Design in harmony with human life

Abstract

Achieving harmony between human life and technological design requires a strong understanding of the diversity and variety in both people and technology, as well as processes for bringing the two together. At IDEO we strive to embrace diversity, often including extreme users in our user-centered research as well as more representative individuals. Instead of just capturing what people do or say that they do, we interact with them in their usual environments and try to understand why they do what they do. Experiential prototyping has become important to us during the design phase, where we design experiences which capture the important qualities of the current or the intended user experience. Exposure to these experience prototypes has proved very effective in helping designers to achieve greater empathy with the users of their products, as well as enabling rapid evaluations of how design changes impact the user experience.