Reading seminar 1 - Anton Sivertsson

The chapters in the book go through a lot of the steps you take before you start the real designing of a product, for example how to attack a design problem or how to do proper design research. One of the things I found very interesting was the different ways of attacking a design problem that was brought up: user-centered design, activity design and genius design, which were all very different in their approach and where to put the focus of usage in your product.

The later chapters we read were about how to make proper research and how to treat both researched subjects and interviewed people as well as what NOT to do. A lot of focus was put on the importance of this stage in the design process and how much could be accomplished if the research stage was treated correctly as well as how it could help in getting an overview of the problems that you will be faced with in later stages. Formulating a problem seemed to be one of the most important aspects of pre-design, however different kinds of design approaches treat design research differently. For example user-centered design relies heavily on it while genius design relies very thinly on it, if at all.

If I relate to our own project, I think we will have great use of proper design research both in the beginning and maybe even more when we start to reach a concrete concept. We proboably will have to include users in the design over and over if we are to acheive a user-friendly concept.

The other texts were two ISO-text, one about user-centered design in general and the importance of user-centered design and one about a specific example with ergonomic standards for working with a visual terminal. There was also a text about key principles of user-centered design which brought up several interesting things. One was that user-centered designing of products often was left to only one person in the design group instead of being considered by all throughout the design process. This is all the more interesting since in our project the whole group will work from an entirely user-centered design perspective.

My question is: is genius design the most effective doing design research or without?