Design Philosophy

Design Philosophy MD Shah Jahan INFO H541 Interaction Design Practice 12/14/2018, Fall 2018 While heart-wrenching stories of war-fleeing Syrian refugees and their thorny migration to Europe in 2016 flood global media, reports about the role of smartphones invoke a ray of hope among many tech enthusiasts, including me. Smartphone devices/apps worked as the lifeline of the exodus as a communication tool and guide (GPS and maps [ See Sebti, B. (2016). 4 smartphone tools Syrian refugees use to arrive in Europe safely. Retrieved from https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/4-smartphone-tools-Syrian-refugees-use-to-arrive-in-Europe-safely.]) during their life-threatening boat journey and subsequent dark-night travels to Europe. This protagonist role of technological devices motivates me to re-affirm my research interest in designing technology for vulnerable/less privileged people and how design can enhance the marginalized population. The reality is that every designer is influenced by personal beliefs, norms, values, interests, and experiences in determining design philosophy. A designer's impetus is reflected in the final design product. My design rationale also intersects my interest in the areas of technology-design, and culture. Specifically, I want to explore how design can ensure social justice, how design and technology development discourse shift to postcolonial discourses, and the challenges technology and design face in contemporary globalization. Various elements and experiences shape people's personal beliefs and behaviors, and those determine a designer's philosophy. In this paper, I will talk about my design rationale and the philosophy of how I view my design work. I believe that design is not merely a paradigm of change by innovating new and unique tools and infrastructure but also seeing whether the change is healthy and unharmful for society and how the design impacts the situated time and space of a cultural situation. A designer's intention could be good, but the broader impact might result otherwise. As a designer, I want to examine a design critically before pouring it down to users. I firmly believe that design means an intentional change (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012) and altering current situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1996). However, I also believe that the expected change matters because the preferred change sometimes does not bring good results for everyone. Thus, a designer should be careful about situating time and space (Rittel, 1987), inseparable from design work. So, the ideas of social justice, postcolonial, and decolonial design emphasize giving special care to time and space during design work since the traditional design tremendously overlooked the notion of time and space, especially while they designed something that did not consider the marginalized population of a society, the cultural differences, and socio-economic situation. They overlooked how power works in the design process and how design could make a specific group of people less empowered in a cultural environment. By social justice in the design process, I talk about how a designer can talk about how people experience oppression and marginalization, “including how burdens, obligations, power, benefits, and privileges have been unevenly distributed within society” (Dombrowski, 2017, p. 63). So, I will now talk about the tenets of my design philosophy and how those influence me as a designer. Design Philosophy As designing is an intentional task to change existing tools or experiences, my idea about interaction design is more than just providing instructions on how to use a tool rather than providing users with a positive impression-like enjoyment engagement about the device (Preece et al., 2015). My design practice follows five tenets—awareness, communication, empathy, failure modes/effect analysis, and providing feedback. 1. Awareness Developing a sense of awareness is vital for a designer since the design is a situated and contextual task. Without having good knowledge about a problem, its users, and stakeholders, a designer is almost blind. Awareness does not necessarily help create a product or design; it is a precursor for a designer to get a sense of design ideas. For instance, cultural awareness provides context and critical understanding to a designer about what kind of product is appropriate for a specific cultural population and what kinds of products are not appropriate. Moreover, awareness helps a designer eliminate personal biases and understand design space. Importantly, as the users are the core focus of present user experience (UX) design, involving users in the design process requires a good awareness of the specific population. The current design process emphasizes infusing users’ mental models in the designer's mind instead of utilizing a designer’s mental model. So, to implement this approach, a designer should have to increase all types of awareness, including concurrent design practice, self-awareness, and awareness about culture, society, and even politics since design now surrounds everything. As a designer, I practice awareness and connect my notions and understanding of design with new knowledge. 2. Communication As a designer, I realize two types of communication are essential—with people and the design process. The practice of awareness helps me understand people in a design system—like users, designers, and stakeholders. Awareness is insufficient to eliminate personal biases and narrow understanding of an idea. The communication process helps me get opinions, feedback, and recommendations to redesign and refine my design work. Besides, I communicate well in my design journey, from the first sketch to the final product. I start my sketch with the end in mind. I follow Bill Buxton’s notion that sketching is the center of design, and learning design from sketching provides freedom to designers to go back and forth in their process of finalizing a task (Buxton, 2007). I connect the sketching approach to the conceptual model (CM) as Preece et al. (2015) said that CM is an abstraction outlining people’s assumptions about a product and how to use it. As a designer, sketching and CM are both ways of communicating in the design process. There are other ways to communicate in the design process, like collecting data using various techniques — for instance, interviews, questionnaires, and observation. Preece et al. emphasized a helpful data collection session for gathering valuable and appropriate information. As a designer, I think data collection and analysis processes also help a designer to communicate well through the design process. The awareness and communication helped me to understand the actual design space and requirements. 3. Empathy The usual notion of design identifies empathy as the first stage of design thinking for understanding problem space, users, and stakeholders. However, with more awareness and good communication, empathy would elicit optimal results. Empathy helps a designer eliminate individual biases and understand a problem by putting aside their learning, culture, knowledge, and worldview (Dam & Siang, 2018). Moreover, empathy in design is also crucial in the modern tech-saturated world. As Bodker said, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is currently in a huge mess due to the lack of clear direction, a saturation of digital artifacts, and its immediate impacts on people’s lives. It is true that technology tremendously improves people’s experience, but it also creates various tensions. In this perspective, with an empathetic understanding of the design horizon, a designer needs to know the users and the problem she/he intends to solve. 4. Failure modes/effect analysis Critical or rigorous failure analysis is essential for a designer to master the design domain. Failure analysis will help a designer learn from a mistake and help to design something sustainable for the future. Besides, a habit of tolerance for criticism helps a designer improve design skills. Creating something and making it open for critique is a unique way to get proper direction for design work. For instance, Cheng (2013) suggested that students accept criticism as an incentive to develop design work. Failure analysis helps explore inefficiencies and inappropriate design decisions, ultimately providing space to shine a design work. The process also lets a designer know where you are in the design process. 5. Provide Feedback A product’s usability and acceptance depend on how users interpret it. In place of single, authoritative decision-making, multiple interpretation processes provide more room to explore a design task. Sengers & Gaver (2006) show how multiple interpretation options open the opportunity for more possible and exploratory design. The authors clarify why the various interpretation techniques are essential in the present design environment. The expansion of the design horizon in a broader, more personal, idiosyncratic, and out of the designer’s control made it necessary to have the option of multiple evaluations. So, I admire getting Feedback from various levels like users, experts, and stakeholders to make my design quality work. Conclusion The design tenets I described here help me balance my thinking and users' and stakeholders' expectations. For instance, factual awareness provides me with the guidelines to communicate effectively with various agents in the design process, thus helping me to empathize with the actual design space. However, the final two steps—failure analysis and feedback—helped me to improve my design work. Reference Bødker, S. (2015). Third-wave HCI, 10 years later-participation and sharing. ACM Interactions vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 24–31. Buxton, B. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann. Cheng, K. (2013). 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