Design Philosophy

I was first pushed into the general direction of User Experience Design when I read an excerpt from Henry Dreyfuss’s 1955 work “Joe and Josephine” and I think this initial discovery has impacted my design philosophy since. Even though that study might be dated and not have many modern sensibilities as it lumps and men and women into two separate groups by their proportions, I think what it instilled in me was the connection between research and design. Dreyfuss gathered this data, and centered the location of every button, lever, and anything else the user interacted with around this data. For me, this is the most important part of UX work. You can have the most thorough research and the slickest designs, but if they don’t connect to each other the research might as well have not been done. This continue onto my thoughts on design as a whole. Everything should be designed for something, whether that be an audience, a construction site, or just something nice for yourself. And even if you are just making something for yourself, the more you know yourself the better it will be in the end. This feels intimidating and even a little cynical, but I think that’s because we often design things for other or ourselves subconsciously and with such ease that we do not even realize it, like the unconscious operations in Lawson and Dorst’s writing.  I think harnessing the realization of these unconscious operations can lead to bigger and bolder things.

            This is a big part of why I consider myself an experience designer, and not a UI Designer or just a User Researcher. This connection is the most important part of a design process, but the UX Design process being as it is you don’t just pause, make these connections and move on. I believe that the power of the UX Design process is in its fluidity and messiness, and anyone following it should not try to fight that too much. Because of this, my design process can be very different for every project and I try my best to adapt my pre-existing strategies to new contexts. I fear that using the same tool for every job decreases the value of this design process, something reflected on in Nelson and Stoltermans’s writing. With this comes not only the design of experiences for your target user, but new strategies for yourself to use, which can be a very different task. However, too many late pivots in class projects have taught me you need to challenge the flow sometimes. It is a very, very difficult balance to strike, and will rarely be perfect. One of my main strategies achieve this balance is to regularly look back at my insights and initial project brief before a meeting, to ensure I do not lose sight of the forest tough the trees.  Other such strategies I value are interviews, rapid prototyping, and of course the ever-versatile affinity diagramming. I also make sure to utilize my specialization in User Research, UX writing, and Visual design to create a heuristic and versatile design process.

            As a summary of this, I would say my main design principle revolves around balancing the fertile chaos of the design process while not letting it take you somewhere completely unrelated to the initial purpose. This involves a lot of fluidity, knowing that practice does not exist in the vacuum that theory does, and wisdom. I am admittingly not the best at this, and have had plenty of fumbles in the past, but I believe with time and experience I will get a lot better at this. One other principle I think is important is utilizing your passion. All the projects I feel I have done best in involved subjects that were either very interesting to me or just plain fun, like Safe-Berry and the Vampire Watch. This connection to something I am very passionate about really drives me to do my best work, and in the future I want to do nothing but my best work.

            All of this leads my purpose of trying to create experiences that aren’t just nice for people while they are interacting with them but continue to have a positive effect on them outside of that small fraction of time. As discussed in in Buchanan’s Words in the Making, one of that major challenges of any design, organizational or not, is creating a ”…positive effect on human experience in an increasingly complex world.” People live their own lives outside of what they use a design for, lives I cannot begin to imagine, and I feel as designers we have a responsibility to think about how our design will effect these lives. This in mind, I have a strong desire to do something under the umbrella of Digital Civics. I am not sure where this will take me, but my designs are about the users and world around them, not about me, so I am not worried too much.