Questioning the concept of the ‘user’

Abstract

This article is a critique of the word ‘user’ as a description of people in the person-environment relationship. By calling the person a user, researchers and designers place themselves inside a utilitarian world view which sees everything and ultimately everyone as simply a resource to be exploited. At first intended by environmental psychologists to refute the idea of the person as a passive stimulus recipient, the word user has come to stand for a complicated grouping of attributes which have been added to the user while ignoring or forgetting its limited definition. The field of environmental psychology is challenged to rethink the naming of people as users and to create a term which better describes the person-environment relationship.