Lecture Note 2

Design at Large: Real-World, Large Scale, and Sometimes Disruptive

Written in 2016/10/8, Pittsburgh

The speaker, Scott Klemmer from UC San Diego, gave us some valuable recommendations on human-centered design in the age of web.

He began with the statement that a shift has happened in the design world: cloud sourcing made many software we use today hosted in or talk back to the cloud. It gives us an opportunity to find out what people are doing with our software. Then Scott discussed what are the valuable elements for a successful design by presenting some of his students’ work. While engineering excels at practical theory, the human world is different. Introspection is valuable but often misleading and some of the principles are not as useful as we thought. For example, by observing how brainstorming is used in a design consultancy, people found out that brainstorming is not actually helping people come up with more ideas more quickly but is valuable in other aspects such as engaging the clients. And Scott pointed out the value of iteration and experimentation when he talked about Instagram, one of his students’ projects.

Scott believes that our beliefs as designers are often wrong or irrelevant. He gave us a lot of examples about this insight such as the A/B test on the web for the 2008 political campaign and the experiment he had with Coursera. Even opinions from an expert can be often wrong. So how should we design? “Try it out with people early and often”, said Scott. And he also pointed out the importance of prototypes. He said: “Prototypes are questions in the format of an artifact”, which is very inspiring because it made me to look at prototypes with a new eye.

Some related projects were introduced at the end of the lecture including Talkabout, a platform for video discussions with global peers in class, experiments Scott and his students held to improve the quality of peer review and some tools for web design.

The talk made me think deeply about the core elements of a successful design and design itself. Design melds physical, digital, and social worlds together and it is a process of creating the future. The insight I got from Scott is to build practical theory with real-world experiments and bake that theory into designs.