Intro to Design (for Engineers) at Sydney Uni

Editor's Notes

• #4: The time when my father (a Mech Eng) designed and built an interactive toy for a one-year old (me) and how I ended up in the hospital…
• #5: There are good books out there that people can use “to design”, but…
• #6: The worst possible idea method is a way to unlock creative thinking by encouraging terrible ideas. It sounds quite fun doesn’t it – and that’s important. Because when you’re having fun, your ideas will flow easier, you’ll be less stressed about coming up with the best idea. In a group setting, it can often be difficult for people to generate ideas, this may be because people are too stuck in a particular way of thinking, or perhaps they don’t want to be judged in front of their peers. Giving people the permission to come up with their worst possible ideas creates a playful and safe environment, it can also energise the room and enables lateral thinking. Some practitioners have also reported that this method far outperforms any other brainstorming method – so it’s definitely worth a try.
• #8: As you run through this activity, you’ll generate lots of bad ideas. Importantly, it will most likely help you to generate some good ideas too! Don’t throw anything away – you never know when a bad idea will help you.
• #9: These are the three areas I'll cover today - with some time for questions at the end. Some of my designs (since 1990)
• #10: As a discipline, design can understood as both established and emerging. That sounds contradictory, how can you be old and new? But whilst the discipline of design builds on a strong traditional foundation – there are many parts of it that are new, that are exploratory, and are pushing boundaries of what it means to design today. Taking a step back in time, design has a long history of practice, and in particular studio practice. Designers were traditionally trained in a master and apprentice model, with a heavy focus on a craft-based practice of making. When I did my undergraduate in design in the late 1990’s, early 2000’s, there were three offerings available: industrial design, textile design and product design – each underpinned by design as a craft based practice. Our days were spent in workshops, studios and manufacturing labs, we were fabricating, building and iterating our design ideas. What scholar Tim Ingold describes as Thinking through making. However, over the last 20 years, how we understand design has shifted significantly. And at the same time, the landscape of design education has exploded.
• #11: Design: everyday, interfaces, mental models…
• #12: Established and emerging design fields…
• #13: Cross-disciplinary design efforts. Not easy but worth it…
• #14: From focus on things to focus on tools to focus on processes to focus on values From tangible to physically intangible to mentally intangible
• #15: Another way of thinking about design is with this model, adapted from Owen shows 5 levels of design – each with a desire to create and improve.
• #16: These are just two of the frames or models we can use for considering design – but we can also look at how the word design is understood. For me, the most exciting and emergent space for design at the moment is in this last description here, the space of activity and agency. This is where design is applied for creative problem-solving, using visual methods.
• #17: This is an effective use of metaphor - we don’t need instructions on how to use the syringe as it’s in our existing mental models – it’s the same as the pen. 
• #18: Mylan's EpiPen is an example of a broken metaphorThe cap is located at one end and the needle is located at the opposite end. People using the epipen make the assumption that the needle is under the cap, inadvertently pushing their fingers directly into the needle, resulting in accidental auto-injection. Now you might be looking at the device and thinking, the end is tapered, I would not make that mistake. However, looking at the device critically in a presentation and using the device in a frantic, live or death scenario are two very different situations.
• #19: Expanding our view, not all design decisions are made by designers, and we’d need to understand the system to evaluate and to design better products
• #20: From focus on things to focus on tools to focus on processes to focus on values From tangible to physically intangible to mentally intangible
• #21: Why rocket science is “tame”… We don’t mean “easy”! It just means that it is possible to gather all relevant information to anticipate things well in advance. It’s extremely hard to get it right, but “in principle” they are “solvable”
• #22: “Wicked problems” are different, they are undefinable, unpredictable, they change as you attempt to solve them. Unlike “rocket science” where most important aspects are fully describable or determinate.
• #23: But the problem is seldom tame or wicked. It’s the problem framing…
• #24: As soon as you start questioning and expanding, you start dealing with the “wickedness” of problems in the socio-technical sphere
• #25: Designing cars, designing roads, designing pedestrian crossings, etc… require wicked problem framing… and it’s not easy because changing one small thing in one product or service tends to have effects in other parts of the system, often over time, often indirect, often unexpected, and often undesired
• #26: Often wicked problems are social or cultural in nature. The survey was conducted on behalf of all universities in Australia to help them understand the scale and nature of student experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault and to ask how universities can better support all students.  University problem We need better resources, better support services. Then you start to think, actually, maybe it’s more than resourcing Education problem – should we be discussing consent and appropriate sexual behaviour earlier – maybe in high school or primary school. Are our teachers equipped to teach young people the knowledge and skills required? And then what is the role of parents? Is it a Parental Problem? their responsibility to ensure their children learn to act appropriately and responsibly?Is it popular culture, is it social media? Is it a technology problem? And what is the Government doing? Where are the policies and strategies to help improve these statistics? Is it a Policy Problem? For a challenge like this – there is no easy solution. There are many perspectives, some competing and opposing and some louder than others. That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be tackled – we just need to start somewhere.
• #27: From focus on things to focus on tools to focus on processes to focus on values From tangible to physically intangible to mentally intangible
• #28: The mindsets that were developed in design over the XX century turns out can be very useful to approach wicked/complex problems in the XXI century
• #29: Like Oscar Wilde said, “disobedience” leads to “progress”, but there’s an art and science to this, what “design” deals with…
• #30: The Mars helicopter in Ingenuity was “disobedient”…
• #31: A few, but these aren’t all
• #32: A key disposition: multiple professional identities
• #33: A design process is a way in which design is used or applied – many of the models we see emerge are contextual, they’re created for specific contexts or settings in education, in research, and in industry. Let’s have a look at three of the most common approaches now – some of these might be familiar to you.
• #34: Perhaps the most well known is the double diamond –UK Design Council in 2005. One of the most common mistakes people make in this process, and indeed in most design processes is to jump into problem-solving straightaway. One of the most important design activities is to understand what that problem is in the first place. This requires us to really dig deep to consider problem spaces from as many perspectives as possible. In design we might also call this problem framing. So go back to the wicked problem I mentioned earlier – we can easily see that how that problem is understood differently by the different stakeholders involved. So young people who have experienced inappropriate behaviour would have one perspective, or one frame. Support services or emergency services will have an other frame. Policy makers who are deciding where Government spending will be allocated will have another alternative frame. In design, it’s not until we make explicit all these frames and take them into account that we can fully define the problem. Most of the time, this happens at the centre of the two diamonds — when we have a rigorous and deep enough understanding of a problem that feels ready to be solved.
• #35: The first diamond can lead to identifying opportunities to transform bicycle helmets, perhaps for specific people, specific use scenarios, etc.
• #36: Hovding is a response (from students now entrepreneurs) to rethink what a bike helmet can be
• #37: This model describes the early creative phases of a design process These early stages are typically ill-defined. It’s a period of extreme exploration that aims to articulate the central challenges and opportunities, and to outline what can be designed. We have to disregard our assumptions and the mental models that we use to understand the world around us. We have to open our minds to new ideas, to push beyond our first ideas to think in new and alternative ways. 
• #38: New ways of thinking…. so is this what we understand as design thinking?
• #39: Design thinking is often referred to as an iterative process in which people seek to understand and redesign problems in a creative way – to think outside the box. This I can identify with – and I see why this makes design thinking an attractive offer for other disciplines. However, personally I have a problem with the term design thinking. I feel that it’s been appropriated and as a result devalued over the last 10 years, maybe longer. To me, design thinking is much more than a toolkit of methods – it should be a consideration of the underpinning value system, the rigour, and the theoretical and philosophical position of the discipline. More relevant I think, and particularly for you in engineering is a specific form of design thinking.
• #40: The SHB pylons: how it looks or how it works? Can we separate these?
• #41: I believe that UX design should be one of the core skills of anyone engaging in design practice. UX includes all the users' emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviours and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. This image is a great example – how we intend our designs to work is often not how they are used in reality. Understanding the perspectives of users, including potential users can offer us rich insights and can help to inform our design process. I really believe this is a critical part of design today – the designer is no longer understood as the lone wolf, the sole expert with all the answers. Instead, it’s a designer role to assemble, or bring together the expertise of those who know the problem space best, and draw on those insights to design.
• #42: I attended an engineering conference in Xian, in China a few years ago and saw some really engaging presentations – people working at the forefront of their fields. But each time, I was asking the same question tell me about your user studies did you engage people in the design process? Did the doctors tell you about the haptic capability they desired Did you speak to your elderly community to ask if they wanted their care to be provided by robots? Did you speak to the carers whose jobs might be displaced? Or to family members who would have to entrust their relatives to machines? The answer was always no – the researchers had some great ideas and they developed them. With little or no engagement with users, or potential users. Now, the technology was great – so for the engineers, it was a success. But imagine how much richer it could have been if they had incorporated some user research. If they had really understood the problem space, and reframed it from all these perspectives. Generated a new body of knowledge and then designed from that new position. This is where design thinking moves into design practice.
• #43: After the Smartphone…
• #44: Several alternatives, have they considered the true needs and wants of people? Should they? How?
• #45: Engineering is often about what else can be done, often at the expense of pausing to consider what should be done, and how, for whom?
• #46: And there is a reason that it’s called practice. Design is iterative, it’s about experiments, testing, and iteration. The repetition that comes with practicing is what builds the idea of practice. And I think there are elements here that resonate with engineering.
• #47: You may agree or disagree with those listed – I know that for design, the list shifts significantly depending on what kind of design we’re in. I imagine that it’s the same for engineering. However, what is important here are the shared thinking and practices – you have the power to choose to be creative in what you do.
• #51: To conclude, as we’ve discussed, design is no longer limited to the traditional industrial making of artefacts, but instead is considered in a much broader way. We’re thinking more around the generation of knowledge, or new futures, or considering complex global challenges, and how design might support people and disciplines to respond to such challenges. That takes us to the end of the lecture – do you have any questions?
• #53: Some of the content might be familiar to you, some of it might be new. Take away some ideas or design approaches that could be applied in your own engineering practice.