Week 2 - how important is the design process?

What is design?  Some would suggest it is about creating functional and usable products or services, with purpose.  It can be building on the ideas of others, having discourse around ideas.  Planning and making decisions about something, where satisfying the needs of customers.  It can be defined as not implementation.  It is helpful to define the problem as a critical step in the design process.

Designing is an art form that requires skills, either learnt or raw talent.  It starts off with a challenge.

Design isn't about a single output, but rather redesigning, which can be a constant as a process, rather than an irregularity.

Jay?? Dyson who was an engineer was stuck at home and decided to improve the vacuum cleaner after much frustration trying to use it.  He has come up with what is in my humble opinion, the world's best domestic vacuum cleaner.  Focusing on air flow and filters, he made another concept much smaller to improve the overall design of the vacuum cleaner, to produce the quality range that is Dyson today.  It's amazing what can start off with a simple idea and with great persistence, can produce such outstanding results.

In the lecture, I see myself as a strong designer, a weak programmer, if I can even call it that.  I started off this semester feeling that this is ok, but in reflection, I suspect I am going to have to be more of a programmer.  This means for 1800, I need to involve myself more in the coding side to grow basic skills into intermediate skills.

The quote from Abraham Maslow, famous for Maslow's laws of heirarchy, "if you only have a hammer as a tool, every challenge looks like a nail".   I see this as an inference to have more "tools in the shed", or more skills as a person, so that I can see the challenges or problems in different lights or ways to approach them.

I suppose there is a level of fear of the unknown, not being able to code like others, can't really do JavaScript, can't really do HTML or CSS as well as others.  I need to put fear to the side, be open and "available" to new ideas that I can let the course change me.  There is a story about coffee beans, an egg & a carrot in boiling water.  The carrot becomes soft and squishy after being in hot water.  The egg becomes hard and brittle, yet the coffee beans adapts and changes the water itself.  That's what I need to be, a coffee bean.

I believe it's important to accept that there are no optimal "endpoint" to design, sometimes it arrives where it's a case of "this will do".

Being aware of the process, of creating, testing & revising is what design is about.  It's not the outcome that's important for this course, but rather the journey ahead.