HPW Reflection II: A Wonderful Little Chat with My Best Friend
by Teresa and Jubbies
While discussing the class exercises we found most valuable, it became apparent that the ideas that resonate with us the most seem to mirror concepts that we have had an introduction to in our Systems course last semester. For example, we realized that it seems to be just as crucial to consider how a person interacts with a product from many different levels of scale, as it is to consider scale while analyzing a multifaceted system. From this, we deduce that in order for an observation of human behavior to be valuable in design, it must be a layered and contextualized observation that is not limited by one particular dimension.
We also think Systems-thinking has helped us consider the challenges of designing for culture, especially with the notion that all systems are human-made. We are reminded yet again of the importance of understanding that systems are mere organizational projections and do not govern reality as we begin to contemplate the weight and variation of personal experience and disposition. We appreciated Marysol’s acknowledgement of this concept and the suggestion of how to cope with the dissonance between methodical ideation and the chaos of culture; perform research with real people. While the information you gather may seem (and may very well be) unique to each individual, accumulating first-person data may reveal cultural patterns you could never have imagined. Ultimately, Marysol’s lecture revealed to us how qualitative data can be of equal or greater value to quantitative data if you let it lead you to unexpected conclusions.
The most obvious way in which these concepts can be incorporated into our current design work is the simple but essential practice of broadening our range of design considerations; slowly but surely making an effort to incorporate more and more worldviews, principles, and conceptualizations into our design process. This sense of universalism is something we are beginning to develop here in college and will most likely be developing throughout our careers.
Another way the things we are learning can be useful to us is by giving us better ways of articulating what design is to those who don’t know. Our experience with talking to others about the work we do has shown us just how little the average non-designer thinks about what exactly design is. When we tell people that we are studying design, we usually hear something like: “oh, fashion design?” How non-designers see design may seem like a non-issue, but if we look at things at a larger scale, it does matter how a society at large views a field or profession. The more people in our society that have an accurate conception of what design is, the more non-design professionals that will begin to recognize the usefulness of incorporating design concepts into their own field of work.
The process of broadening our society’s understanding of design begins with the way in which we communicate what we are doing to our friends and family; and this communication begins with developing the vocabulary and the repertoire of concepts needed to accurately describe the complexity and usefulness of design thinking. In this class, through the steady introduction of more and more design principles, we deepen our understanding of our own work. This means that instead of describing what we are learning to do to non-designers as simply “product design” or “trying to design things people will like,” we can begin to use the concepts we’ve learned to build a more interesting narrative: “we’re learning to better understand people’s needs, emotions, and worldviews, and trying to explore what the fulfillment of those things could look like.”
