Design Students: You don’t have to change the world (yet)
As undergraduates across the country knuckle down for their final year and start work on that all important major project, there’s a simple message I’d like to send to anyone aiming for a career as a design consultant: You do not need to identify and tackle a problem that has never previously been addressed. Nor is it necessary to invent an “all new” product or service. Your goal is simply to demonstrate a deep understanding of a particular user experience, and show how that understanding has informed some creative design solutions to improve the experience. Those solutions might be new product/service ideas, but they could equally be iterative improvements to an existing product or service – and that’s just as valid.
I’d recommend choosing an existing product category, brand, or even a specific product/service and setting yourself the task of designing a next generation solution within those parameters. Choose something that’s unfamiliar to you, or for which you’re not the target customer, but not something so obscure as to make direct research and observation unduly difficult. You want to demonstrate an ability to empathise with users who’s needs and aspirations are different to your own – a crucial skill for any professional designer.
If you need more convincing:
This structure is far more representative of a typical client/consultant scenario. As a design professional, the bread and butter of your career is unlikely to be “blue sky” ideation for new brands (sorry to break the news) but rather iterative improvement or extension of existing products and services within an established brand.
Potential employers will be more interested in your ability to understand an existing brand and work within it’s parameters, than in your ability to create a pretty logo for an imaginary brand.
Mapping the user experience will be much easier and more productive for existing product/service categories. You can conduct direct observation, role-play and storyboarding exercises based on existing solutions and therefore identify clear opportunities for improvement that will inform your design solution.
Think about talking prospective employers though your project. Starting with a familiar product/service type will allow you to spend more time discussing your design process, and less time explaining the obscure problem you’re trying to address.
Don’t worry that a particular subject has been tackled by countless designers before you – thorough research into the user experience will always reveal some opportunities for innovation and improvement.
Judging by the focus on innovation, invention and entrepreneurialism prevalent in contemporary degree course literature, I suspect the above advice may be contrary to that being given to many students by their course tutors. We all know that design thinking can lead to game-changing products, services and even business models. Bruce Nussbaum is enthusiastically waving the flag for a new generation of “Design Entrepreneurs” (Frankly, I’m not quite ready to abandon the belief that good design can drive change in established businesses, but that’s a blog for another day).
Far be it from me to rein in such creativity and stamp out entrepreneurial spirit. If you’re talented/lucky enough to hit on a radical, commercially viable innovation, then I wish you every success. For everyone else, I hope the above advice will make it easier for you to demonstrate your core skills to potential employers. You can worry about changing the world after you’ve landed that job!
Addendum 19th July 2012
Students and tutors (maybe even some professionals!) might also find the below opinions & suggestions of interest. These comments were originally made in response to this Core77 article.
My response:
I strongly believe that students targeting careers in industrial/product/interaction design (consultancy or in-house) need to demonstrate an understanding of the user experience and technical constraints relating to their project. It's a crucial part of framing the problem which the designer is attempting to solve.
A third aspect to consider is the commercial context of the project (e.g. how it fits within the broader business strategy of a "client" organisation/brand). That's hugely important for professional designers, but I wouldn't necessarily expect a student project to delve too deeply into it.
Crucially, this process of understanding the user experience and technical constraints should directly inspire the creative process. Having thoroughly immersed yourself in the user experience, consider the various attributes you've identified as being important one at a time (e.g. "Clear indication before the thread runs out") and scribble down as many design solutions as you can to that particular attribute. That's the time when you can put the technical constraints to the back of your mind for a while - just focus on solutions to deliver the best user experience given your insight into the problem.
Having done that, you can then consider technical feasibility. Where do your different ideas rank on a scale of "easy to implement" vs. "currently impossible"? Think about the relative cost implications of the different solutions as well. Maybe there's a more cost effective way to solve a particular problem? Are there any great ideas which seem impossible/expensive, but could be made to work with a little more thought? This is how you'll start to filter and refine your ideas and, eventually, bring them together in one or more complete design concepts.
The end result should be a design solution which can be justified in terms of delivering the target user experience whilst meeting technical constraints (and, if you really want to shine, fitting within a business strategy).
Making this clear link between insight and design solution is the single most common piece of advise I give to students. The acid test is that you should be able to point at every feature of your design and say "This is designed in such-and-such a way in order to deliver this experiential attribute, which I determined to be important by immersing myself in the user experience".
[Cue observation/roleplay snippet that supports your point].
Extra brownie points for going on to say something like "I've also considered how the product would work, the manufacturing process and the target price-point, and that's why I implemented the design solution in this particular way".
The number of student projects which don't appear to follow this methodology is disheartening, and leads me to suspect that the problem lies in design education itself. I wonder if the marking schemes for degree projects are to blame? Perhaps there's too much box ticking ("research survey - TICK, concept sketches - TICK") without sufficient emphasis on the importance of joining the dots between parts of the design process.
The projects which impress me most as a recruiter are those which demonstrate a connected journey from experiential & technical insight gathering, via identification of target design attributes, focused problem solving and validation/refinement, leading to a carefully considered design proposal.
This is the best way for a prospective employee to demonstrate the skills that employers (at least in my sector) are looking for: an ability to frame the problem, define a brief, understand constraints, identify user-experience goals, solve problems with creative thinking, validate and refine their ideas according to the targets and constraints they've identified, and argue a strong case for their eventual design decisions.
What's most frustrating is that, as well as delivering better end results, the above methodology should actually make the design process easier and more transparent. Thus we're really doing students a disservice if we're not teaching it correctly. Any professional designer will tell you that staring at a blank sheet of paper and trying to conjure good, relevant solutions out of thin air is next to impossible. Targets and constraints are the necessary fuel for creative problem solving.
by Ben Griffin, Principal Designer, TheAlloy
