Author: Xincheng Huang

Thoughtless Act:

In Thoughtless Act, Suri suggests that there are many different acts that we take in our life without noticing. Suri thinks that by being conscious of these thoughtless acts, we can open many new design possibilities that can make our lives better. This article is very intriguing for me by pointing out how details and keen observation matter in our daily life, not only in designing but in every aspect of our lives. Those acts and behavior choices that people are unconsciously making could actually reflect their internal needs. If we try to discover these acts, analyze and design around these needs, we will find that there are actually many things that we can do to improve our lives.

Affordance and Constraints

This article introduces the concepts of Affordance and Constraints, as well as the relationship between the two. In terms of affordance, the author suggests that there are two types of them, namely real affordance and perceived affordance. The former stands for a product’s actual usage as designed by its producers, and the latter stands for a product’s perceived usage by its users at their first glance. This is very interesting how these two often contradict each other, just like the example of people often misuse a door that should be pushed to open instead of pulled. This leads to the idea of physical constraints and cultural constraints. The article suggests that many design choices are actually based on these two types of constraints. However, it is important to make sure that these two do not conflict. We often see a product is designed to have a certain physical constraint for the purpose of its usage, whereas such physical constraint is disturbing by contradicting people’s day-to-day habits or convention. People are more tend to follow the cultural constraints or the convention that they follow in their lives. In my opinion, this is related to the previous topic that is the thoughtless acts. The idea of designing around the thoughtless acts is exactly one of the solutions to unite perceived affordance and real affordance together and make sure that we are not bothered by the conflicts of the conventions and physical constraints. 

The readings for this week gives us a definition of what design is, what are some categories of designing, and a conventional approach to design.

Firstly, in “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”, the author gave us a very broad overview of what design is, including how the notion of design evolved in history and what are some general focus and concerns of designing and designers. The most interesting point of this article is where the author suggests that design is actually a typical “wicked problem”, which means that there is not defined definition, formulation, solution or even an endpoint of any design problem. This brought us a question that is, how indeed should we approach such a problem.

So, in “An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research“, a map of different aspects of design is given. This map categorizes design problems with four dimensions. Namely, whether it is research-led, or it is design-led, and whether it takes an expert mindset, or a participatory mindset. Then, the author placed different kinds of design and design research on the map, which shows the emphasis of each of them.

Finally, in “Visualizing the 4 Essentials of Design Thinking”, a general way of design is given. The essential idea is that we should first find all the possibilities and then focus on the most essential one both in terms of identifying the problem and finding the solution. And because designing is a wicked problem, we should iterate through this chain again and again. However, a question arises that since in the design map, there are many different areas of designing, would this “two-diamond” approach apply to all?

In this quick and dirty design cycle, we proposed a design for Cindy.

Firstly, we took the step of emphasizing by watching and analyzing the video interview on Cindy that gives us an understanding of her problems and needs about using phones. In the video, Cindy mostly focuses on the distraction a phone can create, such as unnecessary pop-ups and advertisements. Therefore, we decided that we should focus on this problem.

The product that we designed is a pop-up filtering app. The way this works is basically that it gets access to the history of popping up of every application and gather them in a simple and clear list. After this, for each pop-up, you can decide whether it is a necessary pop-up or just yet another distraction, by simply swiping to the left or to the right. The app will then block all the pop-ups that are similar to the ones that are labeled as a distraction by the user.

We got very nice feedback from Cindy and we are happy with our design. First, our design is easy and simple to use. The design of swiping to left or right is adopted from dating apps and is thus very intuitive. Second, our design can achieve its purpose very well. It progressively learns the preference of the user and will adapt to her better and better. One possible modification is that we can gather the preference data from all the possible users so that the users won’t have to go through a long and tedious initial setting step.

The good design I select is a poem written in an upside-down style. The title is Water. While reading the poem, you can feel that a man is requesting water in a more and more anxious way, as the line of the poem getting shorter and shorter.

I think this is a representation of a good design for two reasons. Firstly, the style of the poem is intriguing and aesthetically pleasant. Secondly, the way in which this poem is written well serves the purpose of the poem, that is to arouse people’s awareness of the water shortage problem. In conclusion, this way of writing a poem not only preserves the aesthetical element a poem should have, but also make the poem interesting to read and easy to resonate with.