Tafia Bulgin

Tafia Bulgin

Lindsay Starr

ARTC 1302 IMAGING  

22 April 2019

Human Centered Design

The purpose of any design is to "inform and assist with decision-making", as design is applied to “engage, educate, encourage, adapt, and exchange” information visually (Jaenichen,1). Human-centered design is described by IDEO as “a creative approach to problem solving” where the design process “starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs (IDEO.org). There are four principles to human-centered design: focus on the people, identify the problem, think in the form of a system, and test your design decisions.  

The sole purpose of human-centered design is to design for the people. A designer needs to have the basic skill of producing quality visuals that accommodate the needs of the client; this skill needs to be practiced for the general audience as well as the personal, one-on-one client. To do so, the designer has to be able to empathize with the client and understand where their personal concerns and visionary lie. In other words, make the client feel as though they are also a designer, head designer even, in their own project. It is helpful in the identification stage of designing to consider who is the product intended for and what will it be used for; “it’s vital to identify the real goal of people who will use your product”, as it is not for you as the designer (Babich).  

Identifying what is a fundamental problem and what the symptoms of that fundamental problem helps to speed up the design process. Symptom problems are typically a product of the fundamental which is why it is essential to address what issues are priority as to not waste time trying to solve minor ones. Resolving the fundamental issue may eliminate the symptom issues (Babich). Following a system in approaching the overall success of the user experience is necessary as to avoid only exploring the “local experience”. This local experience refers to only one element of the entire design. One piece of the design can be entirely successful over the rest of the design, and as a result, the whole product design isn’t unified in the way that it needs to be.

It is important to test your designs, and if it is necessary, to also continue the process through prototypes. Most important in the testing phase is to receive feedback from actual users that are not personally tied to yourself. To avoid sugarcoated comments and sympathy on your designs, a designer needs to depend on the opinion of outsiders who also may not share the same interests or beliefs as you; this often leads to designers not expanding or refining their designs because they tend to design based off their own personal preferences when the design is not for the designer, it is for the client (Babich).

The main concern in the use of human-centered design is using it to refine the design of products used by a mass group of people (such as cell phones or computers). There’s no way to approach mass production designs with human-centered design techniques when it is intended to appeal on a more personalized level. This is the major difference between human-centered design and design thinking: design thinking is innovation and creating new products; human-centered is “improving the usability and user experience of certain products” (Code_n).  

Works Cited

Babich, Nick. “Top 4 Principles of Human-Centered Design”. UX Planet, September 11, 2018.

“Design Thinking or Human-Centered Design? Both! How to Combine the Benefits of the Two Approaches”. Code_N, Code_n, September 26, 2016.

Jaenichen, Claudine. “Visual Communication and Cognition Everday Decision-Making". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Mike Potel, IEEE Computer Society, November/December 2017, n/a.

Norman, Donald Arthur. “Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful”. Nielsen Norman Group, Interactions, July 2005.  

Design Thinking

Many different methods are used as a means of tackling problems that are complex and have many layers that account towards the outcome. Design thinking can be described as the breakdown of the complex design process in order to better understand and articulate one’s design choices, the needs of the client, to provide organization and documentation to the design process. This method of thinking and organization is quite fluid and is implemented differently depending on the preferences and necessities of each designer and the project at hand. The ultimate goal of design thinking is to get the designer to think past initial, surface ideas in starting a project, and delving into a space where the designer rethinks alternative solutions and strategies to come to a solution (Dam and Siang, interaction-design.org).

Despite the fluid characteristic of the process, each variation follows five basic phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. These phases offer a hands-on approach to a solution-based process, something that I understand is extremely beneficial to curating a well thought out project for two reasons. First, it leaves room for movement, as the process isn’t always going to be in sequential order; the design thinking process is designed to allow jumping back and forth between the stages to emulate the nature of the basic creative process. Second, I see this process as heavily engaging to the designer, as one should be to grow successfully as a creative mind. Design thinking has offered a balance between creative thinking and workplace organization to make productivity in the creative field as effective as possible.

In the Harvard Business Review article Why Design Thinking Works, an example of design thinking being used within the field explains the benefits of expanded critical thinking and complex ideas that can be received from the process. A designer, Katie, used her physical experiences from visiting an autistic adults’ home to understand his lifestyle and redefine the issues that were to be addressed. The process allowed for Katie to think beyond the surface biases made about those who suffer with disabilities and to formulate ideas that counteract those biases (Liedtka, Why Design Thinking Works).  

The area in which I see design thinking being the most influential and beneficial is education. I struggle with understanding why hard-set organization is so heavily used in the classroom setting, especially in primary grade school. I believe that the limitation on creative thinking, particularly at a young age, restricts the reach that developing students gain in critical and creative thinking. By allowing the same room for movement in the classroom as is made in design thinking would benefit in the critical thinking skills of students, even if they don’t look to pursue a career in design. Design thinking, at least the structure of the process, is critical to any field of work because of the simple fact that it allows for the possibility of multiple solutions to one problem.

Briefly, design thinking is a creative process designed to sharpen the designer’s critical thinking skills and provide a sense of organization to the creative process without limiting one to a strict sequential process. This is a method of thinking that benefits all professional fields of work as well as in the teaching material for developing young minds because it encourages us to not think the same as everyone else and be inventive in resolving basic or complex problems.

Works Cited

Dam, Rikke, and Teo Siang. “What Is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?” The Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular.

Liedtka, Jeanne. “Why Design Thinking Works.” Harvard Business Review, 28 Aug. 2018, hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works.