Imago Dei as Design Doctrine
Why "human-centered" needs a stronger reason than good ROI — and what the AI era is about to test.
In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas that “the human person is an end, not a means.” The idea has a longer history—one the Pope would ultimately ground differently than the Philosopher Kant—but the point remains powerful. He was writing about work and the economy but designers should hear it too. People aren’t simply inputs to optimize, a conversion to track, or metrics to move so that you can meet a year-end quota. They are the end, not the means to an end.
Designers have been circling this for years. “Human-centered design” or something to that effect is on every design team’s wall. The trouble is the reason we give for it. We say we put people at the center because it works — better trust, better adoption, better conversions, better numbers, better ROI.
Read that list again. Every reason on it is about the business, not the person. Those aren’t bad reasons to care about people. They’re just not enough. A person’s worth can’t be reduced to the value they create for your organization.
And that gap is about to matter more than it ever has. Designing with AI introduces real risk on two fronts. It lets bad actors mass-produce designs, and it lets well-meaning designers ship faster than they can stop to weigh the human cost. Human-centered design was built for human-paced work. Can it handle what’s already here, let alone what’s coming?
The Weak “Why”
When the only reason to respect the user is that respect pays off, the user is safe exactly as long as it keeps paying off.
The day the dashboard says a darker pattern converts better, the human loses. Not because anyone’s a villain — because efficiency is easy to measure and dignity isn’t. Put numbers on one side of the scale and a principle on the other, and the numbers usually win without a fight.
And it isn’t only the moments when respect stops paying. The quieter danger is the harm nobody meant to cause. A process gets streamlined. A decision gets automated. A friction point gets removed. Each change is sensible on its own. Together they can wear away someone’s agency, their understanding, their trust — and no one ever decided that should happen. The system just optimized for what it was handed.
That’s the flaw in grounding all of this in business outcomes. If efficiency is the highest good, people get sacrificed to it eventually. Sometimes on purpose. More often by accident.
So we need a reason to keep the human at the center that survives a bad quarter — one that doesn’t depend on the dashboard or the conversion rate. A reason rooted in the worth of the person, not the value they produce.
A Stronger Why: People Have Worth, Period
There’s an obvious objection: we already have a secular version of this. Kant said treat people as ends, never just means — no God required. It’s a good principle, and it’s where the Pope’s line comes from. So why bring in theology at all?
Because of where each one puts the worth.
Kant ties dignity to reason: you matter because you can think and choose. That covers most people most of the time. But it puts worth in a capacity, and capacities come and go. The infant doesn’t have it yet. The person with dementia is losing it. The patient under anesthesia isn’t using it. Build worth on a capacity, and the people least able to speak for themselves are the first whose dignity gets shaky — the ones a system is quickest to round down.
Imago Dei puts worth somewhere a metric can’t reach. It says every person bears the image of God — not for what they can do, but for what they are and who made them. Worth isn’t earned by output or proven by reason. It’s given, before the person does anything at all. In the old story, the human is called “very good” before making a single thing.
That does two things an analytics dashboard can’t do.
It makes worth flat. You don’t carry more of the image by being smarter, faster, or more profitable. The dashboard ranks people by their value to an organization — lifetime value, engagement score, churn risk. The image doesn’t rank at all. So when the tool sorts your users into high- and low-value segments, something true about each one survives the sort untouched.
And it covers the edges. The frail user, the confused one, the person who’ll never convert — a worth built on ability or output always has to strain to include them. Worth built on being made includes them by default. So you design with people, not at them, and you watch hardest for the ones easiest to miss. Your most overlooked user is the test of whether you mean any of this.
You don’t have to accept the theology to use what it offers. Just notice what it protects that the cheaper reasons don’t — and the posture it puts you in. If the person on the other side of the screen is already made — already an image, already called good — then you aren’t their maker. You’re a steward of someone else’s work. You can clear barriers, meet needs, build something better. What you can’t do is assign their worth, or quietly take it away. It was set before you opened the file.
Turning the Belief Into Practice
You can be convicted that people have worth and still ship something that quietly treats them otherwise. The belief needs a process attached to it.
Value Sensitive Design, developed by Batya Friedman and her colleagues, is such a process. Stripped down, it asks two things of you:
- Name the human values your product touches — early, while the decisions are still cheap to change.
- Look honestly at where those values collide. Speed versus privacy. Personalization versus autonomy. Convenience versus consent. Somebody is going to decide. Decide on purpose.
That’s most of it. Imago Dei says the person matters. Value Sensitive Design hands you the to-do list.
What AI Changes
When you wrote the copy, picked the default, or set the flow yourself, you brushed against each decision — and every one carried a value, whether you named it or not. AI takes that friction away. The default gets set, the nudge gets written, the ranking gets chosen, and you may never feel the moment a tradeoff happened. That’s the quiet risk. It isn’t that designers stop caring about values; it’s that the work stops asking them to notice. A compromise you never saw is one you can’t weigh. And as more of the building gets handed off, more of it happens somewhere you aren’t looking. So it’s worth asking, plainly, what’s going on inside the well-meaning designer. Are they still thinking about values? Or has the tool quietly made that optional?
There used to be a safe assumption: the things in your product got there because someone put them there. That’s breaking. Design with AI and the tool hands you things you never asked for — defaults, suggestions, rankings, phrasings — each one carrying values nobody on your team actually chose.
So the job quietly changes shape. It is no longer enough to add good values to the work; you now have to go looking for the ones that arrived on their own — the defaults nobody set, the nudges nobody wrote, the tradeoffs nobody clocked. Designing with AI becomes, in part, an act of noticing: catching the value you would once have caught by hand, back when the work still made you stop and decide.
Before You Ship
So before your next design ships, run one gut-check:
Are you designing like the user is a person with worth — or like a number to move?
Whatever we build with AI will say what we believe people are worth.
Sources & Further Reading
On the human person as an end, not a means
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (encyclical on AI), May 2026 — overview via TIME.
On designing for human values
Batya Friedman & David G. Hendry, Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination (MIT Press, 2019).