Design thinking
Designing for the bigger picture
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For a long time, putting the user first was the goal. And it was a good one. By placing human needs at the centre of design and product development, we created experiences that were genuinely easier, more engaging, and more accessible. A two-year-old navigating an iPad is, in its own way, a remarkable achievement.
But somewhere in the process, "user-centric" quietly shifted meaning. Instead of designing with the user in mind, we started optimising systems to work on human nature — to sell more, to increase time spent, to make products stickier and apps more habit-forming. The former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook once described the feedback loops they had built as actively destructive to how society functions. That is not a fringe view.
When I was working at The Garage — the in-house design studio of E.ON — a group of us started asking what a more responsible approach to design might look like. Not a rejection of everything we had learned, but a wider lens. We called it Planet Centric Design: still designing for people, but with a clearer view of the systems those people live in.
The flaws we stopped talking about
Three patterns kept coming up when we looked honestly at how digital products were being built.
The first was product myopia — an obsession with getting the details right while losing sight of the bigger picture. A product exists within a system. The decisions you make inside it have effects outside it, often ones you never intended and never noticed.
The second was an uncritical focus on desire. Desire is not a bad thing in itself. But there is a difference between meeting a genuine need and engineering a craving. We had become very good at the latter.
The third was treating friction as the enemy. The drive to remove all inconvenience from a user's path has real value — but friction also has a role. A car door has a child lock. A medicine bottle is deliberately hard to open. Some resistance is there for a reason, and removing it entirely is not always progress.
Six principles for a more responsible design process
These are the principles we settled on. They are not a framework with steps and deliverables. They are more like a mindset — questions to carry into a project.
Do no harm
Design is more powerful than most designers acknowledge. Be aware of who you are working for and what the end goal actually is. Whether to take on a project is ultimately your decision, but you have a responsibility to at least ask the question.
Create awareness
Change starts with making things visible. Give users — and clients — the information they need to make real choices. Not nudges toward a preferred outcome, but genuine transparency.
Look beyond the product
Your product is part of a larger system. What you build affects things you did not design and may not be aware of. Unintended consequences are still consequences.
Aim to reduce
When facing a problem, the instinct is often to add. A new feature, a new flow, a new layer. But complexity increases the chance of things going wrong in ways you cannot predict. Solve by reducing where you can — while remembering that not all complexity is unnecessary.
Design for humans
Designing for a better world is still designing for people. That requires diverse teams, different perspectives, and a willingness to question your own assumptions and biases.
Be a radical optimist
This kind of thinking asks you to work against some very established incentives. It is not comfortable. But the same constraints that make it hard also create space for genuinely new ideas. Necessity, as ever, is a good starting point for invention.
Why it still matters
I am not sure "Planet Centric Design" ever became the movement some of us hoped it might. The incentives pulling in the other direction are strong, and the industry moved fast in other directions entirely.
But the underlying question has not gone away: are we designing for people, or on people? The distinction matters more now than it did when we first started asking it.