2-1. What is Design? Ver. 2022.03.31

Consider The Following...

To begin, please answer the questions in the Google Form below. Your response will be anonymous. When you have finished answering, please review the other learners' answers.

In this lesson, we will outline the act of design and learn the perspectives that we should consider as creators of digital products. Once you have finished this lesson, please "evaluate" what you see here one more time.

Doing so will allow you to compare the "you" from before and after you have engaged the key question of each lesson. What is important is that you experience this learning process for yourself. When doing so, please remain aware of any changes to your vocabulary or perspective that have come as a result of this lesson.

What Did You Think of the Key Question?

Review your own thought process when you decided how to improve the poster. How did you come up with ideas for improvement?

Stop for a moment, collect your thoughts, and continue reading. Your actions must show the process of design.

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What Is Design?

What is the process of design? The Japan Institute of Design Promotion, which runs the Good Design Award and is making efforts to promote design, defines design as follows:

What is your objective when starting a new product, business, or project? In fact, a design refers to the plan for achieving that objective. Color, shape, technology, and function each are means of realizing this objective. It is because people always play a central role in design that it has the power to bring progress to society. We consider good designs to be things that truly enrich people’s lives or have the potential to do so.

Also, Herbert Simon, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on human decision-making, wrote the following in his book, "The Science of Systems":

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Simon pointed out that activities such as prescribing a medicine for a sick patient, developing a new sales plan for a company, or formulating a social welfare policy for a nation are also essentially design activities.

From these expressions, we can extract a sense of intention: "to truly enrich someone's life," "to plan to achieve an objective," "to change a situation into a more favorable one," and "to devise a course of action".

In the process of addressing the key questions, you were probably also guided by a sense of purpose.

An acquaintance of yours wants to increase the number of members in a tutoring club. If people who want to teach and people who want to learn can connect online, someone's life will be enriched. To achieve this goal, the poster needed to be improved. You thought about how to convey the appeal of the club to students who pass by the cafeteria, and furthermore, you devised a course of action for students who found the poster to access the club's website and made an improvement plan.

Design is the process of imagining human actions and experiences, organizing issues that need to be solved, and devising a course of action to change the current situation into something more desirable. This concept that is very familiar to all of us.

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Tools Are Used by People

Design is an activity that enriches someone's life and has human actions and experiences at its core. From here, let's focus on the activity of designing digital products.

We, human beings, are the ones who use digital products. As mentioned in "1-1 Digital Products and their Functions," we determine "what kind of action is possible" and "what should be adjusted" through interaction with digital products.

While designing digital products, devising a way to improve the relationship between tools and humans is important. The role of design also considers natural human cognition and cultural constraints and devises ways to prevent misunderstandings and human errors from occurring.

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Are Human Errors the Cause of Accidents?

It is said that human errors are the cause of most industrial accidents. But is this true?

To help you realize the importance of human-centered design, here is an extract from the book "Tragic Design" by Jonathan Shariat et al. called "The Interface that Killed Jenny".

Jenny, as we will call her, was a young girl diagnosed with cancer. (...) A while later she relapsed and had to start a new treatment with very potent medicine. This treatment was so aggressive that it required pre-hydration and post-hydration for three days through intravenous fluids. After the medicine was administered, the nurses were to be responsible for entering all the required information into the charting software and using this software to follow up on the patient’s status and make appropriate interventions.

The nurses in charge of the patient used the software to adjust hydration to mitigate the toxicity of the medication, and took good care of Jenny every day, but they missed a critical piece of information about her IV that cost her life.

After seeing the actual screenshot of the software operation, the author said

The experienced nurses made this critical error because they were too distracted trying to figure out the software. (...) First, the density of information is so high that it’s impossible to scan for critical information quickly. Second, the colors selected, aside from being further distracting, prevent any critical information from being highlighted. Third, any critical treatment or drug information should receive special treatment so it is not missed, which is not what we see in this interface. Lastly, the flow of recording the information after each visit, known as “charting,” requires too much time and attention to complete in a timely manner.

In these cases, the incidents tend to be reported as human errors by the nurses who missed the information, and the root of the problem is never resolved. The root of the problem was actually the software design.

Cognitive scientist D.A. Norman, in Chapter 5 (Human Error No, Bad Design) of his book "The Design of Everyday Things", explains:

Error occurs for many reasons. The most common is in the nature of the tasks and procedures that require people to behave in unnatural ways—staying alert for hours at a time, providing precise, accurate control specifications, all the while multitasking, doing several things at once, and subjected to multiple interfering activities.

Why do people err? Because the designs focus upon the requirements of the system and the machines, and not upon the requirements of people.

In other words, it is important to try to design in a way that allows human beings to behave naturally, avoiding human error.

Norman offers another very important perspective.

And finally, perhaps the worst culprit of all, is the attitude of people toward errors. (...) The investigations and resulting punishments feel good: “We caught the culprit.” But it doesn’t cure the problem: the same error will occur over and over again. Instead, when an error happens, we should determine why, then redesign the product or the procedures being followed so that it will never occur again or, if it does, so that it will have minimal impact.

In other words, it is important to ask "why" in order to understand the root problem and then solve the right problem, rather than jumping to the symptoms that seem to be the cause and thinking we have solved the problem.

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So far, we have seen that design is the process of imagining human actions and experiences, organizing issues to be solved, and devising a course of action to change the current situation into a more favorable one. We have also explained the importance of designing for human cognition rather than for machines, and touched on the importance of solving the "right problem".

In the next section, we will further discuss the importance of solving the "right problem". Then, let's look at the process of how the intellectual activity of design is carried out.

Solving the "Right Problem"

Now, let's think about the basic attitude that designers strive for: solving the right problem. Let's start the story with a memorable quote from D.A. Norman.

One of my rules in consulting is simple: never solve the problem I am asked to solve.

Norman says that many of the problems we are asked to solve are symptoms and that there is a separate root problem that actually needs to be solved.

Good designers never start by trying to solve the problem given to them: they start by trying to understand what the real issues are. As a result, rather than converge upon a solution, they diverge, studying people and what they are trying to accomplish, generating idea after idea after idea.

Norman said that while businessmen and engineers are trained to solve problems, designers are trained to discover the real problems. Designers engage in "design thinking" which is how designers identify the real problem behind the task at hand and to consider solutions from a wide range of perspectives.

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Rethinking the Key Question

Now, let's reconsider the key question with design thinking in mind. A good designer starts by trying to understand the real problem. Let's think like designers.

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The Given Problem: Improving the Poster

• You have been asked by a friend to improve the posters displayed in the cafeteria because the number of prospective members of the club is lower than usual. What kind of improvement can you suggest?

Well, the problem given by your friend was "improving the poster." The poster does need to be improved in order to inform people about the club's activities and to attract participants.

For example, what exactly is the "Tutoring Club of the Corona Era"? Is it recruiting math tutors? Or is it a tutoring club that is not limited to mathematics? Since the message is vague, the poster should be improved to show the purpose of the club and what kind of members they are looking for. In addition, you may need to make it easier to access the club's website by adding a QR code.

You may have made these suggestions to improve the poster. This issues are why the poster does not convey its message. In this sense, improving the poster is "finding the right problem." However, what if the problem of the poster not being understood is only one symptom?

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Finding the Right Problem

Let's summarize the situation. In response to the objective of increasing the number of prospective members of the club, you were asked to improve the poster displayed in the cafeteria. However, is it only the poster that is failing to increase the number of prospective members? There may be a more fundamental issue.

Is hanging posters enough to increase the number of prospective members of the club? Is the cafeteria an appropriate place to display the poster? Now that students rarely come to school because of the COVID-19 crisis, and club activities are mainly conducted online, is posting posters effective?

In this way, the first step in "design thinking" is to see a given issue as a symptom, broaden your perspective, question your assumptions, and find the right problem.

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The Process of Design Thinking

We have seen that designers have a basic attitude of questioning assumptions and trying to find the real problem. So what does the process of design thinking look like?

The British Design Council has examined a number of design projects. They found that design involves a process both of divergence that expands the range of options, and convergence that narrows down the options. This process of repeated divergence and convergence is known as the "Double Diamond Model.”

Think of the time axis as progressing from left to right. The vertical axis represents the total amount of expanding options and exploring various possibilities. Design defines the problem by repeatedly diverging and converging to find the right problem, then diverging and converging to find the right solution, and finally achieving the output. The following video (8 min 51 sec) explains the two processes of divergence and convergence.

*You can choose English subtitles from the video's subtitle panel.

The process of design thinking can be described as an exploratory learning process that repeats the process of divergence, in which many ideas are considered from many directions, and the process of convergence, in which ideas are narrowed down.

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So, based on the double-diamond model of divergence and convergence, the general process of design can be illustrated as follows.

First, there is the "deciphering" stage, in which we question the current situation and the given problem, and search for the problem to be solved. Next, there is the "designing" stage where we define the problem to be solved and make a plan to solve the right problem. This is followed by the "creating" stage, where ideas are prototyped and verified, and the "implementing" stage, where prototypes are verified in the field and linked to improvements.

The wavy line in the center is a double diamond model of divergence and convergence. The first wave corresponds to the process of "finding the right problem," and the second wave to the process of "finding the right solution." Through these two processes, the "right problem" can be solved.

In reality, things do not proceed linearly as shown in the diagram. In the actual prototyping process, you might discover new things and redefine the problem. To demonstrate the iterative nature of such designs, the British Design Council updated the Double Diamond model in 2019. In the following video (8 min 57 sec), we explain the design process with the main points of the new Double Diamond model.

*You can choose English subtitles from the video's subtitle panel.

As you can see, the design process is a series of back and forth movements, so it is important to be aware of where you are in the design process. It is a good idea to know the general flow of the design process as a blueprint for bringing your plan to fruition while keeping track of where you are.

The column at the end of this lesson introduces the process of designing the logo for the Hokkaido University Open Education Center so that students can experience the whole process of divergence and convergence that occurs in the actual design process. The video is about 20 minutes long, along with an introduction to the key points in implementing consistent design. If you have time, please watch this video to get a sense of the specific design process.

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Summary

So far, we have looked at the most important basic attitude of a designer: solving the right problem. We have learned that the design process is a process of divergence and convergence in which we find the right problem, and a process of divergence and convergence in which we find the right solution, leading to the final output.

You may have learned the approach of "finding the right solution" mainly by studying for exams. However, the problem-solving you experience in exams and homework is controlled and coordinated in advance. In the future, we will be required to have the ability to discover real-world problems on our own. Taking a designer's approach of "finding the right problem" will give you a chance to broaden your horizons.