Users without designers?

Who is a designer? what entitles him or her as one? what ability does he or she possesses to be the one responsible of designing our environment? What role is there left to play by everyone else?

Human beings are curious by nature, and our curiosity is primarily based on maintaining our very basic senses of security and well being, indeed, the first designed objects were elaborated in order to keep us safe from predators, to hunt, to eat and to form communities, which basic task rely on division of work for the benefit of a whole; arrows, axes, vases, containers, houses, clothes and food utensils, all have the same basic principle.

As Simon states “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Where does this statement leave today’s professionally educated designers?

Evidently, expertise, knowledge, methodology and highly developed design abilities provided either by education and/or work experience makes professional designers have an important advantage over regular, so to speak, users, but this does not mean that the design profession has a monopoly on design itself, since, broadly speaking, everyone is able to devise courses of action to change existing situations into preferred ones.

Nowadays technological development has, almost naturally, given power to regular users to design and personalize their products, rapid prototyping techniques and new communication tools along with easy to use design program interfaces could only do such thing. This phenomenon has evidently provoked discussions on the design field, will users still need us? what’s our business about?

The symposium “Users without designers” was held on respect to this topic the past 11 of November in TU Delft, it counted with the participation of designers and researchers pioneers from both academic and professional fields: Ellen Do, Dag Svaneas, Imre Horvath, Caroline Hummels and Jeroen van Erp. Some interesting points came out of it.

In a broad sense, all speakers agreed that the user is taking a more participative role in certain design fields and stages, that humans, by nature, have the potential to be creative beings and that certain tools and techniques have the capacity to ignite creative behavior. Emerging communication tools and services make participatory design a reality.

In that sense some speakers showed different examples of the designer’s ability to develop creative tools by which the users are empowered to develop their own designs in different stages of the design process that range from the mere research, to the conceptual and final product.

Indeed, its in our nature, as Dag Savanaes stated, children use, for example, role playing, storytelling and tool making in a regular basis to develop their own sense of reality, interact with others and playing games and they are pretty natural when they do it. Grown ups just need certain creative tools and techniques that help them not to feel stupid to start plating those games again and reach with it certain creative potential that can be useful as an insight or design concept.

In that sense designer can be a facilitator that helps certain group to express and transform their needs and ideas into real products. Most of the time a high degree of knowledge and understanding is the key factor for a designer to solve successfully a problem, the final user in that sense, can be the one that better knows the needs and opportunities for a product, the only thing that they need is a way to express their ideas. “Get the best out of them and get the best out of you” Caroline Hummels from TUE accurately said.

Its important to mark an important difference, it is true, users can certainly take important roles in the design process, they can bring insights and be a part of a solution as Dag Savanaes showed with examples from the design of new tools for physical rehab, where using simple tools and carefully crafted facilitating techniques design opportunities where found. However, as Dr. Imre Horvath stated, technological developments must also be taken into account, powerful and miniaturized implantable devices, for example, might not be so far away, this tools might enhance creativity and intelligence for designing and become a key tool for the whole practice, how will design discipline evolve in this context?

In that sense, Jeroen van Erp from Fabrique, the only speaker with experience in the professional world, showed examples, like the Effenaar logo in which, effectively, users played an important role in designing the final product using creative tools facilitated by a professional design team, this process helped the users sense of property while maintaining a preconceived structure.

Effenaar logo template by Fabrique

This potential, however, does not mean that the users could do all design activities by themselves, the user as a designer scope depends on the context and the level of complexity and purpose of the problem, as Jeroen van Erp explained with his “accidents and paradigms model” while simple and incremental changes can be performed by regular users, real innovative breakthroughs and paradigm shifts require the participation of the designer in a increasingly complex way, in which vision, strategy and conceptualization play central roles.

Accidents and paradigms model – Jeroen van Erp

At the end it became clear that, its true, everyone can be creative and has the potential to participate in different stages of the design process, after all is in our nature to look for solutions that make us feel more comfortable and efficient in our daily life. New technological developments such as rapid prototyping will enhance at a certain level the way users buy and design products in the future, new communication channels help the transmission and participatory development of a design, however, this interactions can only reach a certain level of innovation, and are and will happen with designed tools and more or less defined boundaries.

As Jeroen van Erp stated design profession will get more and more complex, we are moving from the doing to more conceptual and thinking fields, which need deeper knowledge from both the market and the user to understand the value of participatory design, and use it as a mean to reach strategic goals defined and designed by experienced and professional designers.

Posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2010 at %I:%M %p. Filed under: Blog, Essays and articles RSS 2.0 feed.