so we know we're not just designing interfaces we're designing interactions we're not just designing interactions we're designing interventions that's your job however what do we mean by Design what is design this is one of those things like there'll be 50 000 answers to this uh to this question but I'm gonna give you one but um hopefully it's one that's helpful so I'm gonna say first of all that design is about achieving goals within constraints um so there's some sort of goal or purpose that you're after an inter interaction design that might be about an enjoyment
goal for people about giving you know having somebody in to be able to sort of see a film or to listen to music or to be able to engage in a social relationship it might be a work goal like achieving something efficiently being able to produce videos easily um but there's a goal there and this is true probably of design in general even if you're designing pure art you you have some sort of goal which might be again it might be aesthetic or it might be about helping people understand meaning there is a purpose that
you have there and it's about trying to achieve that purpose however there are constraints to that you do not usually have total freedom otherwise you can magician not a designer um those constraints are critical so some of those design constraints might be about the kinds of medium that you have to work with you know if you're a painter whether you're using oils or watercolors but as an interaction designer and it's about your computers that you're using what kind of device somebody's likely to have um what kind of platform they're on is it is it going
to run an apple or an Android if it's for a phone or something else you know these are these are sort of broad questions and sometimes you might have choices on those so that becomes part of your design remix to make those choices other times they're given to you you know this is going to run in this organization and everybody has this kind of computer full stop um there's also constraints about time and money what's of what's available to you you do not usually design with unlimited money or time you make choices there so because
there are constraints you have to make choices and trade-offs between some of your constraints and but there's constraints usually given so the trade-off you often have to make is between different goals and purposes which of multiple goals are you going to achieve you know if I'm designing some video editing software I want to make it obviously as pleasurable and enjoyable to use by the person who's doing your editing as I can I don't want them to have a horrible job however I also might want to produce the highest quality video as that is possible um
because that's going to improve the experience ultimately of the person like yourself watching this video and it could be that I have to trade these off I have to have something that's going to use take more effort and possibly not very interesting and enjoyable effort by the person doing video editing in order to produce a better quality for you there is a trade-off I cannot usually achieve all of my goals within the constraints trade-offs are essential to design um the second of those constraints one of the core constraints you have is your materials an art
scenting that might be about the kind of paint you're using or whether you're using you know whether you're painting or whether you're doing sculpting and clearly that makes a difference if you're a sculptor and if you're using stone or wood that is going to change the nature of what you produce this is also true of physical design and it's also true of um of interaction to that so in a physical sense you know I often I won't do it now we often lift up chairs and things like this and say ah look you know um
this chair is made of metal you know if you take the the design of a chair that's made of metal it's often have thin legs if you make that in Wood the legs would break but similarly if you take a wooden chair that's a much more solid one I made it metal it's probably too heavy to move the materials that you use change the fundamental nature of a design that's true physical design but it's also true of digital design you have to understand the nature of materials you're using so if you're if you design something
um that is initially designed to say for a desktop computer and just take the same design and squash it into a phone it won't work if you take the design that's designed for your phone and then try and put it without sufficient changes onto a voice interaction it won't work you have to understand your materials so what are your materials so I've already given you some of them uh the kind of platforms are on your computer is part materials you have to understand the nature of those of what's possible now that's some of that's obvious
like the screen size the things I was talking about but also you know what computation is possible say you're the designer you're not a builder yourself say the person is actually constructing this oh this hat this has to work like this is that possible you know or are you making things so difficult that you all cause problems elsewhere you know what are the fundamental capacities of it you you cannot for instance ask that um for a an interactive video that you have instant millisecond timing between two places distance in the Earth because the speed of
light constrains you there are constraints of capacities like that but also storage capacity how much how much video can you store on a computer that's a limited amount depending on the kind of device and the kinds of tools you've got to use the kind of platforms you're on all of these are part of the material that's available to you as a designer now you might be that some of the details of that are done by other people but you have to design something that works within those concerns you'll have to understand the material the digital
material but of course you also have to understand people you know so the other aspect of it is the people the other crew a crucial aspect so you have to understand the nature of people otherwise you can't design for them people are part of your materials and you have to understand this so psychology their social social nature um and of course these extra things which are complicated about the interaction between the people and technology and between people and each other so so you have a rich picture of materials now you might be starting to think
and um as I say materials and then I put people into that picture you might have felt comfortable me saying that your computer's immaterial of course that's them too but people as immaterial surely that's a little bit functional way to think about people well admit is you know people are not a material in the same sense as a the paint you choose when you're when you're painting or whether you choose to use stone or wood when you're carving it's not the same people people have individuality and thing however what I'm going to say is if
you only treat people as well as YouTube materials you probably treat them better than they are often treated in design so you treat people at least as good as materials I'll explain why um how many times have you heard an act there's been a big accident whether it's a plane accident a train accident something like that and people say oh it was human error right it was due to human error the person didn't do the right thing at the right point they didn't notice something that was important and things went wrong yeah you might have
said it might be in a hospital situation industrial situation so just imagine instead the wing falls off the plane because there's metal fatigue where the wing joined the plane now you would say it was due to the metal fatigue but you wouldn't say it what was metal error you would say it's a design error because the designer of the plane the engineers the detail designers would have had to should have understood the nature of metal and the fact that you do get metal fatigue after a while you should either design it so that the um
where there's metal fatigue it doesn't fundamentally mean the playable crash or you design it so that you can detect when that metal fatigue is happening and then take preventative maintenance there are a number of strategies you've got because you understand that metal as a material has known ways of failing we as humans have limits and constraints and ways that we fail in the sense we don't always do things in the perfect way just like a piece of battle doesn't as a designer your job is to understand those limitations of people as actors in the system
and ensure the design system as a whole works even when those happen so whenever you hear about human error it was human error but typically it wasn't the operator or the pilot or the the nurse or the doctor in the hospital it was typically the designer of the system that's there if you treat users as well as a piece of metal you probably are dealing with them a lot better than they usually are dealt with um so having said that let's just roll back in and come back to what's the central message here the central
message is that for you as a designer the user is at the heart of what you do understanding your users and you know you have to understand the technology they work with but understand those users understand the nature of them and I said then you'll start to treat them far better hopefully in a piece of battle thank you
