Skip to main content

Week 2 Design thinking - Build the right thing


This week focused around building the thing right as opposed to building the right thing. Great design has always been concerned with the whole experience of interaction.

One of the most interesting topics emerging from the class was prompted by a quote from Alan Cooper. It prompted discussion around what do you get when you cross a computer with a camera? A phone? A plane? With a car? A ship? You get a bigger computer.  The products we use on a daily basis are becoming ever more like software.

Allen stressed that we need to develop an annoyance and radar for bad design and an appreciation for superior design. He showed us a variety of good and bad design examples and showed examples of how users will highlight the problems in your products or else they will leave marks e.g. a sign telling the user how to interact correctly with a product / service


During the lecture, we also watched a video "Inside IDEO" which followed the IDEO design team revolutionizing the shopping cart. It was amazing to see their design process. It appeared chaotic and messy and yet they were able to create some fantastic creative designs. It was evident that the organization stresses a lot of importance on sketches and iterative design.

One quote mentioned during the video which stood out for me was "fail often in order to succeed sooner." This resonated well with me and reminded me of a previous module I had taken, Game Thinking where there was an emphasis on iterative design, paper prototypes and brainstorming to create a product from design through to working proto-type in just five days. The module co-coordinators stressed the importance of failing many times before reaching our desired product.


Although it appeared that everyone's voice was heard in the organization, it is not a place I would like to work in. During challenging times or when decisions need to be made, the decision making process remains with the senior leadership team and other members of the organization are treated like children.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iona Technologies

·        Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Anrai O’Toole ·        The company progressed from a Trinity campus company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997 ·        Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and communicate with one another ·        Their research was initially supported by Trinity and then the EU ·        They took a brave leap from academic to the commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking and telecommunications embracing networks and internets ·        Iona found that their c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Exercise: Prototyping and Creating Mock-Ups

We were tasked with designing a test-free search page mock-up for individuals who were unable to read. We were first required to create a paper prototype and then use an online tool, Balsamiq. I found the exercise very interesting as it forced me to refine all my ideas into one, single representation. It also involved selecting the most important requirements as we were under a time constraint. I found the paper prototype process slightly easier a using Balsamic introduced constraints, in that I had to create my design choosing from the icons within the Balsamiq tool as opposed to creating my own. I found this exercise very useful and I will aim to introduce quick prototyping in my future roles when applicable.
Post a Comment
Read more