I’m concious of the fact that, while I am, by experience, a web designer, I don’t have any formal education in design. Because my design mentality is very digitally, and particularly web biased, I struggle sometimes to think how design could be applied to situations in other contexts. I’m still trying to expand my mental model of what design is, ie. it’s more than making pretty pictures, or cool looking objects!
My fellow PhD recommended I look at the Design Council website last week, and I spent a while this week doing just that. It turned out to be a really useful couple of hours!
Designing a Service User Experience
One section of the site centres around how the Design Council have attempted to help communities through application of the design process. An example of this is trying to reduce violence in A&E. Now, this is a perfect example of my stunted thinking – how on earth can design help with something like that, aside from contributing calming posters to the walls? How can it help improve a service, or the interaction between two human beings? Well, it can help a lot, it turns out!
I think the main thing I took from the A&E example is that they were looking at user interactions at the heart of it. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating an image, an object, a building, a service or an experience – it always includes user interaction. An user interaction can ALWAYS be designed, and improved by using a really good, robust design process.
The Design Council broke the A&E experience in user experience sections – such as pre-arrival, entrance area, waiting, triage. They then used the design process to work out needs and frustrations at each of these points. This produced problems to solve, and there the more traditional design tasks began. Interactions were designed to solve those problems, such as screens to say how many people were waiting, and how long. Or signs to make sure everyone knew where they were in the A&E process, and how far through. Or set ways for staff to interact with patients in order to relieve possible frustrations.
The design process was instrumental in discovered how the user experience of A&E was falling down, and causing incidences of anger and violence, and it was key in creating solutions that would reduce both.
My New Definition of Design – Work in Progress
My new definition of design goes, a bit un-glibbly, like this:
Design is creating solutions to problems that occur during both everyday and extraordinary activities. Mostly, during human interactions of any sort, anything that can go wrong, will. Design is using consistent and effective methods to find these problems, and then design solutions to them.
Design also goes further by pre-empting problems, before they occur. This is innovative design – considering what problem might occur, based on new circumstances, and creating solutions that will encourage the right reaction from any person in that situation.
Let me know what you think in the comments below!
colinmcgray
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