QUESTIONING THE CONCEPT OF THE USER

This article is a critique of the word 'user' as a description of peop le in the person-environment relationship. By calling the person a use r, researchers and designers place themselves inside a utilitarian wor ld view which sees everything and ultimately everyone as simply a reso urce 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 lim ited definition. The field of environmental psychology is challenged t o rethink the naming of people as users and to create a term which bet ter describes the person-environment relationship.