Human Centricity is not Human Centric Enough

It’s tempting to believe you design tech for humans. The 2010’s led us to believe that user-centricity was the end-game for design.

Designers were all about connecting technology to user needs.

But these “users” had needs that were as predictable as a train schedule.

(And then the train was late.)

By the late 2010s, most became cynical about digital technology’s mission to “connect friends and family around the world.”

When the promise of user connection fell apart, we were left with fragments—a network of influences, anxieties, and desires that extend beyond what we used to call the 'individual.'

The “individual” is a myth. “User” is a myth.

You are not an economically interchangeable unit. You are not an abstract universal.

You are connected to a culture, place, and time. You are a particularity.

You are the outcome of networks the extent of which you can’t begin to define. 

But it’s precisely this lack of definition that gives you the opportunity to redefine the user’s reality.

Where does the “user’s” mood go when they watch a specific video? 

What anxiety will they carry as they interact with peers after that video?

What fights will they pick? What ideas will they have?

There is no “human-centric” design because there is no “human.”

That’s a conceptual relic from the 20th century. 

You are a network of interactions, habits, and emotions.

Stop saying “AI” needs to be human-centric. You don’t even know what you mean by human.

You’ve been part of the machine since before you were born. Humans and technology are an alliance millions of years old. 

It’s time to shift from user-centric design to user-network design. It’s not about individuals anymore.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari coined the term “dividual”—the idea that the self is fragmented, scattered across experiences and connections. This dividual self is precisely what we can begin to map with AI—creating a framework for design that embraces its fragments, influences, and ripples.

Content doesn’t just live on the screen—it influences your mood, your next impulse, your real-life actions.

And this, dear designers, can be mapped. Interventions can be made. Whole new projects envisioned.

Beyond human-centric objects, you should be designing human systems—including both humans and things.

AI has given us the gift to map what “human” means, right to the edge of the data horizon. To explore the frontier of human experience. To understand second- and third-order effects of interactions. To discern unconscious motivations buried in action patterns. To create art out of the fabric of human experience. 

Soon, your coffee machine will know you better than your therapist; and as a designer, it will be your job to study the consequences of this. Even if the consequence is that your users hate “therapists” and just want to have a regular old cup of joe.

That is the human-centric turn that human-centricity will take, given the affordances of AI: the turn towards the creative and conscious redefinition of the concept of “human”.

Machines will keep asking us 'Who are you?' until we are forced to create an answer. And that answer will be our most human act of design yet.