My design philosophy
Watch the Video: My Design Philosophy
I tend to feel the emotion of people around more easily, which unconsciously prompts me to serve others whenever possible. Perceiving the negative emotions of my friends, I couldn’t help empathizing with them and providing positive suggestions.
On account of such characters, I chose to study Industrial design for undergraduate study, and gradually gained a deep insight into people’s behaviors and thoughts to discover their needs while serving their needs and getting their problems solved.
My expedition in design has also shaped me into a more inclusive person. Having been used to a competitive environment before college, I tended to compare myself with others in all aspects. This habit has for a time inspired my motivation and urged me to make progress. Since I get to know design, I was exposed to a multiple evaluating systems and an inclusive environment, which laid an important impact on me and changed my motivation into enjoying the exploration of the unknown and solving problems by design. Liberated from a fighting spirit, I no longer focused only on competition but enjoyed more and felt so thrilled about working cooperatively with team members from various backgrounds and personalities towards the same goal.
Thus, I set aspirations to establish my design philosophy so as to produce more influential and inclusive designs and lay a huger impact.
Design is first and foremost about people. Indeed, only by empathizing with the people can we designers explore real need which lies in a deep understanding of them and makes our design rooted in reality.
In a collaborative designing process of Milk Powder Leveling Kettle, we had an initial survey on 50 couples of parents’ demands such as sterilization, quantized milk preparation, and water filtration. After a quantitative analysis we conducted, those demands were abandoned from our design, for they can be fulfilled by water purifier, measure spoon and disinfection cabinet with lower cost and less difficulty.
Therefore, I proceeded with more user research, including searching forums on infants and conducting a real household investigation. ‘Shadowing’ every step of parental care for their babies, I felt like being a father and soon I found that young parents looking after kids at home had to say goodbye to trips, social gatherings and romantic date nights.
Hence, I designed a portable kettle that shall allow parents to feed their babies outside of the home without giving up their social life. With immersive investigation and deep empathy with users, I discerned the unspoken yet all-important demand of young parents and produced the above people-oriented design meeting their pressing needs.
Deep empathy has enabled me not only to “encourage” people’s particular desires and actions but also later to “avoid” impropriate actions and solve existing problems. In one of my course design assignments, when I saw the bad manners of children at a zoo, such as yelling, knocking on the window and feeding animals with their snacks, I ‘diagnosed’ their hidden motivation, which is, their curiosity about and love for wild animals.
According to my observation, they yelled and knocked because they anticipated seeing how animals “move” and “act” rather than sleeping still or hiding in corners. I believe it would be a lot better to avoid their improper behaviors by satisfying their needs, instead of simply preventing them harshly. Thus, I decided to apply the knowledge of Gamification and came up with the idea of offering a visual display of different simulated reactions from animals for kids to interact with them. In my design, a bunch of interactive screens would be placed in different parts of the zoo. For instance, if kids choose an apple to feed, the screen will show the video of the bear eating an apple with delight. However, if kids choose to feed animals with snacks, an ailing cartoon bear would appear on the screen.
By doing so, the kids’ curiosity was fulfilled, and the disturbance to animals from visitors was reduced. It was pleasant for me to have found this more effective and natural way to guide the kids’ behaviors and make my design capable of leading people the right way.
With more design practices, my design philosophy further developed and I tried to dig out the potential need of people, even ahead of their own awareness of such demands.
In the Information Product Design Course, we decided to design a for-children-use electronic wallet system, which replaced the traditional process of monetary purchase and savings, to help them develop a good habit of budgeting.
However, when testing prototypes with our target users, our conceptual design was challenged by some parents. They regarded it as totally unnecessary for kids to deal with and manage their money. Meanwhile, our survey also indicated that less than one-third of parents would discuss with their children on the money. After doing relevant literature reviews of education theory and consulting educational experts, we found that such opinions were absolutely misleading. It is critical for parents to cultivate the kids’ attitudes towards money since their childhood, which would later largely decide on their FQ (financial quotient).
As a consequence, our design aimed at creating more opportunities for valuable parent-child interaction and helping parents better educate their children. Specifically, it successfully exposed parents to new knowledge and taught them to deliver appropriate values on money to kids, so it eventually won unanimous approvals in the product launch.
Whenever I laid a slight but positive impact on people like this, I felt so excited and enjoyable. In each design, through an arduous process of thinking and modifying, I could gain an insight into the essence and precisely catch people’s authentic demands, which always brought me a strong pleasant sensation.
Now I am sure that my life-long pursuit is not only solving people’s problems and meeting people’s needs but most importantly, is to bring others a better development prospect using design.
