Some Thoughts

I had several tutorials this term. Each of these gave me some new thinkings of user experience design, and I divided them into several parts.

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Stop At Presenting Problems

We had some conflicts during the project "urban space". One of our group members believed that we should start doing the observation immediately and present our findings, and that was all we have to do. However, another one believed that we should discuss and decide the interesting area first before we did the detailed observation. During the project, we were changing from one approach to another and I was getting a little confused by this. In fact, both ways were okay and there was no right or wrong. The question was what was this project for and which of the approach was the teacher wanted?

We had a tutorial after class. I found that design could be just finding problems and this was just what the course was designed for. I was used to giving a solution in a design task but I missed the part of finding a task. In this two-week project, we were rebuilding our understanding of design and learning to be as open as we could to find more design opportunities.

In our presentation of "urban space" project, we made an model using Arduino, which was also one way of presenting what we found. It abstracted the real substances, the relationship and the data into shapes, but it reminded us clearly what were being influenced during the process.

New Understanding of the Course

During the "time" project, we were confused why we needed to do such abstract things. Then we found it was because the five themes, sense, voice, space, time, death were what may be the future of UX. I agreed with this opinion. Applications have now coming to an stable status. It is not necessary to create new needs or design a different or fancy interaction. Now is enough. But what is future and what should we UX designers do in the future? Now in the near future, we can see that voice interaction has become one of the popular trend. As a new area, no one knows how to design that and what to do. However, the design thinking behind it is similar. We are trying to learn to define the questions and find the design opportunities this term. That is why we could still use what we learned and apply it into the new area.

Conceptual Thinking

I was not sure about what was conceptual thinking before the tutorial. Then I discovered conceptual thinking is that we could think from one simple object, and fly our minds freely from conceptual aspects to concrete ones. We should not constrain ourselves to the topic in this thinking process but we should end up relating to the topic again. Now I am still not good at it but I could practice more in the following projects.

Two Extremes of Design In Two Systems

A question has been perplexed me. To what extent should design be abstract (artistic) or concrete (practical)? The question occurred when I found that I would spontaneously design in a practical way, which has restricted my mind much. In fact there is no answer to that question. Design has two ends, one is artistic and the other one is being practical. We, as designers, should find a balance between these two ends and position ourselves according to our background and strengths. I have seen some works as artistic design outcomes, for example, designs expressing designers' thoughts towards the world using abstract objects. I personally prefer to do some practical works, making my designs more down to the world. However, while we are tending to be in the middle, it is sometimes true that extreme designs approaching each of the end would attract people more easily.

There is another road including the area of design and engineering. One end is being creative and the other end is being technical. Still both ends are okay, but the problem occurred when I found that I would spontaneously design in a practical way, which has restricted my mind much. We, as designers, are thought to be capable of going to the end of creative, though having technical backgrounds are also good for us and sometimes we could even go to that end. But still, in this situation, I should be more careful of restricting myself by thinking about too many technical problems, since I was always apt to do that in some of the projects.