The Movement Of Participatory Design

A subject that recently has caught the attention of many around the world is Policing and all that comes with it. There are countless people with opinions for either side of the argument. One case in particular that has drawn a lot of controversy is the case of 18 year old Michael Brown. He was killed August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern Suburb of St. Louis. Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, 28, a white Ferguson police officer. Before the incident with Darren Wilson Michael Brown was seen with Dorian Johnson at a convenience store taking multiple packages of cigarillos. Wilson had been notified by police dispatch of the robbery and descriptions of the two suspects. He encountered Brown and Johnson as they were walking down

In a society where everyone is competing with each other, you would assume someone with good intentions and logical views is more powerful than a crowd of thoughtless people. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, this hypothesis was put to the test when Atticus Finch, a logical, unbiased lawyer, was given the task of testifying for an alleged rape case to a young girl named Mayella Ewell that was committed by a hard-working black man named Tom Robinson. As a novel set in the early 1930s, most people in Maycomb County, a district in Alabama, were prejudiced towards black people. Even worse, seemingly all of the people on the jury were prejudiced, a “thoughtless crowd”. While the logical person should be more powerful, this is unfortunately not the case because logic cannot change the views of thoughtless people, those with an unclear conscience have prejudices that can overpower, and quantity overrules quality.

Across the Atlantic, Germany started the world’s largest beer event Oktoberfest in 1810 when King Ludwig got married and a festival was held for the royal wedding. At the start, Oktoberfest main focus was on horse races, however, more and more beer stands were popping up and then beer tents started taking their place. In order for breweries to serve their beer in the event, the beer had to be brewed in Munich and it also had to be in compliance with the Reinheitsgebot purity laws. Today, Oktoberfest's first focus is beer but, now, there are many rides and attractions to see while at the fair.

The fact is, that visual research designs, sketchbooks and blogs are sources of inspiration for continual development of ideas. Design students are encouraged to keep personal blogs such as Tumblr and WordPress as a convenient and valuable vehicle for sharing their ideas and soliciting and receiving feedback online – an excessive source of development. On the other hand, sharing their inspiration online allows individuals to get started with some ideas. [6]. From all these sources, designers can progress with a wider understanding of how things have transformed.

The Design Summit will walk you through the Human Centred Design process in stages. The first few days are your chances to discover how the process works, learn about the development context and generally build the foundations of your knowledge base. We will then define a design challenge, and travel to the communities to begin the Empathise phase.

Collaborative design approaches such as co-design aim to result in usable, successful products and services which are tailored to a project’s target group and their actual needs. This article discusses how they work, why they work, and when they can fail.

Product design is a creative discipline that requires designers to challenge themselves to build an ascetic, functional and marketable product. The rapid speed of innovation has stimulated interest and change in designing the user experience. Designers are now responsible to create a new paradigm in the product making process by exploring every possible factor in a design concept. To achieve this vision of a curated user experience design, human behaviour has been studied and as an anchor to change in the way we build products.

Participation in design (or ‘innovation from the edge’): to an increasing degree, individuals take creative and business roles in design processes. Participatory design is an approach to design that actively involves all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. In general, platforms that are able to manifest this power of the community, or power of the crowd, can provide buying power, production power, financing power, democratic power. When we fully integrate design manufacturing process, the company will be able to define, execute and optimize the entire customer experience boosting brand engagement across all channels. Digital, social, mobile, print, direct mail, customer contact center and more (DelGrosso, Weissman, & McCluskey, 2000).

In 1999, Alan Cooper originally introduced the concept of “personas”, an archetype of users with a precise description of his characteristics and goals, which will be attempted to satisfied through the design process [1]. As a user-centred method which exclude real users from the main design process [2], this distinctive design method has been controversial for decades. Personas has been considered and validated beneficial by numerous researchers since 1999, in consonance with their studies and practices [3]. Among positive opinions, what ranks first is that personas specify the design teams’ focus from abstract users to specific target users, beneficial to produce uniform design goals [3]. Furthermore, in the design procedure, personas always serve as a reminder to developers that end users are different form themselves [4]. Nevertheless, despite personas are proposed to be a strong weapon for interaction design, several main obstacles, as well as critical speculations, spring up simultaneously.

Research through design (RtD) is a reflective practice where thinking occurs through prototyping to examine the process, invention, relevance and extensibility of the design (Klemmer and Hartmann 2006; Zimmerman et al. 2007). This approach helps the interaction designers to integrate models and theories with the technical opportunities demonstrated by the engineers to make the right artifact; which in turn is a step towards transforming the world from its current state to a preferred state (Zimmerman et al. 2007). According to Lowgren (2013), “...the essence of research is to produce knowledge while the essence of design is to produce artifacts.” The knowledge in research through design is in the production of the artifacts or the artifact itself (Zimmerman et al. 2007). However, unlike the traditional design practices, which produce artifacts and systems to make some cultural and economical impact, in research through design, design artifacts are used as objects of inquiry into probable future (Gaver et al. 2004) and to

A wide search across the University library, Google Scholar and ACM Digital Library and – to widen the search out to popular literature from various magazines, blogs and articles – was conducted to discover information about the process of Design Thinking. To ensure the search results were not overwhelmingly numerous, speech marks on the phrase “Design Thinking” were used before entering it on the search engines. The purpose of this is to ensure there is appropriate information returned. The books selected were Design Studies by Catherine Stones published in 2010, [8]; The Principles & Purpose of Interactive Design published by Jamie Steane in 2014 about the different ways individuals design think [6], as well as, the book Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan, broader understanding defining Wicked Problem early 1992 [3]. The aim for selecting these books is because of their informative nature and the range of dates over which they were published, which provides more information, both quite recent and then more of a design “classic” from 1992 [3]. Moreover, Tim Brown discussed in the Harvard Business Review in 2008 Design Thinking, [2] and, Jon Kolko wrote an article about 20 Design Thinking Comes of Age [2]. This gives a clear idea of different ways of Design Thinking. And Phil Brown recently discussed Why Design Thinking Conquered The World, [1] as well as, Steve Lennon discussed about Design Thinking [5]. The text, which is less relevant,

Design is omnipresent; it permeates everything that tickles our sensory perceptions. The sheer brilliance of a powerful design lies in it being a transparent medium that allows flawless, intuitive and delightful interactions between people and machines. I envision myself as a UX designer, firmly rooted by HCI principles, who is able to act as a bridge between the technologists building a product and the people using this technology. I am positive that the MHCI+D program at the University of Washington will guide me towards the next level and help me reach my goal.

In the article written by Tim Brown the reader discovers that design thinking initiates innovation and offers the business industries a discipline readily reproduced on a continuous basis. The reader also understands how ideas although extremely incomprehensible to fit, creates the best improvements in a product, services and or process. Design improvement although expected to come last before reaching the customer remains the most important part of the development phase.

The design process is a critical point in development between designers and users; it allows for the designers to understand the audience it is reaching and what that audience is looking for. The design process has several steps before the launch of a product or installment of a software. The process must start with the user and task analysis understanding what the product is going to be used for and what the day-to-day operations are of the people using it (McCracken, 2004). The

A simple user interaction is never simple. A person responding to a product, service, or information tool is also influenced by his or her surroundings, branded content, and even other people woven into the experience. When we study, craft, and engineer an experience, we need to consider all these elements in order to be empathetic and effective designers.