Reading Week 3

Creative Design Approaches

Jane Fulton Suri and her team at IDEO use images to inform design in many ways. To do this they don’t just go around asking people questions about devices or places. They observe what is happening. They discovered that you can find out much more by observing what is happening and try to interpret what is happening. By doing this they can ‘draw on empathy’, ad use this to help them feel what is happening in certain situations.

One example of this is from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where visitors were finding it hard to find their way into the building and to the ticket office. They observed people approaching and entering the building and found two main problems. Visitors could not see into the building because of highly reflective glass, so they could not tell if it was the right building, and inside, there were two counters, which looked identical, but had different uses, so the visitors didn’t know which to use.

To solve the problem, they redesigned the entrance, so that it was well lit, and people could clearly see it from the street, they also made the ticket office highly visible, and gave it a better information display so that people could see it.

This is how they help improve most places or products. They don’t ask people what is wrong with a product, building or attraction. They just observe as a bystander. If they were to ask random visitors of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they could end up talking to a lot of regular visitors, which wouldn’t help them fix any problems. They needed to sit-back and observe what new visitors were having problems with, what they were doing wrong, and how it could be improved.

Suri and her team also try to ask questions about situations from a ‘naïve and curious perspective’. This means that when they try to improve places or products, they always try to look at it, as if they had never seen anything like it before. As if it were the first time going into a building, or using a product. This can make some of the problems a lot clearer.

This also helps them find flaws with products that they regularly use or that a everyone generally uses. Things they expect that everyone knows how to use, things that would be second nature to them. An example of this would be something like a coffee machine, at a company. All the people who work there would know how to use, but if a new employee were to come in, and have to ask how to use it, it shows that there is a problem with it.