His first point to make about good design was to point out that you have to know what bad design is. This is incredibly logical, however I see design as an extremely subjective area. You can have confusing designs, less communicated designs, but does that make it a bad design..? Moggridge seemed to think that when you had people (desirability), technology (feasibility), and business (viability) you would have a good design. He then went on to talk about how important the design process was, and how it changed depending on each and every person and the current situation.
He described the process as
- Constraints
- synthesis
- framing
- ideation
- envisioning
- uncertainty
- selection
- visualisation
- prototyping
- education
He said to not approach this process in a step by step way, but in a pragmatic way. He expressed views that the most important part in coming up with a good design was to fully understand who and what you are designing for, and the only way to do that was to actually put yourself in the customers shoes. He used the example of the Japanese cell phone network 'iMode' to present this idea. iMode had created a way you could theoretically buy things from vending machines from your cell phone. He showed a video in which a woman attempted this however it took her 35 minutes in the end to buy 1 can of soft drink using the iMode device. This seems silly considering it takes less than a minute to buy a drink from a vending machine using physical money, however the idea is smart and practical if you need a drink and have no cash on you.
What Moggridge said was that iMode had not explored the needs of the customers enough and had not gone all the way through the design process, they had skipped parts.
This then linked into how he expressed how important prototyping is. You can only communicate your ideas well with prototyping, and communication is key into getting your design out there and making improvements on it. Clearly iMode did not prototype enough.
Moggridge goes on to talk about different types of prototyping and how you can get your ideas out there through different types of media i.e films, computer software (photoshop, illustrator). What he said which I liked was that sketching was still a major involvement in communicating your design. Sketching is the rawest the idea comes out of someones head, therefore to me it is most important, it is the stem to the design. The lecture talked about when communicating your prototype you should have a combination of medias including sketches, and only invest in expensive prototyping once you are at your very very last stages of designing.
The last point Moggridge made about What is Design is how design is changing. He put design into a 3 step layer, people, social then environmental. Just as a side note, this layer may have to soon change due to the state of our environment and loss of materials etc. Anyway, on a personal level, products now think our health and well being. On a social level, products now think about where we live and what resources are available to us. On an environmental level, products now think about global sustainability and he used an example of insulating containers using fungus from mushrooms.
Products are becoming more and more important in our lives as the world advances technologically. We have to use whats available to us instead of what we desire. We have to take that one step further into designing a product that is going to help us instead of just looking pretty.
This all contrasts with an earlier point Moggridge made about the mind. He said that most of what we do is subconscious, our likes and dislikes, our emotions, what we say and do and how we cant explain it. Our conscious mind is only a small part of our thinking, however its what we allow everyone else to see.
Design harnesses those attributes in the process. Good design is emotion. Good design is more. Good design is less. Good design is people. Good design is everywhere! In my opinion, good design is what you think is good design.
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