Design Education? My role as a Designer?
I wrote a lot on this topic because I have been studying and working as a designer for the last six years, and it has become more than an area of work to me. I have seem many changes since the first day I began studying design, both in my opinion of what a designer is and also in how I have been taught to design. So I think this is worth a read, sorry its a bit long....
Fionn began the presentation on the topics of Affordances, Constraints, Feedback and Designing for people. We covered these topics last semester when looking at Don Norman. Dons ideas on design, although written regarding the designing of everyday objects still have place in interactive design today. From examining projects under Dons ideas their importance became evident. I plan to look back into these ideas on this blog in relation to my project further down the line when I have progressed my idea further.
Lucy and Trionas sections were highly linked so the following is a look at both areas but from my own experience. I will include in this my opinions on being both a design student and working professional as a designer. I plan to also look at the past present and further of designers, our role, and our teaching methods.
After both reading Meredith Davis and hearing lucy talk about it today, there are a few things that stood out to me in relation to my own experience as a design student and also my work in a design company. I spent four years in LIT studying Multimedia with Design and Programming as well as currently part-taking in this masters in Interactive Media. This has allowed me first hand experience of what Meredith talks about in her paper. I agree that there are many challenges when it comes to design education, especially due to the changing technology and practices we are faced with. Even from the start of my first course through to the point I am at now, I have found a need to adapt to new design practices as a direct result of changing technologies. This experience also echoes Davis point in saying that doing by habit may not be the best practice. Many of the methods taught to us in first year of my undergraduate were in my opinion already dates to a certain extent. Examples of this included the waterfall model with its top-down approach, which didn’t allow for iteration and does not consider that the majority of customers do not know what they want directly from the outset of the project among other disadvantages. As well as this, the advancements of multimedia, both its online content and the introduction of interactive media has lead to a need to consider and apply new design practices. Simply doing by habit will not produce successful designs, as it is an area that is ever changing.
Lucy mentioned each of the trends stated by Meredith that will define design practice in the future. So heres my experience on each:
Increasing complexity in the scale of design challenges – As I stated above, with each new technology comes new issues and ways of doing things, which also leads to design challenges. As technology is ever growing at a rapid rate we cannot define a standardized way of designing and stick to it. The nature of design does not allow for this. Also, with the changes in the way we design from the early concepts of human factors through to HCI. This was then followed by Liam Bannons ideas in his paper “Human factors to Human actors” which has been proof that there is an ever changing complexity in design where we need to consider users motivations, surroundings and relationships when designing. With the introduction of CSCW we became more aware of peoples settings and communications. All of the above have been changes in the way we design due to every changing complexity. Meradith talks of the trend that students learn best through experiences that move from simple to complex. In my own experience I have not found this to be the case, although it is the approach with is taken most often. In reality making things simple and isolating them into steps can take the learning out of context. Personally I find that many things can be learnt at once and sometimes jumping in the deep-end and trying to get an understanding of the complexity rather than simplifying learning can be more effective, as it does not disassemble the links between items as simplifying does. I especially notice this when working in a company where a simple step by step systems is not used. While working in a Graphic Design studio on many occasions I had the task of learning a new piece of software in a short space of time. By trying the understand the complexity rather than breaking it down into step by step tutorials from basic to advanced I found the package became easier to learn as an overall view of the software was available from the start.
Thinking about the people for whom we design as participants in the design process Individual performance and control of outcomes are among highest priorities. This idea of thinking of the people we are designing for links into the aspects Triona talked about. Where people have moved from being seen as simply users to more designers in their own right. Throughout the course we have become more and more aware that people may not use the item you design in the way you intended but however modify it to their own needs. We have come across the ideas Triona discussed on co-creation, leading away from the ideas of designing for people and more towards designing with people. That the users plays a large role in the design process. An example of this was text messaging, where the designer did not foresee how it would be used. Also with the popularity of user modifiable systems and objects currently being designed it has become highly apparent that the users do in fact play a vital role in the design process. Meradith goes on to describe how she has found that individual performance and control of outcomes are amoung the highest priorities. I would not fully agree with this trend. When i started out my degree I found that much of the way we were taught was dividing the designer and the user greatly. Where we would be given examples of how to overcome certain problems, almost a standard way of figuring out the users needs. However, as time went on, the importance of understanding the user seem to move to a point of involving the user. This involvement usually meant maybe a survey to discover trends and also user involved testing. Through out the length of my studies the importance placed on the users involvement has changed drastically and only now am I personally truly coming to grips with what the user can contribute to a project with the right involvement. My latest projects involve user participation throughout each of the design phases, and this still can lead to a product thats use is modified by the user themselves. The user will always decide how they want to use the product to suit their own needs. So, I personally have moved from the stage of controlling the outcome to one where the user takes on a vital role. At the same time, while in industry I have found the trends to be very much evident. The client was brought in at the start of the project, and requirements were drawn up. Then the designer would go off and design a product for the target audience, therefore, making assumptions on how they thought the user to be. I personally found that many projects were simply categorized replicas of each other, with little specification and a very strong controlling of outcomes.
The third trend discussed in Lucy's presentation was the emergent and remix technologies: designing social interactions, where the assumption has been that the computer is an extension of tools and media. Yet again, I would only agree to a certain extent that this trend still remains. I do believe that many current professional designers do consider web design and interaction to be about the movement of objects on a screen, what happens when they click here, roll over here, and making things move. In my experience in the design industry I was lead to believe that interaction was Flash (full stop), that if the client wanted a basic website then Dreamweaver and HTML was our tool of choice. If the client wanted some more interaction then Flash would come into play, to make things move. That the visual representation of information in an interesting way, catching their attention was the way forward. Since coming back to college my eyes have been greatly opened on this topic. I now see that interaction is much more than how something moves in a nice way, but that it has a role in developing interactions between people and technologies. We have been taught that we are not just dealing with the execution of a task but however, that we need to consider all aspects eg. their environment and how people are interacting with each other and their world. On examination of projects since we have begun the course this has been evident. We have taken current products / websites and examined them using a heuristic evaluation and a cooperative evaluation. During this process it became evident that looking at peoples motivations / what they are doing at the same time as interacting with the website / whom they were sharing information with / their environment / etc. is a major aspect of the design of interaction. It also made me aware of interaction in areas I had not noticed before, because I had never looked at the larger picture, the social environment.
The fourth trend Meradith talks about is the importance of understanding community. My experience with designing for Global users has not been very large, but however, I have had the experience of designing for a group of people who were not from a similar background to mine with many cultural differences. I would highly agree with the statement "The underlying principles of good design are universal" for if you follow the structure of fully understanding your user, their motivations, their environment then you will be producing a design which does not posses a community divide. I think this is where we went wrong during our project, as we did come across a few pitfalls. Therefore with the increase of information sharing and the globalization of systems, there is a great need for this idea of designing to be taught. In my experience, the only teaching on this topic I did receive was the difference between symbols used in different cultures, the way people read differently in different cultures, the meanings behind different symbols. These are for want of a better word "aesthetic cultural differences" and I feel this area still leaves a lot to be desired in design education.
On her last and final trend, Meredith speaks of the need for a knowledge base which supports new practices. She talks of the need to build a research culture in design. I agree with her conclusions that there is no consensus of what research really is. I think this may b the main reason there is more of a pitfall in design research than in other areas. In our own college here, this lack of research in design seems to be taking a turn in the right direction. However, I would have to agree that the availability of access to such archives in the past few yeas has proved difficult.
When Triona began her section with the title Designing the Designer it really caught my attention. I had previously contemplated what methods we use to design and how we learn to be a "designer", but I had never questioned in depth our role and the characteristics of a designer. As mentioned above the idea of co-creation is one which has appeared throughout my design life, but where does the divide lie? What role does the designer have, if the user is creating their own experiences? To be honest, it did cuase unease for a moment when I began thinking about this. If all people are creative (a theory I believe has great strength to it) and they are infact themselves designers, then where is my role? My first thoughts on the matter did cause mental images of some of the worst sites I have seen to flash into my head. An example of users becoming designers is Bebo. Shortly after the release of Bebo people began to make their own skins, modify their own pages. After a while this control seemed to cause annoyance for users, and has been mentioned many times as one of the presumed causes of its downfall. So where do we draw the line. After a bit of thought on the matter, I began to reason with myself that it is merely not just the technical and visual skills I posses that will make me a good "designer". The ideas of needing an understanding of knowledge and expertise from a broad range of disciplines as well as a deep knowledge in a specific area is a strong one. Triona also talked of the ability of designers to see the scale and complexity of design. I think this is a strength vital for designers, and the saving grace of my design projects where problems can be predicted and avoided.
In conclusion, from the first day I stepped into the new shiny lab in LIT in order to become a "designer", I have come across many pitfalls, but also seen many changes for the better. Its an ever changing area and I feel the practices are still playing catch-up on design. The role of a designer is also changing, and although I can not fully define a designer with each new project and each new experience im getting a better understanding of what it is. My experience has lead me to believe that the newest design graduates have a lot to offer the industry as colleges are becoming more and more advanced in their design teaching, however, currently many design studios do not possess the openness to change. In saying this, once these graduate have been in the industry for a few years times will once again have changed, design students will need to become lifetime learners.
