Humane technology is decided at the interface: digital humanism, Industry 5.0 and the case for design research

Two influential ideas illuminate today’s debate about human-centric technology, each from a different direction: Vienna-based digital humanism and the European Union’s Industry 5.0. One speaks the language of values and critique, the other the language of industrial policy, and they do not necessarily meet. Neither pays much attention to the place where most of us actually meet technology: the interface in front of us when we are trying to get something done. I argue that this is exactly where human-centricity is won or lost, and that design research is unusually well placed to bring the two ideas down to that level.

Author: Harri Heikkilä

Two visions, both above the ground

Digital humanism, set out most clearly in the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism (2019), hands us a vocabulary for values and a critical posture. Its core reminder is an old one in the philosophy of technology: digital systems are never neutral. They carry choices, interests and politics (Winner 1980), and because we made them, we are free to remake them. This is the tradition of the Enlightenment and of the Vienna Circle. It argues over fundamental questions, including what technology is and what a human being is (Coeckelbergh 2024), and it works at the level of principle. The strength is obvious. So is the limit. A manifesto can tell us what to care about, but it cannot tell us what to build on Monday.

Industry 5.0, in the European Commission’s framing, is the policy answer to what Industry 4.0 left out, putting human-centricity, sustainability and resilience on the industrial agenda as goals worth pursuing in their own right (Breque et al. 2021). The ambition is real, but the definition is lacking: ask ten people what Industry 5.0 means and you will get ten answers. And when it is actually put into practice, it tends to turn into engineering, into human digital twins, collaborative robots and the so-called Operator 5.0 (Modoni & Sacco 2023). That is human-centricity in the ergonomic sense. It keeps the worker safe and productive. It is not yet a humanism.

These two are not enemies. One does macro-level critique, the other macro-level policy, and that is the problem. Neither comes down to the level of actual artifacts, interfaces and ways of working, where values are either built into a thing or quietly engineered out of it. In practice this is the difference between a system that gives a stressed nurse a clear view of her patients and one that buries her in cryptic alerts. So the two keep talking past each other, high over the heads of the people who will have to live with whatever gets built.

The decisive level is the interface

This level matters for a simple reason. It is the only one the user ever sees. Jef Raskin put it in a book he pointedly called The Humane Interface: “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product” (Raskin 2000, 5). All the values, all the architectures, all the good intentions reach a person at a single point, where they interact with the service. A humanism that stops at principle, and a policy that stops at the process diagram, both burn off before they ever get there.

And the gap does not stay empty. It fills with the default logic of the attention economy and of raw efficiency, where humane intent is swapped, almost without anyone noticing, for engagement metrics. Anyone who has used a public-service system that promises to serve the citizen and then collapses into an unusable screen knows the pattern. If human-centricity is going to be more than a slogan, it has to be made concrete where the encounter actually takes place.

Design research as the missing middle

Both camps have, in their own terms, been asking for exactly this. Digital humanism presents itself as a call to action, not only critique (Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism 2019), and the Industry 5.0 literature keeps pressing for the operational frameworks the concept still lacks (Breque et al. 2021; Modoni & Sacco 2023). This move to practice is the work of design research, but not in the sense of decoration or styling. It is also not the same thing as the engineer’s user-centred design. Done right, design research is a reflective, humanities-grade discipline: it works on the artifact and reasons about values at the same time. It can carry the principles of digital humanism down into actual design decisions, and it can give the Industry 5.0 mandate something specific to mean. Exactly how to do that, including the move from the sociology of technology down to a set of design principles I have been building for the purpose, is a longer argument, and one I am working out in more detail elsewhere.

Interaction design already has a humanism of its own. Raskin’s humane interface was defined around how people actually are, frailties included, rather than around what is convenient for the machine, and he did this well before anyone signed the Vienna Manifesto. So we are not short of humanisms at all. We have two of them: a philosophical humanism looking down from the macro level, and a design humanism looking up from the artifact. They have just never been introduced to each other, and the level of good practices is where that introduction would happen.

From argument to practice

If the diagnosis is right, the practical job is to build places, studios, labs and pilot projects, where the two humanisms can actually meet at the level of design. I have explored these questions in earlier work, on calm technology for the noisy ubiquitous era (Heikkilä 2023; 2025b) and on reclaiming human agency in the digital age (Heikkilä 2025a). That is the idea behind MESONEXUS at the Institute of Design at LAB, an Industry 5.0 initiative set up to do this meso-level work, the level of shared practices and standards, across education, public services and industry, often starting from the everyday screens and services people already struggle with. The same need for breadth applies to education: if the meso level is genuinely interdisciplinary, Industry 5.0 curricula cannot be built inside a single discipline either, but need design and the humanities at the table alongside engineering from the outset rather than as an afterthought. The wider point is simple enough. Whether technology really serves people is not decided in a manifesto or a policy paper. It is decided in how we design the things people use. That is where digital humanism and Industry 5.0 ought to meet, and it is where design research has the most to offer.

Sources

Breque, M., De Nul, L. & Petridis, A. 2021. Industry 5.0: Towards a sustainable, human-centric and resilient European industry. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

Coeckelbergh, M. 2024. What is digital humanism? A conceptual analysis and an argument for a more critical and political digital (post)humanism. Journal of Responsible Technology 17, 100073.

Heikkilä, H. 2023. Towards unifying human design principles for the IoT-era. LAB RDI Journal. Cited 18 Jun 2026. Available at https://www.labopen.fi/en/lab-rdi-journal/towards-unifying-human-design-principles-for-the-iot-era/

Heikkilä, H. 2025a. Reclaiming human agency in the digital age. LAB Pro. Cited 18 Jun 2026. Available at https://www.labopen.fi/en/lab-pro/reclaiming-human-agency-in-the-digital-age/

Heikkilä, H. 2025b. Towards a silent revolution of calm technology – thin interfaces, pass-through and cognitive sustainability. LAB Pro. Cited 18 Jun 2026. Available at https://www.labopen.fi/en/lab-pro/towards-a-silent-revolution-of-calm-technology-thin-interfaces-pass-through-and-cognitive-sustainability/

Modoni, G. E. & Sacco, M. 2023. A Human Digital-Twin-Based Framework Driving Human Centricity towards Industry 5.0. Sensors 23 (13), 6054.

Raskin, J. 2000. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism. 2019. Digital Humanism Initiative.

Winner, L. 1980. Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus 109 (1), 121-136.

Author

Dr. Harri Heikkilä is a Principal Lecturer in visual communication and UX/UI design at the Institute of Design, LAB University of Applied Sciences, and a doctoral researcher at LUT University, where his work addresses technological humanism and human-centricity in Industry 5.0.

Illustration: Midjourney / Harri Heikkilä