Social
Spaces

On Monday 22nd of February partners of Usewell met at the Media & Design Academy. It was the first chance for many of the partners to meet each other and to share their particular backgrounds, knowledge and interest in the area of research, design and innovation. The kick off meeting began with a presentation of the Usewell project concept. In her presentation, Liesbeth Huybrechts, UseWell research leader at the Media & Design Academy (C-MD), presented her research into existing illustrated models of  user-centred design strategies. This included visualisations created by the Belgian User-centred design consultancy Namahn, Liz Sander’s graphical interpretation of design research across various user-centred domains, Anne Nigten’s collaborative creative tool called The Patchingzone and tools such as Ideo’s method cards, the creativity tool created by the design and innovation consulting firm, IDEO.

Following on from Liesbeth’s presentation, David Geerts leader of the Centre for User Experience Research (CUO) at the faculty of Social Sciences at K.U.Leuven, discussed how the project partnership came to be and highlighted the importance of user-centered design research and projects that his organization had been a part of. These presentations set the tone for a workshop where the participants, organisers and facilitators were presented the challenge to redevelop the phrase “user-centred design” and present a road-map for how the project should develop.

In small groups, participants wrote down when/how user-centered design was a part of their own design process and/or the design process of their domain or their organisation. After discussing and presenting their own experience of user-centered design, the small groups pulled out keywords from each individual presentation and attempted to use these words in order to formulate a group-based definition of user-centred design.

This one exercise led to several topics that were debated. For one, participants had issue with the word user as well as design. Alternative words such as human, people and process and research were suggested. All agreed that design/research/innovation is an iterative process that encourages transparency and interaction.

Dividing each group of four into rolls of designer, manager, end-user and XXX, the teams then took on the task to discuss the processes needed in order to develop a fictional product; what phases would be implemented into the design process, who would be involved in each phase, what methods would be used to gather information, etc. After these discussions, each group presented their findings from these two exercises to the rest of the group.

Design research provides strategies that directly interface and visualise the needs/wants/expectations of those that will benefit with the ‘thing’ designed. Many organisations could benefit from these strategies, but either lack the time to implement them or lack the knowledge of which tools or methods would benefit them most. The Usewell project hopes to become a resource of these tools and methods, enabling and equipping those involved in the research and design process from within these organizations, educational institutions and small business, to bring humans to the centre of the design process.

Leave a Reply