The Existential Designer: Facilitating Meaning Through Interaction
Designers like to talk about making meaningful products or using the tools of design to make meaning.
But like what does that even mean? Existentialist philosophers might offer an answer, and it’s not what you might expect.
Existentialism emerged in the nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom rejected the dominant philosophical tradition’s attempt to build total, rational systems that could explain human existence from the outside. Sort of like the engineering culture of today. They had a shared insistence that existence is lived from the inside, that it is irreducibly personal, and that no abstract system can capture what it means to be an individual facing choices in an uncertain world.
Their ideas became the foundation for a loose movement that flowered in mid-twentieth-century Europe, particularly in France in the wake of two world wars that shattered confidence in progress, reason, and inherited meaning. It feels like we’re there again, 80 years later.
The thinkers most associated with existentialism (Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Albert Camus) differ from one another in significant ways, but they share a cluster of philosophies: that existence precedes essence (we are not born with a fixed nature but become who we are through our choices); that human freedom is inescapable and often anguishing; that meaning is not built into the structure of the world but must be constituted through engaged, embodied action; and that philosophy must begin not with abstract categories but with the concrete situation of a person living in the world, confronting mortality, responsibility, and the presence of others.
In short, to them, meaning is constituted through human choice, commitment, and engagement with a world that is indifferent to our purposes. Meaning is not given in advance, or provided by someone else. Like a designer.
Meaning through interaction
Designers are frequently taught that they are the source of a product’s meaning. After all, they define and arrange the structures, flows, screens, materials, and the technology to make an experience. The user is just someone who receives, navigates, or at best “co-produces” that meaning within tightly bounded parameters.
Existentialists would call bullshit.
Sartre: The user as project
For Jean-Paul Sartre, human existence is defined by its projects: ongoing, self-chosen orientations toward the future that organize how we encounter the present. You don’t perceive objects neutrally; you encounter them in light of what you’re trying to become. A text editor means something different to someone writing a novel than to someone drafting a resignation letter, not because of its features, but because of the existential project it’s being used for.
This goes further than the familiar HCI refrain that “context matters.” Sartre would say that the user’s project is not merely a variable that modifies how a system is used; it is the condition under which the system has meaning at all. A system that defines its own purpose too rigidly (“this is a productivity tool, this is an entertainment platform”) forecloses the user’s capacity to take it up into their own project. It treats the user as a kind of meaning-consumer: someone who accepts the designer’s framing rather than generating their own.
The design implication isn’t that systems should be formless or featureless. (Although AI chat boxes certainly come close.) It is that the relationship between a system’s structure and the user’s purposes should remain open to negotiation. The user should be able to inhabit the system as an expression of their own project, not merely as a participant in the designer’s.
Generative AI tools like image generators or LLM writing assistants sit right on this fault line. When someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay, the Sartrean question is: whose project is this really? If the user is exploring ideas and using the tool as a thinking partner, they’re taking it up into their own meaning-making project. But if they’re pasting in a prompt and submitting the output unchanged, the system has effectively become the meaning-maker, and the user has become a delivery mechanism. The same tool can function either way. The design question is which relationship the system encourages.
Camus: Meaning in the activity itself
Albert Camus poses the question most starkly. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he argues that life’s lack of inherent purpose does not make it meaningless; it makes meaning something we must actively constitute through engagement. His famous conclusion, that we must “imagine Sisyphus happy,” locates meaning not in the achievement of a goal but in the quality of engagement with an activity.
This is a direct challenge to the outcome-oriented logic that dominates HCI evaluation. When we measure success by task completion rates, time-on-task, or conversion metrics, we treat meaning as residing in the outcome. Camus would direct our attention to the activity itself: is the engagement itself intrinsically meaningful, or is it merely instrumental?
When every friction is removed in the name of efficiency, the activity can be hollowed out. There is nothing left to push against, and meaning drains away. This is something that AI systems have become exceedingly good at. Push the sparkle button, the task is done for you, and you have learned nothing and enjoyed nothing.
Consider Spotify’s Discover Weekly, which is optimized to surface songs you’ll probably like. It’s efficient, but it can hollow out the experience of actual, accidental, or deliberate musical discovery. The struggle of searching out new music is where Camus would locate the meaning. An AI that removes all resistance from discovery might also remove what made discovery matter in the first place.
A Camusian design sensibility would ask: Does this interaction have enough texture, resistance, and presence to sustain meaningful engagement? Not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself?
Kierkegaard: From sampling to commitment
Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and ethical modes of existence provides another angle to consider. The aesthetic mode is characterized by immediacy, novelty-seeking, and the avoidance of commitment. A restless movement across surfaces. A great deal of consumer technology is architected to keep users in the aesthetic mode: infinite scrolling, algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, the endless lateral movement across content without depth or commitment. Kierkegaard would likely describe this as a form of despair.
The ethical mode involves choosing, committing, and taking responsibility for one’s choices over time. This is the kind of existence to aim for, and thus the kinds of products to design.
The question for design becomes: how do we create pathways from sampling to depth? How do we support the moment when a user moves from browsing to building, from consuming to committing? Kierkegaard has a concept of The Leap that might be relevant here. The most important transitions in life, he says, cannot be reached by incremental reasoning or gradual persuasion. They require an act of commitment where you leave behind the logic of the stage you’re in and throw yourself into a fundamentally different way of existing, without any guarantee it will work out. The Leap suggests that the transition from aesthetic to ethical cannot always be made smooth and frictionless. Maybe ever. Sometimes commitment requires discontinuity, a moment of decision that feels like a threshold. Designing away all friction may actually prevent users from reaching the kind of committed engagement where meaning-making becomes possible.
As one example, AI-assisted coding tools like Claude Code make it trivially easy to generate code you don’t fully understand. You can sample endlessly without ever committing to learning a programming language or framework deeply. The Leap from “person who uses AI to produce code” to “person who understands what they’re building” requires a discontinuous commitment that the tool’s frictionless suggestions actively work against.
Authentic choices or bad faith
Authenticity and bad faith are among existentialism’s most potent conceptual contributions, and they map onto interaction design with uncomfortable precision.
Sartre: Bad faith and the architecture of choice
Bad faith (mauvaise foi), for Sartre, is the denial of one’s own freedom, either by pretending one has no choice (“I had to agree to the terms of service”) or by pretending one is radically free of all constraints (“I chose to share my data”). Both moves falsify the situation. The reality, for Sartre, is that we are always free and always situated: we choose, but we choose within conditions we did not create. Our users are in this same situation.
Dark patterns are the most obvious case of designed bad faith. They seem like choices, but they actually eliminate genuine alternatives. The user is invited to experience themselves as choosing while the system has already determined the outcome. This is bad faith by design: the system provides the script for self-deception.
But the problem runs deeper than dark patterns. Any system that naturalizes a particular workflow, that presents only one way of doing things as simply “how it works,” is encouraging a mild form of bad faith. The user stops experiencing the system’s structure as a set of choices someone (or some AI) made and begins experiencing it as the way things are. This is not always harmful: some degree of transparency and habituation is necessary for fluency. But it becomes bad faith when the naturalized structure serves interests the user hasn’t endorsed and alternatives the user can’t see.
AI-powered “personalization” is one ofmost pervasive engine of bad faith operating today. When Netflix tells you “because you watched X,” it presents algorithmic curation as a reflection of your authentic preferences. But those preferences were themselves shaped by previous algorithmic selections. The system constructs a taste profile, feeds you content that reinforces it, and then points to your engagement as evidence that the profile was accurate. In Sartrean terms, this is a closed loop of bad faith. You’re invited to mistake a constructed pattern for a discovered identity.
Conversely, systems that support authentic choice make their own structure visible without being disruptive. They allow users to understand that alternatives exist, sometimes just by simply showing alternatives. They demonstrate that the current arrangement is one possibility among others, and that users’ continued use is a choice they are making, not a necessity they are submitting to.
Heidegger: Das Man and the pull of the default
Heidegger’s concept of das Man (the They/the Anyone) describes the way we tend to fall into doing what “one does,” thinking what “one thinks.” We lose ourselves in the conventional, the average, the unreflective. (AI slop, anyone?) Das Man is a structural feature of social existence. We are always already absorbed in shared practices and norms before we reflectively choose them.
Platforms operationalize das Man with extraordinary efficiency. The default setting, the trending topic, the notification badge, the social proof metric (“4,327 people liked this”), the generic AI-generated output: these are all mechanisms that draw the user into alignment with what everyone else is doing. The infinite scroll is perhaps the purest expression of das Man in digital form: an endless stream of the anonymous “they,” pulling the user along without requiring any act of choice or commitment.
Das Man is practically the operating principle of AI-driven social media feeds. TikTok’s For You page is an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for dissolving individual choice into the anonymous current of what “one” watches. The user is carried along without ever making a decision, which is precisely the unreflective absorption in das Man that Heidegger describes.
Heidegger does not think we can or even should escape das Man entirely. It is part of the structure of being human. But he argues that authentic existence involves a particular relationship to das Man: an awareness that one is participating in shared practices, coupled with the capacity to take ownership of that participation rather than simply being swept along.
Interaction design informed by this concept would not try to eliminate social influence or collective norms from systems. It would instead ask whether the system allows users to become aware of those norms as norms, to see the current of das Man and choose their relationship to it, rather than being carried along unreflectively.
Heidegger: Breakdown as disclosure
Heidegger has another concept that is well known in HCI: Breakdown, the moment when a tool stops working and suddenly becomes visible as an object rather than a transparent extension of activity. But less considered is its existentialist dimension.
Breakdown is not just a practical inconvenience. It is a moment of disclosure: the hidden structure of a situation becomes visible. The assumptions built into a system, the dependencies one has developed, the alternatives one has foreclosed, all of these can become apparent in a moment of rupture. In Heidegger’s broader existentialist framework, such moments are related to Angst, which discloses the contingency of our situation and forces us into a more reflective, choosing relationship with it.
The standard HCI approach to breakdown is to prevent it, and when it occurs, to smooth recovery. An existentialist perspective does not dispute the value of reliability, but it adds a question: when breakdown does occur, should the system use that moment to disclose something meaningful? Or does it simply apologize and route the user back into unreflective absorption? Error states, transitions between systems, onboarding experiences, and even feature deprecation are all moments of potential disclosure, moments when the user could be supported in understanding their situation more fully rather than simply being returned to the flow.
This could be especially useful with AI systems. When an LLM confidently states something false, and the user catches it, that’s a Heideggerian moment of disclosure. The system’s authority, which had been functioning transparently, suddenly becomes visible as a structure that can fail. The question is whether the design uses that moment to support a more reflective relationship with AI (making uncertainty visible, encouraging verification) or does it scramble to rush the user back into uncritical trust.
De Beauvoir: The social structure of bad faith
Simone De Beauvoir extends the analysis of bad faith in a crucial direction. For Sartre, bad faith is primarily an individual phenomenon, a person’s self-deception about their own freedom. De Beauvoir shows that bad faith is also socially structured. Systems of oppression work precisely by making certain groups’ lack of freedom appear natural, inevitable, or chosen. The subordinated person is encouraged to experience their constrained situation as simply “the way things are,” which is bad faith, but bad faith produced and maintained by social arrangements, not merely by individual psychology.
This has sharp implications for interaction design. When a platform’s recommendation algorithm consistently surfaces certain kinds of content to certain demographic groups, it is not merely making predictions about preferences; it is structuring the horizon of what appears possible and normal. When a system’s defaults encode assumptions about who the “standard” user is (their language, their physical abilities, their social context), it naturalizes one form of life and marginalizes others. This is socially structured bad faith: the system presents a particular, partial arrangement as universal.
De Beauvoir’s reciprocity principle is starkly illustrated by LLMs. The meaning-making capacity these tools offer to users depends on training data produced by writers, artists, coders, and researchers, most of whom (like myself!) were not consulted, compensated, or even informed. One group’s expanded capacity for meaning-making (generating text, images, code on demand) is built on the instrumentalization of another group’s creative labor. That’s a textbook failure of de Beauvoir’s ethical test.
Designing against socially structured bad faith requires more than inclusive defaults or accessibility compliance (though those matter). It requires asking whose experience is being naturalized, whose alternatives are being rendered invisible, and whether the system’s structure reinforces or disrupts existing patterns of social bad faith.
Situated freedom
The existentialists (de Beauvoir especially) insisted that freedom is not an abstract property of individuals but a concrete, situated condition that depends on material circumstances and the actions of others.
De Beauvoir: Freedom is reciprocal
De Beauvoir’s central ethical insight is that my freedom is bound up with the freedom of others. You cannot genuinely declare your own freedom without also declaring the freedom of those around you. When you treat another person as a mere instrument, as raw material for your projects, or consider people “NPCs” as Elon Musk and his acolytes do, you diminish not only their freedom but your own, because you are living in bad faith about the social conditions of your existence.
Applied to interaction design, this principle reframes the meaning-making question as an ethical and political one. It is not enough to ask whether a system supports meaning-making in the abstract. One must ask: whose meaning-making does it support, and at whose expense?
A social media platform may empower some users to build audiences, create communities, and develop public identities. These are genuine meaning-making activities. But that meaning-making depends on the labor of content moderators, the attention of other users, and the data extracted from everyone’s activity. If the system is structured so that some people’s meaning-making requires others’ reduction to instruments, to content, to data points, to moderation labor, to a captive audience, then it fails de Beauvoir’s ethical test, regardless of how meaningful it feels to the users who feel empowered.
The design question becomes: is it possible to structure this system so that one user’s meaning-making does not require another’s instrumentalization? And if not, if some asymmetry is unavoidable, is the system honest about that asymmetry, or does it obscure it?
Sartre: The look and the politics of visibility
Sartre’s concept of The Look (le regard) describes how being perceived by another consciousness transforms your experience. Under the other’s gaze, you become an object: something seen, judged, categorized. This is not inherently oppressive (mutual recognition is possible), but it becomes oppressive when the look is one-directional: when one party has the power to observe, classify, and define, and the other can only be observed.
This maps onto the asymmetric visibility structures of contemporary technology with troubling clarity. Surveillance systems, performance monitoring software, algorithmic profiling, and social media metrics all create relationships in which some parties see, and anyone else is just seen, and the seen have limited capacity to look back, to define the terms of their own visibility, or to withdraw from observation. The person living under algorithmic surveillance begins to organize their behavior around managing their profile rather than pursuing their own projects. I feel this in myself every time I post anything publicly, and I bet some of you do too. This is exactly the distortion of meaning-making that Sartre predicts under a permanent, asymmetric Look.
An existentialist critique of these systems would not simply ask whether surveillance is “justified” in consequentialist terms. It would ask: what does it do to a person’s capacity for meaning-making to exist under a permanent, one-directional look? Sartre’s answer is that it tends to produce either bad faith (internalizing the observer’s categories as one’s own identity) or a reactive, defensive mode of existence organized around managing one’s appearance rather than pursuing one’s projects. Either way, meaning-making is distorted.
Designing with this in mind means attending to the reciprocity of visibility in a system. Who can see whom? On whose terms? Can users see the systems that see them? Can they contest the categories applied to them? Can they withdraw from observation without losing access to participation?
Heidegger: Thrownness and the user who is already somewhere
Heidegger’s concept of Thrownness (Geworfenheit) names the fact that we always find ourselves already in a situation we did not choose. There’s always history, our bodies, the cultures we live in, and a set of social constructs and laws already in play. We never start from zero.
As a minor example, my students are thrown into a world where AI writing tools exist. They didn’t choose this, but they must now navigate questions about authorship, learning, and intellectual integrity that previous generations never faced. The AI itself has become part of their Thrownness, reshaping what it means to write, to learn, and to demonstrate understanding. Design decisions made by AI companies have altered the existential situation of millions (billions?) of people who had no say in those decisions.
HCI has historically tended to treat the user as an abstraction: less a person and more a set of cognitive capacities, task goals, and demographic variables. Thrownness insists that the user is a concrete person who arrives at the system already entangled in a life. They are already tired or anxious or grieving. They already have habits formed by other systems. They already occupy a social position that shapes what the system will mean to them and what it will demand of them.
Designing with Thrownness in mind means abandoning the fiction of the blank-slate user. It means asking: what situations are users likely to be thrown into when they encounter this system? What histories and constraints do they carry? And crucially: does the system accommodate the diversity of thrown situations, or does it assume a narrow, privileged baseline?
This is not simply a call for “inclusive design” in the sense of accommodating more user types. It is a deeper philosophical point: the system itself becomes part of the user’s Thrownness. Once adopted, it shapes the situation into which the user is thrown tomorrow. Design is not a one-time intervention but an ongoing restructuring of the conditions of someone’s existence.
Kierkegaard: The weight of choice
Kierkegaard insists that genuine choice is weighty. It matters, it shapes who you become, and it cannot be undone without cost. This stands in tension with the design rhetoric of flexibility, reversibility, and low commitment (e.g., undo).
There is wisdom in reducing unnecessary friction. But Kierkegaard reminds us that a world in which nothing is weighty, choice itself is devalued. If every decision can be trivially reversed, then no decision means very much, and meaning-making, which depends on commitment, is undermined.
The question for design is not whether to introduce weight and consequence everywhere, but whether the system is honest about the weight that already exists. Trust me: when someone commits years of creative and social work to a platform, that commitment shapes their life. It matters whether or not the platform acknowledges it. An existentialist design ethic would be honest about these stakes rather than obscuring them with the language of frictionless flexibility.
Toward an existentialist design sensibility
Obviously, this is not a design method. Existentialism resists methodological capture; it is a way of attending to the human situation, not a procedure for optimizing outcomes. But taken together, these concepts outline a sensibility that can inform and challenge design practice.
This sensibility insists that users are not information processors, not customers, not eyeballs, not tapping fingers, and not data sources. They are meaning-making beings whose freedom and dignity are at stake in every interaction. It asks designers to take seriously the existential weight of what they build. The systems we design become part of the conditions of human existence, shaping what people can choose, what they can see, who they can become.
The existentialist tradition also offers a crucial corrective to the optimism that pervades design discourse. Not every problem has a solution. Not every friction should be removed. Not every experience should be optimized. Sometimes the most meaningful interactions are the ones that confront us with difficulty, ambiguity, and the weight of our own freedom. You might try, the next time the opportunity arises, to have the courage to let those moments stand.
