Non-Visible User

Definition

The non-visible user is Hadjiyanni's expansion of the interior's user category: "In much of design research, the body is equated with the user – the patient in the hospital, the student in the classroom, the employee in the workplace. How would designing interiors change if users included the non-visible, those living in the shadows, such as youth caught in trafficking or undocumented immigrants?" The concept names the design-research default (the visible, legible, institutional user) and its exclusion (the inhabitants whose situations — illegality, exploitation, hiding — keep them out of briefs, standards, and studios).

The concept carries two design-theoretical consequences. First, parameters: "What are the implications of design parameters such as surveillance, both physical and technological, for those who live on the margins of society?" — the same sensor infrastructure that secures a hotel from one user's view hunts another. Second, pedagogy: "How can designers be exposed to the plight of the invisible, and in what ways can these experiences be used to rethink current pedagogies and practices?" The concept's ethical horizon is the chapter's expanded designer role: "globalism implies responsibility for all – including those once invisible." Its terminus: interiors accounting for "the junctures of body and mind, here and there, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible" can "become spatialities endowed with complicated identities that are validated and spatially supported."

Key Thinkers

• Tasoulla Hadjiyanni — the concept's author: the body-equals-user default named and broken; trafficking and undocumented status as the two canonical invisibilities.
• Nina Simon — the participatory-museum frame's author (via Brown), whose "meaning-making" visitors are the visible users this concept extends beyond; not yet paged for this register (see participatory-museum).

Related Concepts

• Transbodied Space — the concept's spatial consequence: spaces recognized as transbodied when the absent body dwells alongside the present one.
• Placeness of Trafficking — the concept's typology: the interiors trafficking's non-visible users inhabit, are recruited in, and transition through.
• Visible/Invisible — the phenomenological ancestor: "the presence of absence" (via Smith's chapter) given a sociopolitical form — the invisible as social position, not perceptual limit.
• Panopticon — the concept's surveillance register: "design parameters such as surveillance, both physical and technological" as what the margin-dwelling user experiences from the hunted side.
• Interiors as Global Constructs — the concept's parent theory: the interior whose user base extends beyond the visible and present.
• Inhabitant and Visitor — the access-category apparatus (Hillier & Hanson): the non-visible user as the position neither inhabitant nor visitor categories can name.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the founding source: the body-equals-user default and its expansion; the trafficking and undocumented-immigrant cases; the surveillance-parameter question; the designer-exposure and pedagogy question; "globalism implies responsibility for all – including those once invisible."

Open Questions

• How does a designer know the non-visible user — "How can designers be exposed to the plight of the invisible, and in what ways can these experiences be used to rethink current pedagogies and practices?" Is community-engaged scholarship the only route, or does the concept demand new research methods for users who cannot be named?
• Does designing for the non-visible user conflict with designing against their exploitation (the trafficking typology names the interiors where they are harmed) — the same hotel must serve the trafficker's meeting and protect the trafficked youth: is the conflict resolvable spatially?
• Undocumented status is legal, not spatial: what are the spatial design parameters of illegality (fear of windows, avoidance of gathering places, absence-shaped homes — "informed by absence, not presence")? Is transbodied space that parameter-set's name?
• The concept rewrites the discipline's brief-writer's assumption — every program, code, and standard names its user. Is there a profession-level audit implied: which interior types structurally exclude the non-visible (the hotel, the mall, the shelter), and which include them?