What is design? --Bill Moggridge

In this video, Bill Moggridge told us about design, what is good design and bad design. He also showed us some examples of good and bad design processes, changing in design.

Firstly, he said “Everything is designed.” I’m strongly agreed with him. Human builds up this society because of unbelievable human’s mind.

Then, he shows some National design awards in Washington and the First lady speech which expressed what’s her feels about design education for kids.

Bill Moggridge also demonstrated design disciplines: Architecture, Furniture design, industrial design and glassware design. Design disciplines form teams for complex problems. One example is a service designed for a visitor From China (Intel UMPC).He said this service might happen like that very soon.

What is bad design? An Example is Using I-mode service to buy a drink in Japan. They didn’t understand design process. There are very difficult connection problems in the technology applications. It reminds me of the design confusion we did in the last few weeks. Confusingly designed means that users misunderstand the designer’s intent, resulting in erroneous usage. I think bad design is not that kind of worse, because it can be improved by different ways and turned to be a good design. Designers must learn something from doing this process.

“The key factors in the design process are understanding people and prototyping,” he said.

·         Understanding people:

In human mind, conscious mind is very small proportion of what people really can use, ability to feel, ability to understand without anything to explain. All the things are relatively subjective to subconscious.

We need to design for different people: men, women, child, young people, elderly, disabled people, etc. In this book“51 ways of understanding latent needs and desires”, there are 4 categories below:

Learn~ Analyze the information you’ve collected: flow analysis affinity diagrams, cognitive task and historical analysis

Look~ Observe people to find out what they do: personal inventory, a day in the life, shadowing.

Ask~ Enlist people’s participation to elicit insights: conceptual the landscape experience, collage, foreign correspondents and draw.

Try~ Create simulations to help empathize with people: empathy tools, scenarios, next year’s headlines and informance.

·         Prototyping: for objects you prototype in a shop, for electronics in a lab. For screen design, you prototype in Macromedia or flash. For services you prototype with stories. 

 There are 3 stages of prototyping: inspire, evolve, validate.

Finally, Bill Moggridge told us expanding contexts for design in a connected world: personal, social, environmental.

1. Personal products expand to health and well being.

2. The design of the places we live expands to social innovation programs.

3. Design for sustainable products expands to global sustainability.