By Vera Kwok

I’m a designer.

I play video games, I design brands and shoes and I am fascinated by technology. I love it when form and function come together.

But it doesn’t take a degree in design to know that design is still mainly associated with artefacts. The contribution of design to our everyday lives is unarguably most visible in the tangible things – what we read, wear, sit on, play with, the list goes on. When we think about interaction design, we often generalise it as existing in the digital domain of interactive products, systems, interface and environment.

Yes, design gives ideas their form and it is truly good at that. What is often overlooked is that at the heart of it all, design is essentially about us and our experiences; how we interact not just with products and places, but also with other people. I recently attended the ICID conference in Hong Kong to find out the latest developments on interaction design.

At the conference, I was immersed in discussions on the multifaceted role of design in our lives; designing beyond posters and toasters indeed. Design plays a fundamental role in creating preferred user experiences and, moving beyond the traditional notion of the designed artefacts, it is morphing into means for societal transformation.

The conference featured dynamic speakers working in a wide range of cutting-edge research. Gino Yu of Hong Kong Polytechnic, who works in the engineering of human enlightenment, is questioning the use of media in unconditioning a conditioned belief system. Jodi Forlizzi of MIT, who works with robots, seeks the use of autonomous technology for empowerment, opening up the dialectic in ethics of autonomy and control and responsibility in design. Ron Wakkary of Simon Fraser in his research of “everyday design” reminds us that we are all designers; through our everyday use and appropriations, we contribute to the ongoing design of our everyday artefacts and surroundings.

Organisational Problems are Opportunities for Design
In our schools, communities, workplaces and governments, Tim Fife from Second Road sees organisational problems as opportunities for design. Human systems are essentially “all the social issues that bind organisations together, and they are as designable as any technical systems”. Strategies can and need to be designed, not around profit and numbers, but around the stakeholders. “Profit should exist as a measurement, but it should not be the actual purpose of the business. The noble purpose of any businesses should be deeper than that: it is to produce and distribute goods and services to people.”

Applying design and its human-centred philosophy in tackling issues and problems of businesses and organisations, Richard Buchanan from Case Western Reserve University further argued that organisations themselves are the most important design of the 20th century. From Plato’s musings in Republic to Adam Smith’s division of labour theory to the application of Ford’s assembly line, organisations have a fixation on efficiency. As a result, people, the most important part of the system, are often forgotten. What design is really good at is ecologically framing these organisational and societal problems through understanding the relationships between all parts of the system.

John Thackara, speaking through Skype from Vienna, further opened up the discussion of the troubled state of our world. We all are very well aware of the bad news: the global crisis in oil production, food distribution, water, money, civilisation–what we need to ask ourselves is how could social design help in alleviating some, or hopefully all, of these problems. Dubbing himself as the optimistic doomer, Thackara reminds us what social interaction design truly should be: “…it is the act of designing interactions to help people to meet their needs better, more effectively, and with more joy.”

Design is About Serving Human Beings
My domain is not in interaction design but rather in design management. Nevertheless, it was great to see the same ideologies and philosophies being applied in interaction design. Different terminology perhaps, but at the end of the day, as Richard Buchanan said, what matters is “design is about serving human beings, it is about advancing the dignity of people”. Towards the closing, he reminded us that “interaction designers are cultural explorers and explorers of value”. I call on other designers to ponder this challenge, not just those who professionally work in interaction design but every one of us because, as Wakkary argues, we are all designers.

What I learned from the conference is that design has a moral purpose – to serve people. It helps us to both find delights in our everyday lives and to remind us of the responsibilities that we have towards others and our community.

Now, more than ever, we seek to create meanings to make sense of an increasingly complex world. We need to ask ourselves how, through design, can we help people in finding delights in their everyday lives; to relish in their responsibilities toward others in their respective communities and in society at large. It’s possible that the real question is how, through design, do we remind ourselves and others that it is a truly great time to be alive.

Enjoy the gallery of low-res photos artfully taken with my iPhone!