DESIGN
Much time has been spent by humans trying to predict the future. From palm reading to trend reports to nearly the entire sci-fi genre, we as a species have endeavored to see beyond the present for millennia, albeit with little accuracy. This is no surprise however, as even the slightest glimpse into what might be could have unfathomable benefits. And though we don’t realize it, many jobs and countless companies are in the business of predicting the future in one way or another. Sometimes its obvious, as with stock investing and other times its more subtle as is the case with design. A large part of being a designer is learning how to predict, and influence behavior. If it is designed this way then people will react like this. Designers are constantly exploring these possibilities, for it is the nature of the discipline. To design something that already exists is, in a sense, a non-sequitur. The inverse of this idea being that all design is by definition future-oriented (Lindley, 2015). Because of this inherent property of the field of design, I suspect designers have amassed tools, skills, methods, and ways of thinking that make them exceptionally well suited to dealing with future scenarios and to dealing with life’s inevitable change.
Hypothesis: Designers are well equipped to deal with uncertainty and imagine the future.
Human-Centered Design
Human-centered design (HCD), stated simply is an approach to design that relies heavily on the creation of empathy between designer and user (DesignKit.org). In a HCD approach, a designer begins with the “why” rather than the “how” (Thomas and McDonagh, 2013). Doing this allows designers to build solutions from the ground up that keep the users needs in focus. To focus on the “why”, designers that employ an HCD methodology often rely on tools such as personas, user-stories, story-mapping, in-depth interviews, immersion experiences and a range of others (DesignKit.org). Human-centered design differs from other approaches that may be more business centered. In the end, all products and services aim to create value for a person, a human, but in some approaches the business objectives are the focal point of design decisions. A signal of a non-HCD approach might be the use of dark patterns. Dark patterns are design patterns that intentionally try to trick a user into completing an action (Brignull et al., 2015). Obvious examples of dark patterns might be the design of email newsletters that hide their “un-subscribe” options. Design decisions that benefit a business at the expense of a user’s experience are the anti-thesis of HCD.
Example of a dark pattern: Where do you unsubscribe? (Try Unsubscribing at buysubscriptions.com, 2015)
In the context of this project human-centered design takes on an increased level of importance. Helping a business react to an emerging technology might be construed as fundamentally not human-centered owing to the fact that the technology itself becomes the center of design activities. This is a valid perspective and a technology centric approach should be scrutinized heavily. However, as technologies arise they may do so initially to meet a human need, but they can also create needs and change behavior (Drouin, 2012). Furthermore, the decision of which technology a given business should allocate resources to can be made with a human-centered perspective, meaning that the unmet needs of a businesses users can be used to dictate the course of exploration.
Experience Design
Experience design is a design discipline that can be viewed as having arisen from the expanding scope of the designer in other disciplines. The graphic designer’s role grew to encompass communications design which ultimately grew to include experience design (Grefe, 2011). In experience design, experience designers aim to transcend the material nature of objects and interfaces (Hassenzahl, 2013). Objects that appear to be rather unappealing in their aesthetic may actually be quite effective in creating an experience. This point is an important one to make as it is what helps tie the role of the experience designer closely to the process of human-centered design. The designs that experience designers produce aim to appeal to the most fundamental parts of what makes a human, a human (Hassenzahl et al., 2013). It is for this reason that human-centered design is a preferred and oft recommended approach of experience designers.
(Maslow, 1943) (Hassenzahl et al., 2013) (Sheldon et al., 2001)
To accomplish their design goals, experience designers rely on a number of tools. One tool in particular, design fiction, is particularly relevant within the wider context of this research project. A design fiction as defined by Bruce Sterling is the “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief about change” (Sterling, 2012). Design fictions are commonly used in the research portion of the design process to help designers and stakeholders alike imagine a future in which their ultimate solution might deployed. One can see how valuable the use of design fictions, and experience with their application, might be in evaluating future scenarios in relation to the emergence of given technology. For example, the design lab SuperFlux used design fiction to explore the role of drones as an emerging technology of the future. SuperFlux summarized the project as “an investigation of the social, political and cultural potential of drone technology as it enters civil space (SuperFlux, 2015).” In this instance, though drones were the central mechanism of experience, the ultimate goal was to examine their effect on human needs and behaviors.
Example of a design fiction: Drove Aviary by Superflux (Superflux, 2015)
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a creative approach to problem solving (Yamazaki, 2014). This approach is usually instituted at an organizational or team level and is often embedded in the culture of those organizations and teams. Yamazaki, in his paper Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design - Solution-Based Approaches to Innovation and Problem-Solving in Social Environment, asserts that design thinking falls under the wider umbrella of HCD. However, this certainly not the definitive view. In her paper, Design Thinking, Maryanne Gobble says,
“To be clear, design thinking extends far beyond design as most of us imagine it. Design thinking is not concerned solely, or even primarily, with the look of a product. Rather, it encompasses a whole range of tools and frameworks, many drawn from other disciplines, that reflect its driving concern with human experience (Gobble, 2014).”
Design thinking may seem to some to be more of an outlook or a philosphy on critical thinking and problem solving. Additionally, a hallmark of design thinking is collaboration across organizational roles in the shared project of innovation (Liedtka, 2014). That is to say that designers work alongside managment, development, and others to combine perspectives. This fact alone should lead one to see that design thinking would not fall under the HCD approach but rather human-centered design is a design approach used by design thinking teams and organizations.
Designers often have experience with and are champions of design thinking in their organizations and team cultures. Additionally, many of the tools used by designers on a daily basis are enriched by the participation of members from other business units. This means that experience designers can be particularly effective in fostering cross-organizational collaboration with the use of design thinking in the pursuit of innovation.