Now imagine a dozen other students observing this dialog. What would they get from it? They’d see, like you’re seeing on this web page, an example of how to share feedback, how to receive it, and deep domain knowledge about the nature of email as social media. This means that you have much to gain just by watching critique happen, in addition to participating in it yourself.As we noted before, good critique isn’t just about method, but also expertise

There are many design principles in broad use that are a bit more precise, even though they might not be universally good in all contexts:Simple. This is a design aesthetic that prizes minimalism and learnability. These can be good qualities, reducing how much people have to learn to use an interface and how long it takes to learn. But simplicity isn’t always good. Should moderation tools in social media simple? There’s nothing inherently simple about regulating speech, so they might need to be complicated, to reflect the complexity of preventing hate speech.Novel. In some design cultures (e.g., fashion design), the best design is the new design that pushes boundaries and explores undiscovered territories. Novelty is powerful in that it has the power to surprise and empower in new ways. It also has the power to convey status, because possession of new design suggests knowledge and awareness of the bleeding edge of human creativity, which can have status in some cultures. But novelty trades off against simplicity, because simplicity often requires familiarity and convention66 Norman, D. A. (1999). Affordance, conventions, and design. ACM interactions. .Powerful. This aesthetic values the ability of designs to augment human ability. Take, for example, a graphing calculator. These are exceedingly complex little devices with thousands of functions that can support almost any kind of mathematics. It’s certainly not simple or novel, but it’s extremely powerful. But power isn’t always good. Sometimes power leads to complexity that poses barriers to use and adoption. Powerful designs can also amplify harm; for example, powerful saved searches on Twitter enable trolls to quickly find people to harass by keyword. Is that harm worth whatever other positive might come from that power, such as saved time?Invisible. Some trends in design aesthetics value designs that “get out of the way”, trying to bring a person as close as possible to their activity, their information, and their goals. Designs that achieve invisibility don’t try to be the center of attention, but rather put the attention on the work that a person is doing with the design. Good example of designs that attempt to be invisible are the many intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa, which try to provide “natural” interfaces that don’t need to be learned, personalized, or calibrated. All of this may come at the expense of power and control, however, as the mechanisms we often use for invisibility are automated.Universal. The premise of universal design77 Story, M. F. (1998). Maximizing usability: the principles of universal design. Assistive Technology.  as something that all of humanity should be able to access, prizing equality over other values. For example, designing a website that is screen readable so that people who are blind can read it often constrains the type of interactivity that can be used on a site. What’s better: power and novelty or universal access? Maybe there are some types of designs that are so powerful, they should only be used by certain people with certain knowledge and skills. Of course, universal designs are rarely universal; all design exclude somehow.Just. The premise of design justice11 Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.  is the purpose of design should not be to amplify inequities and injustices in the world, but to dismantle them. This might mean that a design that ultimately serves the enrich and empower the wealthy (e.g., Facebook Ads) might be deemed worse than a design that helps dismantle an unjust system (e.g., a social media network for small-business loan networking amongst Black owned businesses)

Another analytical route to generating ideas is analogical reasoning, which Plato and Aristotle called “shared abstractions.” The basic idea is to take something concrete (like a horse), generalize it to something more abstract (a grass-powered human vessel), then modify the abstraction (a gas-powered human vessel), then finally make something more concrete (car). See? We just invented cars with analogy. Here’s another example: what is a teacher? If we really abstract away the details of what teachers do, they’re entities that shape the future thoughts and behaviors of people, by consent. If we take that abstract idea of what teachers do and try to make it concrete in a different way, what can we come up with? Intelligent tutoring software that shapes people’s behavior. Maybe advertisements are teachers because they also try to shape behavior, but not by consent. What if there were advertisements that did teach by consent? See how this abstract idea of what a teacher is starts to generate new conceptions of how to shape behavior? The creative strategy here is finding the essence of something, and then manifesting that essence into something new. By no means is it a mechanical process—there is still a synthetic leap required from one domain to another

It’s hard to generate anything in a vacuum with no stimulation, right? Now let’s try generating some ideas after looking at some context:

We want to make it easier to make dinner.That’s a pretty lousy argument. The whole problem is bundled up in the word “easier”. We’re not going to convince anyone with bland, vague statement like that. Let’s try to break it down.Few people have time to make a healthy dinner.We want to make it easier to make a healthy dinner.

Surveys communicate with people in a structured, asynchronous, impersonal way, getting you large scale insight, but in a way that can be unintentionally overly structured, biased on who responds, and shallow in insight.

Then I went to grad school to get a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where I studied not only computer science and behavioral sciences, but design as well, combining these fields together into my expertise in Human-Computer Interaction. Suddenly I was surrounded by designers, and taking design classes with design students in design studios

which focuses less on problems or people’s needs and more on what they do, ensuring that what you design integrates well into the complex fabric of an activity