FORUM THE NE X T BILLIONThis is a forum for perspectives on designing for communities marginalized by economics, social status, infrastructure,or policies. It will discuss design methods, theoretical and conceptual contributions, and methodological engagements forunderserved communities. — Nithya Sambasivan, Editor

The Fallacy of Good:
Marginalized Populations
as Design Motivation

T

IMAGE BY DESIGN FOR AMERICA

Joyojeet Pal, University of Michigan
he American Instituteof Graphic Arts (AIGA)
runs a webcast series
called Design for Good
whose focus areas aredesign for democracy,
diversity and inclusion,
women in leadership, and design forcommunities [1]. AIGA offers links toa host of organizations that work in thedesign-for-good space, offering services
ranging from renting designers’ time,to specializing in marketing and visualpresentation for community and socialjustice organizations. Similar online andphysical events encouraging designers
to “make a difference” abound; thenotion of design for good has grown inindustry as well as in government andacademia in recent decades.
Clearly, some clever design has
sought ways to fix out-of-market
problems. This includes designs suchas low-cost or energy-efficient handcranked appliances for populations
lacking resources, as well as low-cost
prosthetics and healthcare diagnosticdevices. While these innovationsindeed offer benefits to those who needthem, the broader trend of viewing theneeds of marginalized populations as
an object of design experimentation is
problematic and merits reflection.
The politics of expertise—theperception of technology andtechnologists as holding superior
solutions to society’s problems—isat the very heart of science andtechnology studies [2]. Morgan
Ames [3], building on sociologist
Max Weber’s theory of charismatic
authority [4], proposed that certain
technologies gain mindspace based on
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Some of the many challenges discussed and explored before choosing a final topic for Design for
America's Leadership Studio.

their charismatic appeal rather thantheir immediate relevance to a problem
at hand. Technological solutions cancaptivate. Consequently, designers
with the best intentions are likely
to be surprised by the realizationthat technological fixes to problems,
evidently superior on their value
propositions as clinically defined,
Insights→→ Working to transform the livesof the marginalized throughhackathons or design-for-goodinitiatives is unlikely to make a dent in
the complex problems of the world.
→→ But research and practice in thisspace can offer designers valuablegains in breadth, methodologicalexpertise, analytical skills, andoverall employability.

should find few takers on the ground.
The notion of design for social
good implies an intentionality—it
is for good. To accomplish this,a population or domain must be
understood in depth. However,design-for-good initiatives aregenerally disaggregated from thepopulations of need. While we pay
lip service to notions of participatory
design, the vast majority of events or
exercises fitting the design-for-goodparadigm do not take place in situ orwith active collaboration with partnergroups (more power to you if yourwork does not fit this model). Whenthey do, they tend to be in limited,short-term engagements.
Scholarly social research typicallyrequires that “experts” immersethemselves deeply in a field of study before
proposing any contribution to a real-world
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65FORUM THE NE X T BILLION
problem. Business consulting, on theother hand, may require a practitioner tohave a grasp of a set of tools and hone ageneral, domain-independent approach
toward studying problems before applying
solutions. Government departmentsthat rotate civil servants through theirfunctional arms may have even lighter
requirements for domain expertise, andyet they are allowed to make decisions
with weighty consequences for theaffected populations.
There is of course no fixed designer
entity. Rather, there is a range of design
professionals, from consultancies whobring an amorphous design thinking
to a range of problems, on one hand,to designers in scholarly research
who typically work on a narrow set ofspecialized problems, on the other. The
vast majority of design professionals
will probably find themselves in roles
along this spectrum throughout theircareers. When we think of a designer
working on “good,” they may well bea lifelong investor in the subject, or
one whose engagement is limited to ashorter time span.
As designers, our practice most often
involves taking on a problem, proposing
a solution, and then moving on to thenext thing to be solved. Indeed, thepractice of designers is not the sameas that of sociologists, for instance, orpolicymakers commenting on welfare
schemes for underserved populations.
Yet it still bears exploring how well one
needs to know a community or a setting
before engaging in activities that have adirect impact on them.

the poor, the homeless, or thoseengaged in precarious work. Suchusers may be unable to afford thetechnology or be structurally exposed
to other vulnerabilities. Second,user populations could be defined as
marginal in terms of faculties needed
to interact with the technology, suchas people with sensory impairments,
people who are illiterate, or people who
are technology-phobic or otherwise
unable to fully use the affordances of atechnology as designed. Finally, goodcan be applied to user populations in
geographical terms, such as people
living in remote areas where thetechnology is not easily accessible, or inparts of low- and middle-income regions
who may not have been originallyconceptualized as users of a technology.
The semantic positioning of good
would imply that the goal of suchprojects is typically to alleviate the“not good” of the population. But theoutcome can just as well be for the goodof a product, or of a design professionalor process. There is an alluring logic
to having design and good intersect,in much the same way that social
enterprise as a concept tells us we canmake money indefinitely and never let it
interfere with doing good for the world.
The necessary question here iswhether the design (including themuch-feted ultra-simple design) getsrewarded for its creativity, or whether
the measurable achievement of social
good is the goal of the design.

MAINSTREAM TO GOOD ON A
USER SPECTRUM

There are several reasons why design
work in this space has been expanding.
First, there are a number of major
corporations that see populations
thus defined as potential users of theirgoods and services. The “typical” userof design artifacts is a shapeshifting
entity, making design that is agile toa breadth of use cases circumspect,
if not a necessary means of engaging

Design for good proposes improvements in the condition or functioning of
the user population of a design artifact.
This definition loosely encompasses
cases in which the target population
for the design artifact is a user groupsomewhat atypical from the norm of“mainstream” adopters.
The mainstream user is usually themost likely target of mass-marketed
technologies, by which definition the“good” user is then someone outside
the primary market. Thus defined,
good user populations could fit into
one of three broad typologies.
First, they could be marginalas defined economically, such as
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WHY DESIGN FOR GOOD
IS BOOMING

When we think ofdesign initiatives tohelp some marginalizedgroup, then we risk
objectifying that group.

with customers. Designing withconstraints in mind sometimes leads toserendipitous outcomes, as in the caseof accessible design. Many products
originally designed for people who
require non-standard interfaces haveeventually been used for mainstream
populations interested in multimodalinteractions. Speech recognitionis one such area. The practice ofdesign for atypical users may beapproached differently depending on
the size and setting of a design team.
Large corporations can send their
headquarters design teams to workthrough their satellite operations byengaging field partners, whereas smallerfirms or design teams may contract
specialized design consultancies. In theindustry, such work is often driven by
product-shipping deadlines.
Second, the education system has
been a major driver of design for good,
especially during the formative yearsof a designer’s training. The academy
is invested in social good—universities
are in the business of making the world
a better place, or at least telling theirstudents that they will. Thus, students
of design can expect some exposure
to doing design work for social rather
than for purely commercial ends. A
range of design-for-good projects haveemerged as part of capstone classes
or research projects in academic
institutions throughout the U.S., forinstance. However, because schools
have a semester/quarter orientation,students are used to starting, delving
deep into, and imagining they havegained reasonable expertise in a topic
by the end of a semester. Two classes
in a subject is halfway to a minor
in the area of work. All of Japanesecooking, for instance, is offered at mylocal community college—as a singlesemester class.
Third, there is a larger notion oftechnology for good that is driven by
governments, media, philanthropies,
and a range of institutions centeredaround the potential of technology
for creating a just society. This is
articulated through a phenomenal
growth in hackathons, technology
and development conferences, andinformal events such as meetups. The
specter of technology changing theworld is ingrained into our collective
psyche; it can be seductive to people
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who work in design and technology
for the place of pride it lends theirprofessional practice. However, as I
have argued in greater depth [5], wehave erroneously reversed the value
directionality in design for good. The
immediate, predictable value of these
initiatives is likely to come to thedesigners rather than to the objects of
their work—the recipients of “good.”

HANDS OFF DETROIT,
YOU CANADIANS

I frequently start a class on technology
and development here at theUniversity of Michigan by asking
my students how they would feel
about a proposal from Canada to help
revitalize parts of ailing Detroit.
Frequently mythicized as an eightmile allegory of postapocalyptic decay
porn from our wealthy suburb of AnnArbor, Detroit is invariably owned
as ours in outraged response to thisquestion. “Who are the Canadians to
fix our problems? Who said Detroit
was ailing?”
When we think of design initiatives
to help some marginalized group, say,refugees, then we risk objectifyingthat group. When we think in termsof outcomes, we tend to focus on thenature of the marginality. Thus, theact of good or the population in need of
the good becomes the central point of
our engagement. This is problematicin design thinking, since our typicalexpertise is in evaluating and producing
user outcomes. The refugees and how
their lives change because of a digital
artifact should not be the focus of designfor good; the design artifact and how
usable it is are what matters.
But technology design and adoption
in the real world present an entirely
different scale of complexities that do
not allow for a linear or practiced setof solutions to the problems stated.
Designers cannot be expected to spend
several years gaining deep appreciationof some social domain or population,and if they did do that, it is not clearthat the learnings from one setting
would translate well to others. When
we propose that a design artifact will
fix, or even ameliorate, the challenges
of a lived social experience such as
homelessness, marginal farming, ordisability, we pitch ourselves—thedesigners—as the ones with theanswer. Social good is serious business.
People with careers dedicated to workon these issues, or communities thatdeal with these issues as part of theirlives, have experience that is difficult
to transfer into the frames of bounded
engagement involved in short-term
design endeavors.

HOW TO BE GOOD

However, if we set aside the social
claims and outcomes of good (and at thevery least focus on doing no harm), a
lot of benefits can come from engaging
with diverse populations of users:• Breadth benefits. Working tofulfill the needs of a diverse userbase gives us a design constraint towork with. The natural outcome ofthis is that we are forced to examine
our creativity alongside our need forour design to be accessible to a broad
range of stakeholders. Being a worldly
professional also helps to broaden ourexposure to design thinking, which
extends beyond an artifact to anunderstanding of the ecosystems inwhich technologies exist.
• Methodological benefits. Such work
may include engaging populations
who are excluded from having a voicein design decisions; therefore, they
may have a harder time articulating
their needs. Working with this kind ofdiversity in user research helps designers
be better interviewers and design
observers since it forces us to think
deeply about what is needed to engage
more fruitfully with atypical users of
our products.
• Analytical benefits. Working
on issues with diverse users isuseful for prompting designers tobe ref lective of their own agency asbuilders of products that people will
sometimes be forced to adjust theirpractices around, particularly whenthese products end up defining theindustry standard.
• Employability benefits. Working
on issues such as accessibility adds animportant skill set that corporations
value, for making their products
used as widely as possible but also for
ensuring compliance with accessibilityrequirements.

Practice working with atypicaluser populations or use-case scenarios
offers benefits to designers and user
experience professionals, making us
more well-rounded as professionals and,by extension, more attractive to design
research and practice contexts in theindustry and academy.
As a community of designers,
we know how to build products
and research their use. In this role,
we are qualif ied to speak for theinteractions we examine, not forthe people who participate in ourwork in broader contexts. The casefor appropriately recognizing thelimits of design does not just build
humility; it also gives us a sense of
the impacts we can have throughour work, and what may lie beyond
it. Each user encounter makes us
slightly better at understanding how
we can improve our work for all,instead of perfecting it for one group
we choose to serve.
I do not argue against working on
the problems engendered in the designfor good universe. Quite the contrary.
I strongly advocate more exposure ofdesigners to issues of diversity in theirdesign practice. What I question is
the terminology and intentionality of
the notion of design for good. When
we accept that such work benefits
us, we can pay attention to what we
do as a practice—designing usable
products—instead of setting our goals
at the transformative value we imagine
offering to the user.
Endnotes
1. http://www.aiga.org/design-for-good
2. Fischer, F. Technocracy and the Politics ofExpertise. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1990.
3. Ames, M.G. Charismatic technology. Proc.
of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference
on Critical Alternatives. Aarhus UniversityPress, 2015.
4. Weber, M. On Charisma and Institution
Building. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968.
5. Pal, J. CHI4Good or Good4CHI. Proc.
of the 2017 CHI Conference ExtendedAbstracts on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. ACM, 2017.
Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at
the School of Information at the Universityof Michigan. He teaches user experienceand accessibility, and conducts research ontechnology and global development.
→→ joyojeet@umich.edu

DOI: 10.1145/3121393 COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHOR. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00
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