Good post by Roberto Verganti on the Harvard Business Review blog. Topic is how “user-centered innovation” is not sustainable. His argument:

User-centered innovation has helped conduct us into an unsustainable world. The reason is sustainability is not embedded in the anthropology of our existing culture, society, and economy. Yes, people are starting to be concerned about the environment. But their concerns about many other things — their budgets, health, safety, well-being, and emotional fulfillment — are increasing, too.

It’s an interesting perspective, and one that might add depth to the discussions many businesses are having today about the design and implementation of social media. The bias in this world — and it’s a good one — is for user experience. But our rational obsession with the user can easily obscure the difference between the work that UE/UI professionals do and the work that social-media innovators do. Both are important, but it’s important to see them on different horizons, to borrow from the old McKinsey model for corporate growth. Even Facebook — the company that has developed the gold standard for user experience in social media today — will sometimes ignore the crowd and bet on a feature, a functionality, a concept that will play big in the future (i.e., across a later time horizon).

I suspect the reason we get tripped up on this distinction — between user-experience and user-centered design — is the overwhelming egalitarian vibe in the social media world. We like to think of this world as one where practically everything can be crowdsourced. But the vibe distracts how innovation happens, whether it is crowdsourced or not. It rarely comes from the crowd en masse, but it can come from the crowd on the edge. Says Verganti:

It is only within the framework of a vision-centered process that users can provide precious insights. There are indeed some people who are already adopting sustainable behaviors. However, they are rare exceptions. Only leaders and designers who are driven by a vision and who explicitly search a priori for those sustainable behaviors can tune out the unsustainable needs of 99% of users and focus on the few exceptions.

One such person is Ezio Manzini, a respected scholar in the field of sustainable design who has conducted significant research on how local communities have developed clever sustainable solutions to everyday problems. Ezio is not at all user centered in his approach. He does not look at what users want and need. He is one of the most visionary and design-driven innovators I can think of. He wants to find sustainable behaviors. Therefore, he refuses to look at dominant consumption. Rather, he explicitly searches for the needle in the haystack: local fringe communities that have already found sustainable solutions for everyday living. He then engineers these solutions and proposes them at a larger scale.

It’s great that Verganti uses the word fringe to describe those outlier communities where innovative ideas are first surfaced, tried, practiced. It may be the wrong word. Coincidentally, yesterday, on the same HBR blog, John Hagel and John Seely Brown explored the difference between (a) fringe communities, which may never enter the mainstream, and (b) edge communities, which may someday lead the mainstream. In any case, the folks in these communities are often on the outside, and it’s not so easy to fit them into the fabric of ordinary user-centered design. Perhaps, of course, that’s just another way of stating the requirements for leadership. Leaders don’t ignore what the crowd needs today. But leaders do focus on where the crowd will want to go, and they will go there with their customers before their competitors do.