I’m excited about this subject. Legit. How often is it that you are presented with an assignment that allows you to work on practically anything digital that you so choose? I’m especially excited because I’m eager to flex my new found skills in building digital artefacts. I’ve recently dived head first into the world of User Experience Design (or UX design for short). UX design, for those who don’t know, is a discipline that revolves around the concept of creating things for humans. It about designing things that when used by humans, will result in a positive experience. Hasso Plattner’s slides on ‘An Introduction to Design Thinking’ paints a solid picture of Design Thinking – A methodology that resonates with the core principles of UX design.
Design thinking correlates closely with human-centered design (HCD), another methodology that practices high levels of empathy in order to best cater to human problems. You may be thinking, “well hec, isn’t it obvious that things should be designed for humans?”, the reality is that this is a very new concept. While designers, inventors and creators have always designed things to be used by people, it is only recently (about 30 years ago) that that HCD was termed and started to be taken seriously. Since it’s birth as a concept in the cult classic book, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donal’d A. Norman, HCD has rapidly started evolving into a highly respected and valuable concept. Using methodologies such as Design thinking and HCD is going to help me build a really cool artefact. I’M EXCITED. THE END.
Daniel Rad 