One of the challenges of the industry of medical devices is the implementation of ergonomics and usability during the design of these products, and some constraints slow down the consideration of usability during the whole design process. For this reason, a quantification tool of the usability might aim to democratise the usability feature and facilitate the communication in design teams with limited resources during the whole design process. This proposal finds its origin in the work of a PhD thesis, of which some results are presented hereafter. A model of the tool (usability index) is proposed based on a post-task part and on a post-study part. The results have shown good trends of the usability index in terms of a correlation with System Usability Scale (SUS). Moreover, it appears that a light quantification tool of usability can be implemented in the design process to monitor and communicate about usability.
Referring to data gained by means of an ethnographic study, the paper at hand provides an account of a rather particular 'real life' experiment, which a group of students conducted for their master's degree. In their 'design-build project' the student group created a temporary (interior) design for converting the ground floor of a vacant commercial property into a co-working space slash shared flat. Analysing the students' experimentation, the paper addresses the intricate relationship between innovative live projects and traditional academic examination criteria in architectural design. In doing so, the paper shows that invisible aspects of design need to be more strongly integrated into the assessment of live projects - both for ensuring the traceability of the design process as well as the quality of its outcomes.
There is an increasing number of approaches and methods in design for environmental sustainability ranging from principles and frameworks to configure sustainable products to visions to confront socio-political systems. However, there is limited understanding of: a) how designers engage with sustainability; and b) how researchers have studied this engagement. This paper is a systematic literature review to identify what are the designers' perspectives and actions to create sustainable products and systems and how researchers frame their studies. The findings suggest that designers understand the critical value of sustainability; however, they do not incorporate sustainability into their practice. Designers are constrained by other priorities defined by management and policy. Findings also show that researchers studying this issue have focused on exploring case studies of how designers apply and react to various proposed methods for sustainability.
This paper focuses on the formal structure of some design theories of product experience in order to highlight their fundamental, if largely implicit, assumptions. Even though building on different perspectives and with different focuses of interest, many authors address the theme of experience in the light of a shared conceptual structure. The three-level schema, on which they agree, mirrors the traditional philosophical distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary qualities. I will argue that the reason for this similarity lies in the acceptance of a shared paradigm, that of object-subject dualism. This fundamental world-view creates an unbridgeable separation between the material structure of an artefact and its meanings, hindering the attempt towards a true understanding of experience. The adoption of a pragmatist approach, which is based on different fundamental assumptions, leads to frameworks that truly do justice to the complex, dynamic and situated nature of experience.
The job market in UX design has been growing in Brazil over the last decade, occupied by professionals from different backgrounds, mainly from areas of digital product design, interaction and information architecture. The use of methods, techniques and design tools is part of the daily life of these professionals. From in-depth interviews with seven designers living in the city of São Paulo (Brazil), this work sought to identify the main techniques currently adopted by designers who work focused on the UX and whether such procedures are regularly revised, adapted or replaced. As a result, we present a list containing the ten most used techniques, organised in phases corresponding to the stages proposed in the Double Diamond: Discover (In-depth Interview, Online Survey, Benchmark); Define (User Journey, Canvas); Develop (Internal Co-creation, Prototyping, Design Critique); and Deliver (Wizard of Oz, Usability Test).
