Human Centered Design

I am taking Human Centered Design because I want to learn how to design for the user. All of the classes I have taken so far for engineering have focused on how to make a design work only in the in the strictest functional and most necessary sense. I’ve learned how to make a design do what is intended with emphasis on effectiveness, efficiency, and feasibility. I want to learn how to make a design useful. I want to design products that people don’t use begrudgingly. I think that’s the difference between a design that merely works and a good design. Even if I don’t work as an engineer in the future, I think that the skills I learn in this class will be useful to me in framing problems from the client’s perspective.

A moment of silence for Brad Ray, our fallen MechE.

Appropriately enough, a friend of mine and teammate for my Senior Design project was talking to me about how we aren't taught design at all until this year in Senior Design and Thermal Systems design. And that's a completely different aspect of the design—purely technical.

What I found about Human Centered Design as a class that was pleasantly unexpected is that it wasn't just about understanding the user and seeing the problem from their perspective. The class also taught how to come up with a new idea and get it out into the world.

Now I'd say that this class is about how to make new things. That's good for me, I think, especially as I debate whether or not to seek employment as an engineer or to plot my escape. I originally got into engineering because I wanted to make new things—especially meaningful things. Now I at least know where to start and what to look for. I've practiced (I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it) letting go of ideas I get attached to too early and creating a first prototype that isn't fully functional, just representative. I've practiced vulnerability in getting feedback on early ideas and not defending them too strongly, but instead accepting feedback and taking it back to the drawing board.

I thought that the elderly who resisted moving out of their homes did so because they were stubborn, didn't like change, wanted to continue to feel independent, or simply didn't want to acknowledge that they were getting old. The market for renovating houses to make them easier to live in seemed like not a good option, but the one that people would accept. It's also very expensive.

I thought moving out really was the right way to approach this, but even when I brought it up, I could tell I was missing something.

Speaking with Marylynn, I realized I completely undervalued the sense of home her house gave her. It wasn't the independence. She was completely aware of what she could and couldn't do. This is the house her grandfather built, where she grew up, and raised her children, and took care of her father. This is where the family came over for brunch on Sunday. Even though the wood is beginning to rot out and the foundation is shifting, the house (which still has its original tile) is fully of history and sentimental value. The people who visit recognize that and appreciate its antique charm. If she moves out, she will lose all that, and the house will be torn down. Gone forever.

This doesn't make living alone any safer or easier, and it can also be a very expensive option. But there are things about the house that are very important to Marylynn as a person, and rightly so. Moving her out of her house and out of the neighborhood she is connected to would be uprooting her and forcing her to start over, readjust, and sacrifice that which contains her fondest memories.

The problem is more complex than I assumed. The elderly are not simply stubborn. If living in their own house is too dangerous, the solutions my group proposes should do as much as possible to move home and that which embodies it with the person. And if living in their own house is feasible, our group needs to find as much as possible to provide that which enables the elderly to continue doing that, and make it safe and affordable.

Something I saw the other day got me to thinking about getting in and out of TSA screening at airports. Taking everything out of your bags and pockets that needs to be screened separately, then quickly getting all your belongings back into your bags and pockets before your things are stolen or you are trampled be the rest of the line is a stressful process. I have managed to get quite good at it, though! 

Place boarding pass in pocket after getting it checked.

Remove quart bag of liquids (packed at the top of an outside pocket so it's easily accessible) and place it in a bin. Hold onto the bin.

Remove phone along with any pens, coins, or keys from my pockets. Place them in the bag, not the bin.

Remove belt, watch, and shoes, place them in the bin.

Place bag and bin on conveyer (That should be all there is, if all goes well. A laptop complicates this).

Retrieve boarding pass from pocket, pass through metal detector when waved through, holding my breath wondering what I forgot.

I didn't forget anything. Why is the TSA so scary? Move along. Wait for your goods to come through the X-Ray. Wonder whether that was a millimeter wave machine you walked through or a backscatter machine. Wonder about the efficacy of security. Wonder if your wondering makes you look like a terrorist. Act natural. No, don't look at your feet, that's suspicious. No, not at the agents! That's suspicious too! Agh!

Sigh with relief as your belongings peek out of the cave. Tap your foot when they stop before you can reach them. Okay now they're out.

Liquids go back in the bag.

Watch goes back on wrist.

Grab bag, belt, and shoes and walk out of the way of other travelers.

Put yourself back together. After putting my belt and shoes back on, it's okay to get my phone etc. out of my bag and back in my pockets.

Thinking about all the parts that get moved around made me realize that this process is basically about taking yourself apart and putting yourself together again, and its efficiency can be judged as an assembly problem. First ideas for making this easier are

Reduce the number of parts. Fanny packs are dorky, but it does mean you can take this one item off instead of each of the items it contains. Women with purses may have an advantage, here.

Use easy fasteners. No Apple proprietary pentalobe screws here. Laces aren't great either, if you can avoid them. I have done this in hiking boots, though. Sometimes saving space is more important.

(Very late. Sorry.)

Jason Roberts's talk is very interesting to listen to and think about. It is frightening to undertake. I keep thinking he's going to be found out, arrested, fined, shut down, or any number of things. Sometimes he's breaking laws on purpose. Other times he may or may not be and I don't know if he's researched regulations and ordinances. Constantly in the back of my head is this anxious wimp screaming in a whisper "He can't do that! Can he do that?"

Apparently he can. He seems like he's really lucky. He's gotten away with some huge capers. I remember, though, the con man wisdom that if you are confident and look like you're supposed to be there, people will assume you know what you're doing. I believe it works, but it's not my style. I generally hate drawing attention to myself, and these ostentatious, probably illegal stunts just raise the stakes too high.

Does he have no fear?

He moves quickly. I don't know if that's just his excitement or whether he really doesn't think things through and he's fully involved in the project before he has time to worry. I am a card-carrying worrier. I get my confidence for my undertakings by extensive preparation. I like to research, develop a plan, develop a backup plan, and devise an exit/mitigation strategy in case absolutely nothing works.

Jason just kindof does stuff. What drives me crazy is that it seems to work. It seems to work pretty often, in fact, and planning doesn't seem to improve the odds that much. Maybe balls to the wall puts enough energy into projects that things work out, but I think there's something else at play. By jumping into the thick of things so quickly, he learns whether something works or not very quickly. I invest in an idea before I've tried it and I'm both behind and in the hole if it doesn't pan out.

For those wishing the [course] counted as part of your degree, tell me why it should!

I'm of the opinion that the degree is deficient without it. It doesn't necessarily need this course, but it does need this perspective integrated into the curriculum.

I realized (or rather I found the words for this thought) that engineering students get frustrated when they can't see the implementation of a design completed. That is the thing we have been learning: make it work. We are told what to do in a fairly specific way and left to decide how to do it. We are never asked what it is we should do, and that is one of the big things this course teaches. While it is frustrating that the DP2 teams came up with some very good and very feasible ideas and it would be great to see them through, I don't think that is what's most valuable about this course. I think what's valuable is that we learn to find good ideas.

This course is valuable to me because it is helping to teach me to identify and address users real needs, even (or especially?) when it is not what the user asks for. I wish I had been able to take this course sooner. The SMU Engineers Without Borders chapter has already designed and implemented a water distribution system for a village in Guatemala, and I wonder what we might have done differently if we had taken this class before. Our proposals for clearing their water of the coliform contamination were ignored, as far as we know, because while to use they were perfectly reasonable, they were not solutions that worked for them. I wonder if we could have found a better solution for them if we had addressed it from their perspective rather than our own.

When I started thinking about ways to improve the wallet for my partner, I shucked the idea that the contents of the wallet had to be inside the wallet. I think I did that much well. I was able to come up with a design that was simple to construct and simple to use without sacrificing much in the way of organization. This worked for my partner because the two key desires for his wallet were that the contents would be easily accessible and that it remain slim so that it fit in his pocket comfortably. I am pretty fond of the minimal design, and could even go about constructing it this weekend if I wanted. In fact, I might.

But I realized what I made was still very much a wallet. I noticed after hearing other people's ideas that when I try to think of solutions, my mind immediately jumps to feasibility of the design. I only thought of things I already knew how to make. I didn't try to invent something truly new, And I didn't design anything that depended on a material or service that I didn't know of. I felt I was still able to design something good, but I limited the project a lot by thinking that way. The next time, I want to try to think of what I'd want to do if absolutely anything were possible, and then figure out how to do that, if I can.

On a related note, I noticed my thinking is very mechanical. I thought much more about the material and the operation of the wallet than what other services it could provide or in what ways it could be replaced. I think my design was good in its physical aspects but could have gone further in changing the way we interact with money and other pocket items. Maybe it could have an e-ink surface for displaying loyalty card bar codes on demand. Maybe it could have a unique RFID to which credit, debit, and store credit accounts could be linked to jump from cash past plastic card transactions to cardless transactions. And then how do we get rid of the wallet entirely?