Designing For Humans
The first section of Chapter 6 — Design Thinking, within The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, resonated with me as someone who was raised surrounded by a family that is mostly comprised of engineers, as well as someone who has gone through traditional schooling. While growing up, I found that school teaches children how to think concretely. Questions that have a single “right” answer. And from my family, engineers who are focused on providing a functional solution to the most apparent problem, without necessarily spending enough time wondering if that is the correct problem to solve. Many times I heard the famous Abraham Lincoln quote, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”, without being given more detail as to what that meant other than the importance of preparation and that its okay to spend time figuring out how best to tackle a problem.
One of the first times I encountered the idea of Human Centered Design was several years ago when I was just started out on my college experience hoping to become an engineer like the rest of my family, in my Creative Design class. One of the assignments was to take an object and modify it to be more usable by a differently abled person. Where this assignment failed was in the fact that it took place in an entry level course that engineers were forced to take, so the professor was very lenient and the students were not that engaged.
As such, when I was given this assignment, people that are wheelchair-bound was the most obvious example of ‘differently abled’ that I could come up with. So, I researched physical anthropometry to find average values of comfortably reached heights by people sitting in wheelchairs and came up with the idea of lowering the height of a counter-top so that it is less awkwardly tall for a person that is sitting down. This was as good of an idea as any, so my group accepted it.
Completely bypassing the idea of applied ethnography, and having never been restricted to a wheelchair for enough time in my life to ever personally feel the need to create a better counter space, my group got to work designing a counter with a vertical cupboard door that would allow for a flexible height level. And, because the class had multiple more projects to get to, this creation ended at the prototyping stage without considering if what we made was even useful to the target audience.
I have thought about this project multiple times since changing major to become a design student. How might this product have changed if we were tasked with testing it, or even simply needing to do proper design research before ideation and prototyping?
