Reading Seminar 1 - Mathias Bylund

For seminar 1 we read chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 from the book designing for interaction. The chapters went through different approaches for preparation of a project. There were several topics that I had not heard about before I think many of them will come in handy when we are preparing for our own project.

Chapter 2 outlined four different design approaches. The first one was User-centered design which is an approach where you put the users in focus and the designers goal is to translate their needs into the project. Activity-centered design was another approach where you instead focused on activities and tried to find tools for the actions.

The most analytic approach hence the name System centered focused on components of the system to make a robust design taking into account all the objective needs of a functional system. Sometimes designer feel the need for full freedom and know or hope that they have the wisdom to design something solely on their experience. This last approach, called genius design in the book, is commonly used but should of course be used with care and by actual experienced designers. Although I think this approach would be handy in some cases I would argue that the other approaches are more reliable I suggest that we use a user-centered design for our project.

They talked about design strategies in chapter 3. A design strategy is way to decide the why, the how and the value of a product. There are many things to keep in mind when making a design strategy. Framing was mentioned in the book and the meaning of the concept is that you find out the core problem of a bigger one to make a more precise decision about what is needed. Other ways to make a strategy is making traditional research, interviews, getting to know the competitors, differentiators and ROI(Return On Investment). I think that it’s important to have knowledge about all the strategies to be able to make a mature decision about which are useful for a project.

Chapter 4 contained approaches of different ways to do design research. I would summarize the chapter as a lot of ways to do creative brainstorming. A lot of the concepts are probably very useful. I would love to apply collaging for our project because I think it’s a great way to create new ideas taking into account all the project members visions of how the vision the final result.

After the point where you have to be open minded and have the mindset no idea is a bad idea comes the time to get a structure and a more concrete idea of the project, this is covered in chapter 5. This is the time to kill your darlings, and kill them you shall…..!

Question for discussion: When is it better to use a Genius Design instead of the other approaches, even though you are experienced couldn’t you always gain new insights?

/Mathias