Week 3 @ MxM — Professional Inspiration
Week 3 has passed for the Interns at Made by Many, and our project is reaching that interesting stage of the design process where we leave the safety of Google and it’s ethereal knowledge of worldly matters, and walk forth into the abyss to ask real life people about their real life issues and real life needs. Gulp.
It’s a strange thing, the design process. Here we are, about to ask potential product users about their needs. The insights that they give us will inform the rest of our design process, and therefore these interviews are of the utmost importance, because this is where we will begin to establish where the true value lies for the people that we are designing for. We are in a sense, blindly entering the unknown. And as designers, we must resist allowing our desires to influence our resultant designs, because at the end of the day, we are unfortunately not the user that we are designing for. This is the part of the design process that I find the strangest — essentially acting as an invisible passenger, using a measured, non-partisan way of thinking to deliver what is best for our participants.
Looking on to week 4, we are beginning to figure out what exactly a group of professional office workers would actually want from a product. To do this, we have begun to ask experts about what we should look out for, giving us guidance to take forward into our initial interviews. We have started asking professional psychologists and experts on the workplace about their opinions, however my most insightful interview thus far has come from a source closer to home.
On Friday, I met up with Rich Cahill, a recent graduate of my course who has moved down to London in the past week, which conveniently allowed me to discuss his personal honours project, “~yougra.ph” (link here, check it out! http://rc3.me). In short, ~yougra.ph tracks mental disruptions by allowing a user to text a bot discreetly through typical SMS messaging. An API, IBM Watson, processes the texts, the emotions from which are then plotted on a graph based on the deciphered wording of the text. The graph is a digital artifact that visually communicates the emotions that a user is experiencing, something that people with anxiety frequently struggle to put into words.
Rich’s project addressed many of the same issues that we had been investigating in our initial research phase, and for me as a fellow designer, the conversation allowed me to fully appreciate the amount of thought and detail that had went into his design. One insight from the interview in particular confirmed something that I had initially assumed to be a given, but with that confirmation has made be further think about what we may want to make, and the limitations placed upon as us a design team.
Rich made clear that when we approach experts, such as chartered psychologists, that we be careful in regards to how we approach the interview and how we describe the aims of our work. He said that during his research for yougra.ph, people could be tentative to speak to him, as they were unsure if he was a designer aiming to replace the role of a therapist or psychologist with a technological solution. Obviously, neither he nor the interns at Made by Many are naïve enough to believe that this is possible, or even a valuable proposition for potential users.
At the end of the day, whilst we may look at mental health issues within the workplace, we fully understand that there are some things that cannot replace a human touch. It is important that people understand that when they are unhappy, the most important thing they can do its talk to people and to have support from their loved ones. To try and replace that necessity with a machine is a silly concept, and one that we think would be unwise to look into. Alas, the reality is that when you mention the words “artificial intelligence” and “develop new technological solutions” when requesting an interview with a professional, you run the risk of being turned away as their skepticism tells them that your ultimate goal is to put them out of a job. This however, is obviously not the case, and it has been a lesson for me as a designer — that in actual fact, not everyone shares the same vision of our project as we ourselves do, and not everyone will understand and want to share what they know.
The way we’ve started to look at our project is that we’re making tools. Just as a builder has a hammer, we are trying to create a tool that will hopefully assist people in becoming happier. At this moment in time, we do not know what that is, however we are hoping that by manipulating technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will design a tool that some may find of use throughout their day-to-day lives.
