c. 1900: The development of the industrial revolution leads to the separation of the maker of a product from the planner of the product. The maker becomes an engineer and factory, the planner becomes the designer who must interact with many people: client, engineer, and consumer.
1907: Deutsche Werkbund — birth of the idea that a designer brings quality craftsmanship into industrial production.
1919-1925: The Bauhaus School Weimar Period— Form follows function where form is a mediation between the client, materials, and manufacturing. With Louis Sullivan, the idea of form follows function is introduced and modernism in design is born.
1925-1946: The late and post-Bauhaus school. László Moholy-Nagy introduces the concept of design is Form and Function mediated also by science and, most importantly, aesthetics.
1940s — World War II sees the role of ergonomics enter design, especially task analysis in airplane cockpit design.
1950s — Human-centered design is introduced into industrial design by, among others, Henry Dreyfuss.
1960s — Aesthetics of elegance, e.g. Dieter Rams’ work for Braun and many other rock star designers at work for companies like Olivetti, Bell Labs, IBM, etc.
1960-70s — Technologists like Douglas Engelbaert, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, etc., reimagine technology as a domain for everyone not just engineers. In put devices like the mouse, outputs like the GUI, and media like hypertext are born. Suddenly technology needs design in order to serve these new potential users and they begin to appear at Bell Labs, DEC, and many other places we no longer hear of.
1980s — Cognitive Psychologists introduce user-centered design into technology HCI (human-computer interaction-dominated design of technology). Emphasis on making technology useful to the expert or professional user.
1990s — Design and HCI synthesize into UX design. As the decade progresses, the wild growth of the web leads the consumer to increasingly come into contact with technology. Designers and HCI professionals begin to synthesize their work: Design brings aesthetic forms and HCI brings ease of use. User-centered design where the design is heavily based on making technology accessible to the lay consumer (technological and end-user requirements). The triumph of minimalism and “Keep it simple, stupid.” The Usability and GUI is king.
2000s — The expansion of user-centered design to customer-centered design with the addition of business, financial requirements as well as end-user requirements. Design encourages HCI to embrace complexity and see customer needs in a systematic manner. GUIs are the center of all design. Data visualizations, machine learning in point solutions, etc. proliferate but resolve in a visual interface. Seeds of other interactions paradigms take root, mostly in research e.g. tangible computing.
2007 — iPhone introduction — Aesthetics returns as a part of usability as consumers start demanding easy-to-use products. The smartphones start the disintegration and fracturing of the idea of an application to an increasing system of distributed devices with multiple modes of interaction (GUI, voice, touch, gesture, etc.). The more static and blog-like websites become commoditized UIs.
2010s— Platforms and systems stakeholder-centered design, where stakeholders extend over domains, systems, and markets (business, legal regulatory, customers, end users, media etc.). As the iPhone craze takes hold, now even expert users want aesthetically pleasing and usable “consumer grade” software solutions. Apps are increasingly becoming commoditized UI’s.
2020s — The focus shift away from applications and journeys to systems. The computer becomes a proactive player in software creation, and the user more passive/observatory role. Complex systems thinking is now essential even for small software solutions as access to agentic technology spreads. If in the 2000s there was a transformation from one stakeholder: user-centered to multiple stakeholder-centered; now we go from single agent (the computer) to dual agent (computer + AI) to multiple stakeholder/multiple agent design, where agents extend over domains, systems, and markets. The gradual shift starts to agent-centered—or rather stakeholder-agent-centered design, where the agent can be the primary actor (but the stakeholder needs still must be understood thoroughly)
[Small note: it’s interesting to note that design’s essential activities as captured by Donald Schön (reflection in action), Herbert Simon (design as problem solving), Christopher Alexander (design patterns), and Nigel Cross (designerly ways of thinking), and others remain uniformly relevant.]