My friends say that I usually care to an extreme edge. I say that I'm a shapeshifter who can shift into others' shoes and feel and relate to the situation from their standpoint. Questions like: How would I feel if I was in this situation? Why is this happening? What can fix this? These questions drive me to make me want to do something about it. So, in turn, I feel like I am helping myself. Therefore, this can make me either a caring or a self-concerned person, but I would look at myself as a Designer who can shapeshift through people's lives, striving to look at the world from their point of view and look for ways I can make it simpler and meaningful so that it helps make a difference for the user. This is where I understood that there is Design in making someone's life better.
On account of such characters, I chose to study the HCI course at Indiana University, where I had the pleasure of taking the Design Theory course by Professor Erik Stolterman. This course helped me reflect on myself as a designer and understand why I do things the way I do, and it helped me meet other classmates and peers who all shared similar perspectives towards Design.
A design situation can be created in a company, an organization, or our own home. Every designer without his own knowledge might already have his own preference of what kind of solution a design should lead to. This is dependent on his core beliefs and values that he holds, and the same is projected by what he envisions the Design should be. These core values can vary for each designer.
Design is about empathy, but only by empathizing will we not know how to solve the crux of the problem. Therefore, as a designer, it is important to understand what people desire the most. For example, if I'm able to click a candid picture of a client and show it to them, that should bring a smile to their face. People don't just want products- they want to feel happy using them.
As put by Nelson and Stolterman, "Desiderata can be expressed through distinct domains: the body's desire, the mind's desire, the heart's desire, and the soul's desire. A desideratum is something that is roused out of a desire, a hope, a wish, a passion, an aspiration, an ambition, a quest, a call to, a hunger for, or a will toward." [1]
Desire is a force, the impulse towards fulfillment. By engaging with desires, we can then look for what is needed. Therefore, we can use these desires as a guiding compass to understand the direction to which those desires lead us.
"To reveal our desires, we have to name them, reflect upon them and examine them" [2]
The Design finally should speak to a person's truest sense of who they are, their experiences in life, and why they do the things they do.
As a Designer, it is good to be focused on the users, but it is also equally important not to be ignorant of the production pipeline. The Design should be easy to implement in an effective manner. The designer should know how the product goes through the whole chain from design to development and, finally, the user. What we design should be feasible to build in reality. Therefore, having rapport and involving the stakeholders during the process of design is crucial.
"…in a service relationship, the designer is responsible to more than just the client, and must assume accountability for others who will be affected by any particular design active." [3]
Being able to project our ideas to the future applicability and durability helps a designer design a sustainable product. Testing if my design is fitting enough for the customers to use and pay for the solution. Does the design keep the business models and the stakeholders also profitable? Viability in terms of sustainability to the ecosystem of the product and not just profitability and end of the day ensuring that it contributes something meaningful to the community and society.
The above goals enable me to realize how my design solution should turn out. The next step comes in translating these goals into a good design.
We know simple when we see it, when we touch it, when we use it. A good design would be a seamless adaptation into our lives.
This takes me to the time when I'd design a new game at the Escape games company I was working at. We had to design a new game from storyline until execution and support. Extensive research and conceptualizing many ideas helped me build the storyline to closely resemble real-life scenarios. The design and the levels of ciphers and puzzles were well appreciated. However, through Beta testing, we found that the users found it very difficult to decode the game and complete it in the stipulated time. So we took the feedback from the users and covered the loopholes to make their experience simpler and meaningful so that it is inclusive of everyone's capabilities.
There are many such complex steps that we come across in our daily lives. For example, turning the right setting on a showerhead or scraping out a sticker from an apple. However annoying it is, we tend to get inured to this process in our lives. As humans, our brains encode these everyday things into habits which makes us forget these small things. Habituation can be good and bad. If habituation stops us from noticing and fixing these problems, these habits are bad. But as designers, it is our job not just to notice these annoying stickers around us but go one step further and fix them.
A product perceived as honest will show respect for its buyer. In addition, it will create a sense of trust, which is one of the most valuable intangibles one can find in a product. Whenever there is a disconnect in the design of a product, we feel scammed. The design feels deceiving, dishonest. These dark patterns come in all shapes and sizes - whether it be sending out unauthorized messages to your contacts, opting you into service by default, or creating ads to look like content; they ultimately prioritize business wants over user needs. They're highly unethical. Therefore, design should be straightforward about its purpose and make a user feel safe
I remember it like today, the first time I bought my One-Plus mobile two years back. It came in a crimson red box with minimal design and bold text. It was as close to giving a girl red roses. Slowly lifting the lid, I could see the shimmer on the glass surface with a huge screen. Sliding my hands from the round-edged screen and the silver matte back finish over the alert slider and down the speaker grill, everything felt just right. It was the most beautiful device I had bought in my lifetime. This value that I hold to from my first experience with the device is the visceral feeling.
As Don Norman says, Design should be Visceral; "Concerns itself with the appearances" [4]. This talks about how the Design makes the user feel and the emotions it evokes, which brings out the value it holds. It is all about attraction or repulsion, and designers can use their aesthetic skills to drive these visceral responses.
Exclusive design patterns are almost always the result of carelessness, not malicious intent. It's natural for designers, researchers, and engineers to implicitly assume that their users will think and act more or less like themselves, with similar abilities and mental models. It all boils down to bias. By being mindful about who we are excluding, not only can we build experiences for "everyone," but we can also create new possibilities throughout society.
When it comes to people, there's no such thing as "normal." For example, the interactions we design with technology depend heavily on what we can see, hear, say, and touch. If we're designing with ourselves as a baseline, we can overlook people with circumstances different from ours. For example, a curb cut is still a curb. The cut makes the curb more accessible. Curb cuts were initially created to help the disabled. It helps people in wide range of cicumstances. I'm a biker myself, and I can easily use it instead of only thinking that its for disabled. So can parents using stroller or even in hauling heavy objects. Designing with constraints in mind is simply designing well. Inclusive design gives us ways to design for ever-changing human motivations and needs.
All these above triggers can help us realize the value of the Design and the organic unity it entails, and everything that we Design needs to embody the core meaning that users are seeking. Meaning and value together ultimately make the user happy, which is the design harmony one can achieve as a designer.
How can a designer achieve this harmony?
As humans, we are already biased; our past experiences and living conditions might already make us assume certain things about a user, and we might not know it. As designers we need to remove any preconceived notions, we might feel we are empathetic, but we need to approach every project as a new person having only our core values as a guiding star.
As designers, we will face a lot of rejection in our work. But having the right mindset is the best toolkit for a designer. One has to be a persistent designer by taking constant constructive feedback from his peers. As Professor Erik Stolterman says, most design decisions might not always reside in our hands. Designers might act as facilitators in bringing the desiderata and the proposed designs to the table. The final say is at the hands of the stakeholders.
Not everybody will like our ideas or agree with our solutions. So I might have to create 50 versions of something, incorporate feedback that doesn't make sense, and have someone rip apart the work from the seams. But a resilient designer would know that the ideas can never end, and instead of dwelling on the issue and asking why me?, we can ask, "How can I improve this design?"
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used to create them." — Albert Einstein
I could relate to my photography experience in understanding Judgement. It is like capturing a perfect photo; where you frame your picture with the – the mountains, the starlit sky, the moon, and when you see it; you know it! And then you take your Snap!
Judgment strongly intervenes with the core values that we have picked up through our experiences and beliefs we hold. These help us decide when to present or when to take a step back and jump onto the tree of research. The ability to make good design judgments distinguishes good design.
"Design judgment making is the ability to gain subconscious insights that have been abstracted from experiences and reflections, informed by situations that are complex, indeterminate, indefinable, and paradoxical. Judgment is, in effect, a process of taking in the whole, in order to formulate a new whole." [5]
Sometimes working as a team might lead to conflicts, but as designers, we should be able to put aside the elephant in the room and engage in meaningful conversations about what's best for the overall project.
"Think of design collaboration as a multi-step process to conceptualize a design idea." [6]
Alone we can do so little; together, we can even shape the whole world and build a happier society.— Helen Keller
To conclude, my design philosophy lies in the roots of my beliefs and experiences. A good design has the power to touch hearts, create deep meaning and bring out emotions for everyone. Therefore, I strive to look at the world in ways I can make it simpler and meaningful while making a difference for the user.
As a young designer, I intend to imbibe knowledge and feedback from everyone around me and use it to reflect on myself and sculpt my core design philosophy to become a designer who can bring about meaningful change in this giant world.
[1] Nelson, Harold G. Stolterman, Erik. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (The MIT Press) (p. 111). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
[2] Nelson, Harold G. Stolterman, Erik. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (The MIT Press) (p. 111). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
[3] Nelson, Harold G. Stolterman, Erik. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (The MIT Press) (p. 49). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Norman's Three Levels of Design: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/norman-s-three-levels-of-design
[5] Nelson, Harold G. Stolterman, Erik. The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (The MIT Press) (p. 145). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
[6] Improve Design Collaboration:
https://dribbble.com/stories/2020/12/02/improve-design-collaboration
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