What Is Design?

Begin with Daniel Pink quote from slides.

“We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.”

Design is Everywhere

• Everything you own, everything you interact with, was designed in some way. Someone made a choice to shape an object that way.
• When things “don’t work right,” it’s the designer’s fault.

Design and Function

• Often design doesn’t have anything to do with what something does.
• The idea of opening an aluminum can of peaches doesn’t come from a designer. Whether your can opens easily or not, whether the can opener looks nice, and whether it hurts your hand, though, is often the responsibility of a series of design decisions

Example

Look at chair in class

• Why does this chair look the way it does?

Usability

The study of effective design “in the wild” is called usability. Essentially, it refers to the question of whether or not something is useful to its users.

For this assignment, we are going to be studying the usability of a space at Penn State or an object in your lives.

We need to determine what things are wrong about the object and what could be done better.

This needs to be quantifiable:

• Produce data to show the problem exists
• Document it via pictures and/or primary data
  • Interviews
  • Studies
• User Narratives