Design for Understanding : Reflection

Introduction

In taking Design for Understanding, my goal was to learn techniques I could use to break down complex topics into sticky, digestible bits of information. I’ve seen so often how the “curse of knowledge” in any field hinders people from effectively communicating. Prior to attending Stanford, much of my work experience in manufacturing required me to filter highly technical information on tool failures and product design changes and dissolve them into simple takeaways for management — a skill I’m quite sure will continue to be a necessity as I move forward in my career in design.

In reflecting on my learning journey throughout this course, I would like to highlight three key topics — the why, the theme, and the bias — that have shaped the way I think about the stickiness of design.

The Why

Something particularly challenging for me was determining which piece of the puzzle on our topic — money in politics — was worth explaining. We knew pretty early on that we had found a knowledge gap through our interviews, as this is a little-known topic amongst students. However, digging deeper to determine whystudents didn’t seem to care to research the flow of money was something I don’t think we really touched on until we created our game, Super Dark. I was so focused on illustrating what donation strategies students could utilize to make an impact in politics, that I missed out on the core assumption I was making: that students knew why their voice was necessary in the first place. As such, I feel that our team’s Explorable Explainer zoomed in on donation strategies but missed the target on showing our users why they need to understand what we were showing them.

The Theme

Learning about the use of themes in helping users understand concepts was an important takeaway for me, though I didn’t realize this until the end of the quarter. In making our Neopets-themed political world of Neotopia, I think we ended up with a bit of chocolate-covered broccoli: an attempt at making learning about political donations fun without deeper consideration into why a game — and a Neopets-themed one at that — was a suitable avenue for the topic at hand. Though our base concept of having an “unfair game” illustrate the unfair advantage that dark money can create for democracy had legs, I think the thematic choice did not lend itself to a greater learning outcome for our topic, but instead may have clouded our learning goals. In trying to hammer down our learning goals for our game, Super Dark, we realized the importance of achieving the correct level of abstraction in helping users see the relevance of the provided information (game, explainer, etc) to their lives. Maybe, the experience of living that reality through the magic circle of a game was the missing link in our explainer.

The Bias

One thing I’d love to learn more about is the notion of ambient belonging. How do our designs make some feel welcome, and others not? What explicit elements of visual design, information architecture, or even type of fun lend themselves to inclusivity and exclusivity? One area that I continue to find challenging is how to reconcile the idea of designing for all versus designing for some; in other words, how do we tune the bar of specificity when deciding the user group to design for? In wanting to make the most impact possible, it is natural for designers to start broad and hesitate to narrow the user group. As an engineer by trade, I tend to crave certainty through robust experimentation to guide how to narrow a user group. Though I have been working on a bias towards action (quickly picking a direction that is interesting, or using my intuition to guide a choice, rather than time-intensive research) over the past year, the idea that my design can be unintentionally inclusive or exclusive due to the bias inherent in my design is one that is uncomfortable. Could something that I create be detrimental in the hands of the wrong people? Could I alienate a population by not considering their perspective?

Conclusion

As I continue my final year of graduate school, I hope to build on these three elements as I think about the purpose of good design and what it means to me.

I am thankful for the opportunity to have been a part of such a thoughtfully-curated course. As I look forward to a career in design research, I find the toolkits, design critiques, and resources provided over this past quarter to be invaluable