About
What type of ‘design’ does this blog focus on?
There are many types of design including graphic design, product design, communication design, interaction design, interior design, landscape design, web design, packaging design, game design, learning design, animation design and the list goes on.
In this blog I will mainly focus on:
Service and Experience Design: Service Design officially refers to making services better by examining the end-to-end journey of what it takes to deliver a service; so not only the customer experience, but also how to support staff in delivering it. It involves mapping and optimizing the flow of information, communication, goods, and money. It can involve optimizing efficiency and improving quality, but also designing ‘delighters’, innovating new service delivery models, and creating novel experiences. For example, a coffee shop may think about reimagining the morning rush hour experience. There are many possibilities, but always limited resources. This is where Design Research comes in.
Design Research: Design Research is about understanding people’s needs and behaviors; especially dealbreakers. Since people aren’t always good at articulating their needs verbally, Design Researchers consider other ways to gather insights - like making activities to attain a first person perspective (e.g. getting people to take a photo of their morning routine), conducting observations, or supplementing in-depth interviewing with props, prototypes, or scenarios to get closer to real life behavior.
Human-Centred Design: At the heart of Design Research is Human-Centred Design. It’s about how we design experiences, products, and services for human beings. We consider their motivations, fears, tendencies, mindsets, individual and societal behaviors, goals and desires.
The lines between design are blurry. What’s common is that design is about solving problems.
How is art different than design?
Art and design often overlap but differ in their core intentions and contexts.
Design is typically driven by function, addressing specific problems within systems, services, or products to create solutions that are practical, efficient, and desirable. It often operates within economic or societal frameworks, aiming to improve usability, accessibility, or performance.
Art, by contrast, is more often about provoking thought, evoking emotion, conveying a message, and stimulating new ways to see things and the world. It is usually generated from the artist themselves and can be a form of self-expression.
While both intersect, design tends to engage with practical systems, whereas art usually explores abstract or personal narratives.
What does a designer do?
Design solves problems - a designer’s job is to:
Pick up on concerns of others.
Determine the essence of the problem.
Discover issues and opportunities.
Resolve them or find ways to accurately convey them to society so that they can be tackled collectively.
Designers explore context
Products and services do not exist in isolation. There is always an influencing context and environment. We design for the ecosystem (which includes people, relationships, systems, values, ideologies, places and other things). For example, perhaps there is a new medical device on the market that helps people sleep - adoption may not be just about having a great product design that is functional, ergonomic, user friendly, and affordable. After doing Design Research, you may discover that people are actually concerned about the space it takes up on their bedside table, or how it makes their bedroom look like a hospital, or how to travel with it. You might discover these types of insights by asking people to take photos and observing that people try to cover it up during the day - and then using that as a prompt for discussion, or understanding their struggles traveling with it by getting them to do a mini vlog activity and realizing the impracticalities of using it in hotels, or getting people to write a ‘how to’ letter to someone who has just been diagnosed with the sleep condition and observing the types of concerns they try to address. People might not say they don’t use something because it makes them ‘feel like a patient’, but it could be the real blocker subconsciously. This is why understanding human behavior and psychology is important in design.
Why ‘dissect’ design?
The focus of this blog is to ‘dissect’ design. Since we design for people, we have to be responsible about the possible impacts of our designs. Of course we intend it for good, but it could accidentally create some undesirable behavior. Being intentional requires understanding the mechanisms of how design works and how it influences. Not only that, but the better we can understand ‘the process’ of design and how to generate new ideas, the more innovative and efficient we can become.
