From Space Planning to UX

“What would it look like if you flip your model upside down and turn it to the left by 35 degree?” — This is a tip my professor often suggested to me back in the design studio at Pratt Institute.

To this day, it still doesn’t make complete sense, but it actually taught me how to see things differently when working professionally in my career — and that is also what led me from a space planner/interior designer to a journey to become a UX designer.

People’s Designer

Throughout my career, I realized that I enjoy observing humans interaction and behaviors, especially after I took the landscape design class while I was studying abroad in Denmark. Humans are extremely complicated creatures, but we do react to different kinds of situation similarly. For some other simulations, we react differently depending on our habits.

Denmark was a country that designs almost everything around human’s interaction with mother nature. Such as the so-called “cloud church”- Jorn-Utzon’s Bagsværd Church. The building is located in a beautiful countryside with big sky, and the architect Jorn-Utzon brought the cloud from outdoor to indoor- the roof mimics cloud and brings natural light in, and creates a perfect lighting and experience for the users.

User Experience

After a few years of working in the interior design fields, I got a lot more interested in creating better experiences for people in my design. Moreover, I also found that I can apply the same principles to create designs in the digital world with my experiences in space planning and design.

Changing just a little bit of the landscape would improve people’s interaction. For example: the staircase at Julliard’s entrance provides more leisure corners by changing the scale and adding divisions. In digital design, we can also do the same things to provide better experiences for users. such like interactive buttons.

The web design can also apply the same principles to increase interaction between users and the application.

Change an angle orperspective and we can all bring good designs everywhere. I am excited for this change.