“Why is it so challenging for us to reformulate the objectives of our discipline and the central values of our educational programs? It is because those were not the basis upon which we argued for the legitimacy of our practice. By legitimizing HCI and its role in technology production in terms of user experience, user delight, and user acceptance—which were only ever means toward other ends—we have ceded the space from which we could argue for the considerations that were actually at the center of the discipline’s ambitions …

First, where we want to speak beyond usability to broader concerns—privacy, autonomy, control over data, and so on, what we might broadly frame as concerns for human flourishing—we find that the legitimacy trap rules these topics as outside HCI’s purview.”

http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2019/user-experience-as-legitimacy-trap