Design For Understanding — Class Reflection
“What is your definition of ‘Design,’ Monsieur Eames?”
As I stared at those words on a wall in the Oakland Museum of California, it was hard to pull my focus away from the room of TV screens behind me. On the screens, the Eameses film Think was playing. In that film and the nearby exhibits, Charles and Ray Eames explored the power of design to simplify complex subjects.
As a designer who loves to learn, but is often frustrated by bad lectures and dense texts, I was captivated by the idea that we could apply design in that way. So you can imagine I leapt at the chance when I learned there was a class offered at Stanford called Design For Understanding.
One of the things I came to appreciate most in class was the importance of considering human nature when designing to teach. Instead of just distilling a few key points from a subject, we learned how important it was to understand the audience we were trying to communicate with.
If you want to teach someone, you first have to give them a reason to care. The only way to do that is to understand who they are and what they care about. Our first project, for example, was a game that explained how voters can act more strategically in elections. American voter turnout tends to be disappointing but our audience, millennials, can be downright apathetic!
But after several hours of interviewing our fellow students, we learned they actually do care. Many of them want to get involved more, but they’re intimidated by the scope and scale of national politics. They don’t realize how much of a difference they’re capable of making.
With this in mind, we tweaked a few of the parameters of our game. Instead of giving players an unrealistic $10,000 budget to make donations, we gave them a $100 budget with the option to amplify their impact by sharing the donation on social media. With this small change, we saw engagement from our players improve significantly.
We solved that problem, but as my group and I progressed further through the quarter, we realized we had a bigger one. Engagement is often surprisingly easy to get from users. But learning is an entirely separate, much tougher outcome to deliver.
Our third project, a hidden role game about how dark money affects politics, we were able to get our players having loads of fun by the second playtest. But when we asked them what they learned, it was usually something like, “I learned not to trust Jenny.” We were teaching people more about their friends propensity for betrayal, but not much about American politics.
What we learned, after several more rounds of playtesting, was that our game didn’t mirror the real-life mechanics of dark money donations. We made subtle tweaks to the gameplay to more accurately reflect reality, and suddenly our players were learning exactly what we wanted them to learn. One player told a passionate story about corruption in her home country after playing.
This is another power of design: to immerse people in a simpler, but still realistic model of reality that encourages a deeper understanding. By empathizing with our audience and making an effort to understand the mechanics of the subject we were trying to teach, we could build a game that clarified a difficult subject.
Both of these ideas connect to a core idea in design: empathy. By repeatedly interviewing and playtesting with our users, we developed the empathy we needed to reach them. And by designing a game that accurately reflected the complex system we wanted to explain, we helped our users build empathy with the people who are a part of that system.
Design, like the subjects we aimed to explain in class, doesn’t have to be complicated. Spend time with the people you’re designing for, build, test, repeat. If you do that enough, you’ll find success.
In that original interview, Charles Eames described design as, “a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.” Eames, along Design for Understanding, showed me a new, powerful purpose for design. I’m looking forward to carrying those lessons with me wherever I go next.
