Philosophy for UX Design
Can learning philosophy make you a better UX designer?
This is the kickoff to a series highlighting how philosophy and UX intersect. Throughout this series, I won’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Just like in design, you can wait to launch to get the details just right, but eventually, you need to ship a product.
Does philosophy matter? Isn’t it just for people who can’t “science?”
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
— Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking’
Philosophy is foundational to science. And like science and design, philosophy is iterative. Like designers iterating on concepts, philosophers iterate on ideas. There’s a lot that we can learn about design from philosophers throughout the ages to help us become critical thinkers and designers.
It can challenge and change the way you think and approach the problems you design for.
Every design project starts with taking a look at the fundamental nature of the problem. Philosophy takes a look at the fundamental nature of concepts like beauty, experience, meaning, knowledge, reality, and much more. Design and philosophy are both wide and messy arenas with hard-to-define borders.
Why challenge how we think?
Questioning what we think we know is difficult. We naturally tend to guard our egos. The famous ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, preached the importance of self-reflection and realizing the limits of our own knowledge. He famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And he believed we should question everything, saying, “there are not stable truths; everything should be questioned.”
Of course, you already do this.
I know, preaching to the choir here. As a designer, you already buy into self-reflection. For instance, we humble ourselves by making journey maps, where we first challenge our assumptions during user interviews. For example, in a project mapping how parents decide to take a child to the Emergency Room, we assumed parents first seek professional advice. Through the assumption-challenging interviews, we learned parents more often first seek validation that they are still good parents, and question what the act of seeking professional help would mean towards that.
This and other insights had an enormous impact on our service and product roadmap. Only by intentionally seeking to challenge what we thought was true were we able to make such insights. Back to Socrates, he says:
“I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think that I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”
- Socrates as quoted by Plato, Apology
Basically, Socrates is saying this:
you are wiser if you know you don’t know something, rather than thinking you know something and it’s false.
Isn’t the premise of UX research? And for the record, Socrates isn’t the only philosopher with something to say on this topic.
First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must “once in his life” withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.
- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
So you can find the basic foundations of UX in some philosophical traditions that go back centuries. But the rabbit hole goes much, much deeper. And in the spirit of personal growth, improving your craft, and creating more value for the world, it’s worth exploring.
So what’s next?
I’ll leave it at that. We’ll discuss some interesting ideas from people like Barthes, Foucault, and Nietzsche in future articles. And we’ll explore ideas and philosophies like semiology, defamiliarization, and power systems. And we’ll use them to view our UX practices with a new lens, enabling you to go beyond popular frameworks and master your craft.
