I greatly appreciate how the text provides some design principles to refer to for critiques. As someone who just recently began their design journey, I often associated "critiques" with what "looked good." This POV is pretty misguided as it doesn't focus on usability or actual functionality (or the other principles mentioned) so I'm glad that I'll have a point of reference for future design critiques!

I like the ideas of personas because they put a face to the audience that you are trying to impact with the design of your product. It seems like they make it easier to empathize with users needs and remind you that you’re designing for real people, not just abstract requirements. I've created a persona for my INFO 200 course, and it was interesting to put myself in the shoes of a user and their needs in the process.

This really drives the importance of user research in the design process. Without communicating with the people you intend to help, it's unreasonable that you could provide a solution for their problem. In an evolving tech. landscape, optimization and efficiency is oftentimes the top priority, which can easily exclude vulnerable populations. The first example that comes to me is facial recognition, a tool that has repeatedly shown bias against black women, leading to misidentifications and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.

This sentence really resonated with me because it put into words the perspective I've always had about design. People in other STEM fields oftentimes consider design "easy" or something that doesn't take much effort, when really, at the core of all of these respective fields lies problem solving, which in itself takes effort. In my opinion, I don't think it matters what that looks like in industry, research, or academia.

I agree with this section because I think it's important that direct stakeholders are considered throughout the design process. You can only truly understand the needs of a group by talking to them, so to exclude your target audience from the earliest stages of the design process is counterproductive to me. I draw a lot from Value Sensitive Design, a framework that encourages designers to consider human values from the beginning to end of their projects.