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

The Soul of a New Machine

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tracy Kidder’s, The Soul of a New Machine, particularly as it tied many concepts discussed during the module together. Topics and themes which stood out for me were Management and the Importance of hard work. The management style visible in the Eagle project was Mushroom Management. That is, management appeared almost absent. The “kids” were given a general idea of work expected of them and then they were expected to complete the work independently. No one knew who to go to and any issues that occurred between the “microkids” and the “hardy boys” needed to be negotiated among themselves. It can be argued that this management style brought out the best in the “kids”. Many of them commented on the level of responsibility they were given, something they would not have received at rival companies, such as IBM. Something which stood out for me was the way that Carl Alsing announced that it was Tom West who built the Eagle. To me, this underlined th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Research Essay

A major assessment component for the Design, Development and Creativity module was conducting a research essay which involved working individually or in pairs. Myself and my partner, Beth conducted our research essay on updating a digital product, the UCD student portal through the introduction of a digital collaboration tool as a core offering for all students studying at the University. This essay involved conducting both primary and secondary research. In terms of primary research, we conducted a questionnaire, interviews and observational research to understand how students currently interact with the UCD student portal and how it can be improved. Once we understood the problems associated with blackboard and how it could be updated by making it a more engaging site, we conducted secondary research, studying existing literature and case studies on the topics of collaboration and utilising collaborative tools. Upon decision on the update required, a usability, requi...
Post a Comment
Read more

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