As a designer to look at other people's design project, I always search for need statement or problem statement first. I want to know the problem, how they dig into it, and then how they solve it. So, I think it cannot be overemphasized.

I believe this is important in any field of research. To give sufficient context, you are inviting people to be in your shoes, to imagine, and to get their mind involved. Either when we are presenting to client, when we build our portfolio, when we introduce ourselves, when we want people to take action, it's all important to do so. Pictures and illustrations are especially powerful to tell stories. It's also hard to take care of the flow while giving sufficient context.

It makes me think about what the teacher said last week that if we want to know what people will do in the future, we should first look at what they now, and then go deeper about what they need right now, extend to what they will need in the future, and finally imagine what they will do in the future. The reason behind it is that the needs change very little while the behavior changes a lot over time.

Talking about the design of door, there's one that Norman did not discuss much. I think it's a cultural constraint. American all know that when you are going from outside to inside of the building, the door should be pulled. In contrast, the door should be pushed when you are going from inside to outside. It does not work this way in Taiwan, so I think the problem with doors also makes a good example of cultural constraint.

This is so easily ignored during design process. As we dig deeper into users and know more about their needs. It's easy to broaden the definition of the problem and increase the number of features to fulfill users' needs. So, keep it in mind, to be selective. It's a life philosophy as well as design philosophy.

Interestingly here talks about the difference between how marketing utilize focus group and how design utilize focus group since they focus on different aspects doing user research. Marketing people are looking for some big trend or representation through a small amount of people such as user group, trying to imagine and predict the picture of larger population such as how they will purchase. On the contrast, in design, we do user research to see their actual behavior to design something meet their needs. When I studied in business in my undergrad, focus group is a very common way in marketing to learn more donut consumer, but at that time i did not know design utilize similar method in order to get different insights since it’s a research method in social science. All roads lead to Rome.

In this article, it mentioned that the word “participatory” might be self-explained, but the word “design” is a bit ambiguous. In other field of design, “what” is much emphasized whereas in participatory design(PD) that “how” is what it’s focusing on. That is to say, the practice of design in PD to be addressed while in Human Computer Interaction(HCI) for example focus on resultant product or service.

This triggers me to reflect on my past work experience in user experience(UX) design and service design. I’ve optimized a trading software through wireframing and usability testing and participated in another service design project to address the issue of the wayfinding system of a hospital in Taiwan. For the former one, UX design simply looks for concrete outcome of UX designer such as a interface that has higher usability and is more enjoyable. It will be great if the design process to be as simple as possible. At the same time, we don’t reflect much on the process and how we interact with each other. That is to say, the outcome is the only thing we care about.

However, in the latter one, it involves different stakeholders to design, which by definition is a participatory design, including patients, doctors, medical professionals, managers, and volunteers to join the workshop. It emphasizes on how these stakeholders interact with each other, hoping the practice of design will be brought into their context and have greater impact besides the certain tangible outcome we’ve made - a way finding system with clear identification system to make the space more accessible. I didn’t realize the difference between these two approaches until I read the material. It’s truly inspiring!