This unit was authored by Marianne Ping Huang with the assistance of Stephanie Ochiel.

In our first two lessons, you have been introduced to human-centred and user-oriented approaches, aiming at solving problems through design processes and making. Apart from introducing you to main concepts and approaches, we have aimed to show design thinking and maker approaches through a variety of examples and cases, be it designing for social justice or for sustainability as human-centred design. 

Highlighting the importance of art and humanities in human-centred design, also means asking how critical thinking and creativity get integrated into the design process. Design processes are by definition creative, and when we meet challenges with the humanities, the knowledge and agency we bring, we must understand how we more often than not understand any challenge through cultural and societal lenses and almost implicitly start by putting the user, the citizen or resident, the audience to the centre. We also usually add a deep dive into historical sources and contexts. This is a major and valuable contribution to all phases in a design process and in defining a challenge as a problem with a solution. Creativity involved in designing solutions is a diverse field. Creativity in challenge driven problem-solving is to provide something unexpected, and just as we have done in the previous lesson, we look to the arts, to architecture and to product design for such creative approaches, because here we have acknowledged paradigms for creative processes, from which a broader design concept – the design thinking approach – has emerged. Yet, in engineering we also acknowledge creativity in problem solving, yet maybe with a less amount of the unexpected. While creativity in areas from crafts and making to coding and software design is well accepted as a way of problem solving, the critical creativity of the humanities is less acknowledged in our research and educational frameworks, and we may see that the higher education study programmes in technology score higher in problem solving than study programmes from the humanities. What the humanities bring, besides deep knowledge of language, rhetoric, communication, history, and culture, are specific ways to integrate creativity and criticality, ways of connecting lateral and analytic thinking across a creative and iterative process. This is also what we may learn from artistic approaches to processes: to address the disharmonious or strange in ways that will open up new insights and new practices. Humanities are based in analytic and critical methods for interpretation: the criticality of the humanities brings the ask for a bigger picture and the need for diving deep, with an inherent knowledge that we deal in probabilities, dialogue and deliberation. These are strong competences to bring to a human-centred design process in which uncertainties are dealt with in open investigations and decision making as well as across many knowledge and creative cultures. Friedrich Borries, a German design teacher, theorist, and novelist put is like this – on the backdrop of 20th Century Philosophy:

"Das, was wir gestalten, entsteht nicht voraussetzungslos. Unser Leben unterliegt Bedingungen. Wir entscheiden nicht frei, sondern bewegen uns in einem Feld von Normen, Weten, Prägungen. Die von uns erzeugten Dinge (und, im Sinne eines erweiterten Designsbegriffs, auch die Räume, Beziehungen und Ordnungen) sind diesen Bedingungen unterworfen. Diese Bedingungen sind in der Welt, in die wir geworfen sind, gegeben – und werden durch das Design, das wir projektierend der Welt entgegenwerfen, verändert." (Borries 2016:16)

Design Process Flow

Going into the lifecycles of a design process, you will notice that humanities bring much to its phases of discovering via different cultural probes–be it open interviews, diary formats, documentation in the wild, as well as to analysing this qualitative data. Not least do the humanities bring knowledge and competences in handling the values and insights from the users' everyday life and in reflecting on diversity and ethical issues. In other words, the humanities bring a wealth of methods and resilience when it comes to exploring and defining a problem as well as working in interdisciplinary teams and settings. This is in itself a key insight, as we will recognise the need to embody our investigations and findings, to handle conceptualisation through material experimentation by embracing the ethos of maker culture for engaging users and stakeholders through experimenting, testing and iterating with  materials other than text and verbal communication. 

In this lesson, we want to move you closer to the lifecycle of the design process, in introducing its overall cognitive and methodological implications, as well as its overall structure and concepts. We are sure that you will find some methods and practices familiar and others strange and disharmonious to approaches you currently use or are being trained for. Perhaps the main take-away from this course is to embrace the creativity of the design process, the capacity to stay with the strange, and grow with the uncertain.

You may already have an impression of how a design process looks: have a look at the image on this page and keep it in mind while we go through a short recapitulation of a few major shifts in design approaches moving towards the participatory and human-centred design model, that we utilise in this course.

References

• Borries, Friedrich von: Weltentwerfen. Eine Politische Designtheorie. Edition Suhrkamp, 2016
• Rosner, Daniela K.: Critical Fabulations. Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design. The MIT Press, 2018
• Situated Design Methods, (eds.) Simonsen, J.; Svabo, C. et al). The MIT Press, 2014