“What is design?” There is no certain answer to this question, probably because we all have our own perspective about the meaning of design.From John Maeda’s article, now I know how other people think about design and that helps me a lot in understanding design better. I agree that designing for people is a lot harder than designing for machines. Because we can’t just ask someone’s feelings about a product, we have to actually experience what he might do when he uses that product just to find out what can be improved. I remember when I was in college, one of my friends asked me to make a poster for her dance community, but when I asked her what style she wanted to add for the poster she said: “I don’t know, but when you finished I will know if it’s okay.” So I think this is the reason why designing for people is so hard. But as designers, we really need to learn how to communicate with the user, only in this way we can achieve a win-win situation.
From articles about prototype and mock-up, I learned why prototype is different from sketch, not only it is less disposable, but also it encourages larger investment than sketch. It’s more like a thinking process, which produces an attitude and some language to solve the problems of design. There are so many prototyping techniques including storyboards, scenarios, sketches and videos, each of them makes designers easy to understand and discuss among users. Mock-ups are also very useful design artifacts in these articles, but only work effectively when you clearly know the process of design language game. For me, mock-ups are like the bridge between designers and the user, they make it possible for users to be involved in design process.
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