Professional Identity
I enjoy figuring out what goes on behind the scenes and am always up for learning something new. This makes me interested in finding concrete solutions to abstract and complex challenges. It is these challenges that involve deepening my understanding of the topic, figuring out people's needs, understanding the stances of experts and then finding a way to come to a solution.
I see my role as a designer as someone who is stands with one foot in contact with people and is empathic, and with her other foot stands with the engineers, has technical skills and understands technology.
Developing technical skills was not a problem. I enjoy creating things, digital and tangible alike. It makes explaining ideas easier. Therefore, I have developed my skills to create hi-fi and intelligent prototypes. However, I am realistic enough to know that software and electrical engineers have a far deeper understanding of their respective fields. To improve my own knowledge of and skill in creating devices, I always aim to actively involve engineers from different fields.
To best understand people, one needs to listen. Interestingly, people find me easy to talk to, and strangers feel comfortable sharing their troubles with me. I have aimed to use this ability and be an empathic designer who values user-centred design approaches and aims to involve more than just potential users. Codesigning, interviews, or simply listening. Experts, engineers and other designers can provide different views that may otherwise be missed.
By specializing in these skills, I am able to work with a multitude of people. Explain technology to non-engineers, and explain the needs of potential users to engineers. When working with a diverse group of people, clarity, straightforward communication and structure are a must for me. That is why, in a project, I will often be in an organizational or managing role. Either planning, setting goals or checking in with others.
Vision
I believe a designer has a type of inherit responsibility toward potential users and society when creating a new product. This means, thinking about the user's goals and needs , privacy and data usage and the impact a device may have on their daily practices.
Therefore, empathizing and aiming to understand and applying methods to involve people are a key part of any design process (Kouprie, M. &. Visser, F.S., 2009; Smeenk, W., Sturm, J. & Eggen, B., 2019). This means taking a holistic view of the context, but also studying what the situation is currently and determining what you need or want to change. Designers need to care for people , and be aware of the impact technology has on their lives and society at large, both in a positive and a negative sense.
Because technology touches nearly every part of our lives, this awareness is even more important. With data as the new currency (Gates, C. & Matthews, P., 2014), I believe designers need to be wary of the privacy and ethical implications of the data collection in their designs. I see technology as a tool, a means to an end. Therefore, technology, whether it be smart home devices or applications, should always have a clear why, and only collect the minimum of data necessary.
Still, while I view these things as responsibilities of designers, I have seen how much the design process and the way of thinking we learn when going through the design process is useful for so many processes. Identifying goals, investigating options and creative problem-solving are useful skills in any profession. Therefore, I envision we as designers taking a role of connecting other disciplines and teaching others to also aim to bridge between their field and others.
References
Gates, C. & Matthews, P. (2014) Data Is the New Currency. In Proceedings of the 2014 New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 105–116. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1145/2683467.2683477
Kouprie, M. &. Visser, F.S. (2009) A framework for empathy in design: stepping into and out of the user’s life. Journal of Engineering Design, 20(5) 437-448
Smeenk, W., Sturm, J. & Eggen, B. (2019) A comparison of existing frameworks leading to an empathic formation compass for co-design. International Journal of Design, 13(3), 53-68