User and Society

Without involving users in the design process, there is no way to know whether the design would actually be used by anyone. Design can be about creating value for people, or helping people create value for non-humans, but it has to achieve at least one of these.

Creating value for people

Creating value for people means involving users at any step in the design process. This is very similar to marketing, where you need to make sure you understand your users and know exactly what they want, using qualitative or quantitative methods, or both. In project 2 I worked for an external client, them being a business made it very important to understand their users thoroughly in order to be able to make a good design proposal for them. In this case, we already received in-depth information about their customers so we didn’t need to do any research ourselves to understand them. But in other projects and courses, this does need to be done. Game design requires an understanding about the player type of the target group, design innovation methods also required this along with actually performing a user test with a prototype. In research projects, like the course making sense of sensors, I learned things about how to involve users in research in an ethical and friendly way.

Creating value can also be about exploring future wants or needs, based on current trends today. This is a big part of what I did during my research project, researching the future of how people deal with time. To identify interesting trends, we observed the society overall and things that started to become more common. Later in the project, we involved users in a qualitative way by asking them to think about a future like the one described by us and what this would mean for them personally. I also performed something similar in my final bachelor project, since it is set in a futuristic scenario as well. When I involved users, I asked them to think about a future scenario while answering my questions or experiencing my prototype.

Creating value for non-humans

Non-humans can be anything that is not a human. Animals, the environment, sustainability, the things we use, anything that is not a human being can be a target for a design as well. In this case, humans still need to be involved in the design process to properly understand how to make them behave in a way beneficial for the targeted non-human. A simple example is a project about behaviour change for better sustainability. If the design goal is to cut down on emissions by fossil fuels, you rely on humans to achieve your goals. In this case, you need to know what you can do to make people use their car less. So even when your goal isn’t to create more value for humans, it will always be relevant to properly understand any humans related to your design in order to achieve your goals. I followed a course called “Design for debate”, which was all about “more than human-centred design”. And while that course was very philosophical, it did make a good point. We shouldn’t always design in a human-centred way, because humans are not the only important parts of this world. Non-humans, whatever it is, are also important and in the end, allow us to thrive. Without non-humans, humans wouldn’t exist either.