bottom line in the short run. But at what cost? Users lose trust, brands get lawsuits, and the whole market starts to feel like a rigged game. Bad vibes all around. People remember when they’ve been burned – it’s not just a one-time thing. It sticks.

At Studio Simple, ethical design is our foundation – because we believe meaningful customer relationships should be built to last.

Anyway, if you want to avoid hiring some random design dud, I’ve got your back. I slapped togethera handy checklist with the five must-ask questions before you commit. Grab it.

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