HUMAN COMPUTER

INTERACTION/INTERFACE
ACMP 446/ SOEN 426/COMP 401
Sept/Dec 2020

Lecture 1: Design Philosophy

Mzee Awuor
 Design Philosophy
What is Design?
How do we Design?
Reading Activity:
https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/design-methods/#/designers
 Design Philosophy
What is Design?
How do we Design?
Is it about colors, fonts, layout, and other low-level visual details?
Design is where ideas came from

1. Design is/are method(s) for generating ideas.

2. It is/are method(s) for evaluating ideas.
3. It is/are ways of communicating ideas.
4. Design is/are problem solving - and that it is design problem
solving that shapes the world.

Look around you: nearly everything in the space you’re seeing/using

etcis designed by someone, somewhere, to solve some problem.
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What is Design?
 What is Design?
 Then if design is problem solving, then we all design to some
degree.
 When you rearrange your room to better access your clothes,
you’re doing interior design.
 When you create a sign to remind your roommates about their
chores, you’re doing information design.
 When you make a poster or a sign for a club, you’re doing
graphic design.
 We may not do any of these things particularly well or with great
expertise, but each of these is a design enterprise that has
the capacity for expertise and skill.
 What is Design?
What does it mean to do design professionally then?
In way, professional design is just design for pay, in a formal organization, often
(but not necessarily) with a profit motive.

• Consider all of the job titles that have a little (or a lot) of professional design
embedded in them:
1. Graphic designers take information and find ways to present it in a way that
efficiently engages people in understanding that information.
2. Interaction designers envision new kinds of interactions with interactive
technologies, usually as part of design consultancies. Some work on contract,
helping other companies envision new products, others work “in-house”, designing
for their company.
 What is Design?
3. User experience (UX) designers design and prototype user interfaces, defining the
functionality, flow, layout, and overarching experiences that are possible in a product.
In many bigger companies, UX designers determine what software engineers build.
4. User experience (UX) researchers understand problems deeply so that designers can
envision solutions to those problems or improve existing products.
5. Product designers/managers investigate market opportunities and technical
opportunities and design products that capitalize on those opportunities in a
competitive landscape. The person that envisioned Airbnb? A product designer. Mark
Zuckerberg when he envisioned Facebook with the help of his investors and co-
founders? A product designer.
6. Software engineers do many kinds of design. They design data structures,
algorithms, and software architectures. Front end developers occasionally help with
interaction design, unless they work in an organization that has dedicated interaction
designers.
 What is Design?
What is it that all of these design roles have in common? They all involve these
essential skills:
1. Seeking multiple perspectives on a problem (sometimes conflicting ones). There’s no
better way to understand what’s actually happening in the world than to view it from as
many other perspectives as you can.
2. Divergent thinking. This is the ability to creatively envision new possibilities. When
designers consider alternatives in parallel, they design better things.
3. Convergent thinking. This is the ability to take a wide range of possibilities
and choose one using all of the evidence, insight, and intuition you have.
4. Exploiting failure. Most people avoid and hide failure; designers learn from it, because
behind every bad idea is a reason for it’s failure that should be understood and
integrated into your understanding of a problem.
5. Externalizing ideas as sketches, prototypes, writing, and other forms. By doing this,
designers express details, often revealing which parts of an idea are still ill- or undefined.
 What is Design?
What is it that all of these design roles have in common? They all
involve these essential skills:
6. Maintaining emotional distance from ideas. If you’re too attached
with an idea, you might not see or accept a better one that you or
someone else discovers.
7. Seeking critique. No one has enough perspective or knowledge to
know everything good and bad about design on their own. Seeking the
perspective of others on an idea helps complete this picture.
8. Justifying decisions. No design is acceptable to everyone. Designers
must be able to justify a choice, compare it to alternative choices, and
explain why the choice they made is the “best” choice relative to the
tradeoffs.
 What is Design?
 In a way, all of these skills are fundamentally about empathy, because
they all require a designer to see problems and solutions from other
people’s perspectives, whether these people are users, other
designers, or people in other roles, such as marketers, engineers,
project managers, etc.

 But, given the power that design holds to shape the world, empathy
alone is not enough. In fact, many argue that to truly be just and
inclusive, design should not be done by professionals on behalf of the
world, but rather done with the world.
 What is Design?
 This need for radical inclusion in design processes comes from
designers’ inability, no matter how committed to understanding other
people’s perspectives, to accounting for the needs of a community, or
the potential unintended consequences of a design on a community.
What is Design?
 How do we Design?
 How do you design “good” design?
 Does it come from lone genius?
 Is it luck?
 Is it the result of hard work?
 Where does all of this stuff that humanity makes actually come from? 

 How do we Design?
1. Appropriation
 This involves simply taking some object in the world and using it for
some purpose it was not intended.
 This is actually something that every human does. Some might even
consider it a defining human characteristic.
 For example, you appropriate when you take a broom and use it as a
sword; you appropriate when you cut down a tree and carve it into a
boat.
 The process here is a abductive leap from a simple observation about
some object to a different vision for how that object might be used to
achieve a goal.
 How do we Design?
2. Bricolage
 The act of creating new things from a diverse range of other things.
 Whereas appropriation is about reusing something in a new way,
bricolage is about combining multiple things in to new designs.
 One of the most salient modern examples of bricolage is sample-based
hip hop or electronic dance music. Much of the production in these
songs is grounded in recordings from existing music, sometimes from
disparate parts of recorded history.
 Bricolage uses appropriation, but goes beyond it, assembling novelty
through recombination. Like appropriation, it is not an explicit process,
but a kind of activity that humans engage in that can arrive at new
designs.
 How do we Design?
3. Designerly ways of knowing
 Here, the idea is that trained designers arrive at knowledge
through synthesis - forming coherent systems of ideas from disparate
parts - whereas other kinds of thinking involve analysis - taking a
coherent system and deconstructing it, as scientists do with nature.
 Synthesis is similar to divergent thinking in that they both focus on new
possibilities; analysis and convergent thinking are similar in that they
both reduce possibilities.
 How do we Design?
4. Human-Centered Design
 This takes us to more explicit design paradigms, which arguably
combine all of the skills above. One of the most common in the world
today is human-centered design (sometimes called user-centered
design, but many people find the word “user” to be too limiting).
 In this paradigm, the idea is simple: before doing abduction, bricolage,
synthesis, or any of these other lower level activities, first try to analyze
the problem you are solving, then generate ideas, then test those ideas
with the people who have the problem you are solving.
 Then, repeat this process of analyzing the problem, designing, and
testing (which we call iteration) until you converge upon an
understanding of the problem and an effective solution.
 How do we Design?
5. Human-Centered Design
 Here, the idea is that trained designers arrive at knowledge
through synthesis - forming coherent systems of ideas from disparate
parts - whereas other kinds of thinking involve analysis - taking a
coherent system and deconstructing it, as scientists do with nature.
 Synthesis is similar to divergent thinking in that they both focus on new
possibilities; analysis and convergent thinking are similar in that they
both reduce possibilities.
 The premise of this approach is that by modeling a problem, and
verifying solutions to it, the design one arrives at will be a better
solution than if a designer just uses the pre-existing knowledge in their
head.
 How do we Design?
6. Activity-Centered Design
One critique of human-centered design is that it narrowly focuses on people
and their needs rather than a systems-level view of the activities that people
engage in, and the multiple people and systems involved in those activities.
For example, consider the activity of driving a bus: it’s not just the driver
that matters, but the dispatchers that communicate information to drivers,
the other drivers on the road, and even the riders occasionally.
One paradigm that addresses this more directly is activity-centered design,
which focuses less on problems or people’s needs and more on what
they do, ensuring that what you design integrates well into the complex
fabric of an activity. 
Contextual inquiry is a more systematic process for investigating activities,
and the people, processes, and artifacts that support them.
 How do we Design?
7. Human values
 Some design scholars have questioned whether focusing on
people and activities is enough to account for what really
matters, encouraging designers to consider human values.
 For example, instead of viewing a pizza delivery app as a way to
get pizza faster and more easily, we might view it as a way of
supporting the independence of elderly who do not have the
mobility to pick up a pizza on their own.
 How do we Design?
7. Human values
 Or, perhaps more darkly, instead of viewing TSA screening at an
airport a way of identifying potential terrorists, we consider it
through the value of power, as the screening process had more
to do with maintaining political power in times of fear than it
did with actually preventing terrorism.
 This shift in framing can enable designers to better consider the
values of design stakeholders through their design process,
and identify people they may not have designed for otherwise
(e.g., people who are house bound because of injury, or
politicians).
 How do we Design?
8. Participatory design
• Some design scholars are skeptical about human-centered design
because they don’t believe modeling and verifying people’s needs
through a few focused encounters is sufficient to actually address
people’s problems, or systems of activities.
• These and other critiques lead to a notion of participatory design in
which designers not only try to understand the problems of stakeholders,
but recruiting stakeholders onto the design team as full participants of a
design process.
• This way, the people you’re designing for are always represented
throughout the design process. The key challenge of participatory design
is finding stakeholders that can adequately represent a community’s
needs, while also participating meaningfully a design process.
 How do we Design?
9. Universal design
• Participatory design, of course, has the risk of overlooking key
stakeholders, and therefore producing designs that do not work for
everyone. 
• Universal design, attempts to address this, arguing that designers
should assume that there will be a vast diversity in the types of people
that want to use what you design, and so designing for diversity from
the outset will maximize how many people can access your design.
• This paradigm emerges out of studies on accessibility and disability
studies, which focus on how to empower people with diverse physical
abilities to access technology, the built environment, and other
designed things.
 How do we Design?
10. Ability-based design
 Related to universal design is ability-based design, which goes
even further, arguing that the designed artifact itself should
self-adapt to a person’s abilities and contexts at any given
moment.
 For example, imagine a touch screen keyboard that detects and
models a user’s physical ability and mobile context, and adapts
the keyboard to suit a person’s needs in the moment.
 Both of these paradigms respond to the inherent diversity of
human abilities, needs, and contexts.
 How do we Design?
12. Design Justice
 One critique of all of these approaches, however, is that no design, no
matter how universal, will equally serve everyone.
 This is the premise of design justice, which observes that design is
fundamentally about power, in that designs may not only serve some
people less well, but systematically exclude them in surprising, often
unintentional ways.
 Consider, for example, Black Americans, whose darker skin is often not
recognized by hand soap and water dispensers in public spaces.
 This is not a natural limitation of technology - it is a consequence of
designers choosing a sensor technology that must necessarily be
calibrated for particular skin tones, and then calibrating it for white skin.
 How do we Design?
12. Design Justice
 Design justice argues, then, that some designs, when they
cannot be universal, should simply not be made.
 And if they can be universal, then they should be made in ways
that
1. Center power inequalities,
2. Center the voices of all directly impacted by the design outcomes,
3. Prioritize impact on communities over designers’ intents,
4. View designers as facilitators rather than designers,
5. Ensure designs are sustainable and community led, and
6. Build upon and amplify the solutions that communities have
already found.
 How do we Design?
 You can think of all of these different design paradigms as
simply having a different unit of analysis.
 In summary ….
 Human-centered design focuses on an individual,
 Activity-centered design focuses on a system and the activities
in it,
 Value-sensitive design focuses on human value tensions
amongst diverse stakeholders. Universal design focuses on all
of humanity,
 Design justice focuses on power structures, oppression, and
communities.
 How do we Design?
 You can think of all of these different design paradigms as
simply having a different unit of analysis.

In summary ….
 Human-centered design focuses on an individual,
 Activity-centered design focuses on a system and the activities in it,
 Value-sensitive design focuses on human value tensions amongst
diverse stakeholders. Universal design focuses on all of humanity,
 Design justice focuses on power structures, oppression, and
communities.
 How do we Design?
 Each different unit of analysis exposes different aspects of a
problem, and therefore leads to different types of solutions.

 Implications:
i. If you’re engaging in design, how do you choose from these
paradigms?
ii. If you have the freedom to choose, you have to consider your values:
if you’re concerned with social justice, it is hard to recommend
anything but the design justice perspective, as it places justice at the
center of design.
iii. Other paradigms might be easier, since they involve giving up less
power, working less with affected communities, and therefore taking
less time.
 How do we Design?
Implications:
But that just means designing something that may be less effective,
sustainable, and successful.
In most professional design contexts, however, you might be forced to
work within design paradigms that are less justice-focused, with more
attention towards profit and speed.
In these contexts, you’ll have to decide whether to compromise on
just and effective outcomes to optimize speed and profit, or whether to
advocate for change.