The concept of user experience (UX) feels modern, born from the rise of digital interfaces, apps, and analytics, but the mindset behind it has existed for centuries. The practice of designing with empathy, experimentation, and systems thinking is rooted in disciplines as old as science, psychology, anthropology, engineering, and architecture. Even more surprising: many of UX’s foundational ideas trace their roots to the Midwest. Before Silicon Valley made “design thinking” a business strategy, innovators from Ohio to Michigan to Iowa were quietly shaping the principles that would become the UX movement.
The Midwest Origins of UX
Consider the lineage:
- David & Tom Kelley, founders of IDEO, were raised in Barberton, Ohio.
- Janice Fraser, co-founder of Adaptive Path, studied at Ohio University; Mike Kuniavsky attended the University of Michigan; Jeffrey Veen graduated from Calvin College.
- The Information Architecture Institute, a cornerstone of digital UX, was founded by Louis Rosenfeld (University of Michigan) and Christine Wodtke (Iowa City).
- Karl Fast, a leading voice in UX education, taught at Kent State University.
- Midwest UX, the annual conference now in its seventh year, was born from the collaboration between Columbus’s Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA).
These roots matter, not just because of geography, but because of values.
Midwestern Principles
The Midwest has long been known for a set of enduring truths that extend beyond region or industry. They’ve also quietly shaped the principles of user experience design itself.
- Honesty & Integrity: An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
- Respect, Kindness & Empathy: The neighborly instinct to understand others.
- Dedication & Reliability: You can depend on us, always.
- Curiosity & Invention: A relentless desire to improve systems and tools, think Henry Ford and the assembly line.
- Quality & Excellence: A belief that good work should endure.
- Collaboration: The understanding that progress happens together.
These principles, authentic, humble, and quietly radical, helped establish UX as more than a technical discipline. They made it human.
Before UX was a formal field, these same values drove the great thinkers and designers who sought to improve the human experience long before “user experience” was a term.
Case Study 1: Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Curiosity
We know Leonardo da Vinci as an artist and inventor, but he might also be considered the world’s first UX designer. His notebooks show an obsession with how people interact, with tools, with the body, with nature itself.
While we don’t have his explicit “design principles,” author Michael Gelb distilled da Vinci’s creative mindset into seven timeless practices:
- Curiosity: A relentless quest for learning.
- Independent Thinking: Testing knowledge through experience and mistakes.
- Refine Your Senses: Especially sight, as a way to truly see the world.
- Embrace Uncertainty: Finding possibility within ambiguity.
- Balance Art & Science: Merging logic and imagination.
- Mind & Body: Cultivating grace, fitness, and poise.
- Interconnectedness: Recognizing that everything is connected, systems thinking before systems had a name.
Leonardo didn’t separate art from engineering or science from beauty. His approach foreshadowed the very idea of design thinking, that empathy, experimentation, and synthesis lead to better outcomes.
Case Study 2: Dieter Rams and the Discipline of Simplicity
Centuries later, Dieter Rams, the legendary designer behind Braun’s iconic products, brought a similar philosophy into the industrial age. His work, minimal, functional, timeless, redefined modern design and laid the groundwork for what we now call human-centered design.
Rams articulated ten principles of good design, each one rooted in respect for people:
- It is innovative, useful, and aesthetic.
- It makes a product understandable, honest, and unobtrusive.
- It is long-lasting, detailed, and environmentally friendly.
- It is “as little design as possible,” less, but better.
Before there were UX heuristics, there was Rams. His pursuit of simplicity wasn’t aesthetic minimalism; it was emotional clarity, a belief that good design should never get in the way of human intention.
Demystifying User Experience
As UX evolved from intuition to industry, it formalized what people like Leonardo and Rams had always known: design is a bridge between people and possibility. Let’s trace the evolution.
From Science to Systems
The scientific method, observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis, gave us a framework for curiosity. It became the foundation for research-driven design. Data became insight; insight became information; information became architecture. Information Architecture (IA) emerged to organize and structure content for clarity and accessibility, helping people find what they need and complete tasks with ease. From there, User Interface (UI) design brought interaction into focus, making digital systems intuitive and responsive. Interaction Design (IxD) added emotional nuance, defining how users feel during those interactions. And Usability, as defined by Jakob Nielsen, introduced measurable qualities, learnability, efficiency, memorability, error prevention, and satisfaction. Finally, User Experience (UX) emerged as the holistic integration of all these disciplines, a recognition that every touchpoint, from product to service to brand, contributes to how people perceive value and meaning.
Beyond UX: Toward the Human Experience
When Don Norman coined the term “user experience” at Apple in 1993, he was expanding the lens beyond usability. He saw that the interface was just one small part of a larger emotional and cultural ecosystem. Today, that lens has widened again, from user experience to human experience. Designers and strategists aren’t just shaping digital interactions, they’re shaping the moments, emotions, and relationships that define our lives.
That’s why human-centered design, as championed by IDEO, Stanford’s d.school, and others, remains so powerful. It starts not with technology, but with empathy. It ends not with efficiency, but with impact. As Tim Brown of IDEO defines it, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. It’s a process, but more importantly, it’s a philosophy: one that reconnects creativity with humanity.
Designing for Humanity
So where do we go from here? If UX was about usability, and CX about consistency, HX is about meaning. It challenges us to move beyond interfaces and into experiences, beyond systems and into stories, beyond design thinking and into human thinking. The next chapter of design isn’t about making technology easier to use. It’s about making life easier to live.