Story-Based Design Methods
Focusing on ease of use tends to encourage a narrow view of what ‘use’ is with respect to technology, emphasising efficiency and productivity over exploration or curiosity. With a correspondingly narrow range of models for usability, interaction tends to be self-similar, mundane, and ultimately boring.
I’ve never thought about ease of use in this way! I’ve always imagined that we trend toward similar design models because good designs are simple and unobscured. Seeing another viewpoint that describes these models as self-similar and mundane is a perspective that I did not take into account prior and really appreciate. I think about the smartphone in this case, and how similar each is to one another. The phones themselves are so indistinct in appearance that people like myself look elsewhere for aesthetics such as case design, from clear to patterned to textured. They look for how well the design is for its interactions with some taking into account a bit of aesthetic, when both can be equally as valuable to an experience. From the article I was able to understand how connected aesthetics and interactions are, and how we need both in design.
…we have experimented with interaction relabelling. In this method, participants are asked to consider an existing product, and, pretending that it is the product to be designed, to tell and act how it works.
I had never heard of interaction relabelling prior to this reading so I found learning about it very fascinating. At first, I was a bit confused on how it worked but they explained very well in their example how it works. If this isn’t done in one of my classes at some point, then I’d love to do an exercise on this in the future possibly as a self initiated exercise! Interaction relabelling being a group exercise sounds like a wonderful team building experience along with having healthy amounts of collaboration and competition. Working with objects and designs that have already been made in different capacities help expand our POV and creativity. I’m still new to the field of design, but it’s never too early to drill the fact that I should not become narrow minded when it comes to designing.
Two of the three extreme characters that we used were stereotypical, and to at least one reviewer offensively so.
While I appreciate designing for extreme characters as a method for unearthing commonalities and possibilities in different aesthetic interaction approaches, the way that it leaned so heavily into stereotypes was something I did not appreciate. I believe that we as designers must remember that our designs are for people and the society they inhabit, but our social environment influences our ideas and decisions. The designing for extreme characters is relying so heavily on assumptions that it isn’t revealing much about the characters or design aesthetics, and even in their own words “makes it difficult to apply the concept to the real world” because how it leans so heavy into characterization, in this case of a “drugsdealer.” I understand that it’s made to design outside of comfort zones and within the margins, but there has to be a way of doing so that perpetuates stereotypes, because those too are flat characters. I think the unexpected could rise from other places. I’d love to design for people who are pharmacists by day and drag queen by night or the struggling grad student trying to find their place in the world, people I’ve interacted with in real life. I’m glad in the future they won’t be so clichéd in their approach as they mentioned, but still am cautious on how that will look.