What is Good Design?

Good design involves creating something while putting the needs of others at the forefront of your thinking. It is heavily dependent on the user's emotions while using your product. For example, you want your design to be easily accessible to people who may have disabilities. That's why good product designers look at the two extremes of customers knowing that by designing for these two groups, the middle group should be satisfied. For example, if you were to design a building with multiple floors, it is important to realize that for some, using the stairs can be difficult. Therefore, you would probably incorporate an elevator. During our redesign, I focused on making my object – a wallet more accessible to those with arthritis. While I didn't have an exact solution to this problem, I validated my redesign of what the redesign should address.

As you can see from figure 1, out of the people who use a wallet, the majority of people believe that taking their cards out of the sleeves is the hardest part of using a wallet.

Figure 1

This study was conducted with people who don't have arthritis but considering that it is difficult for even them to take their cards out of the sleeves it is probably okay to assume it is even more challenging for those with arthritis. Wallet manufacturers with good design should probably take this into account when designing their wallets, going back to my point that is important to design for the two extremes.

Good design is very much about finding the right balance. While it is important to design for accessibility there is a certain threshold where this may not be possible anymore due to factors such as cost and efficiency. This is why it is necessary for good designers to find that place where they address a lot of the consumers' needs while keeping costs low and producing at a consistent rate.

In class, we were asked to split up into groups based on our major. For my group, we looked into what makes good design in computer science and created a poster (figure 2).

Figure 2

Good Design in Computer Science

Simple

Some of the values I would highlight is that in computer science good design must be simple. Having a too complex of a design can be difficult to debug and other may have difficulty understanding your code. A difficult design reduces your ability to collaborate. If you have confusing or complex code it may be difficult for your peers to understand. At some point, you may potentially also have difficulty understanding your code!

Non-Biased

Another extremely important aspect of good design especially in computer science is that your project must be non-biased and fair. Especially, nowadays the issue of unfair and unjust technology is a huge issue. It is important to have discussions about whether your design is non-biased. I believe that the first way to make sure that your design is non-biased is by making sure that the teams creating them are diverse and have various viewpoints. A lot of the time, in technology companies especially, the teams who create technology and machine learning algorithms do not have much diversity and they lack different viewpoints. However, having people from different backgrounds on these teams will help these technologies be more unbiased. Another way to make the technology more equitable is through testing, testing, and more testing. Testing your design to see its effects is the best way to understand if it is fair or not.

The last aspect of good design that I learned in this class is communicating ideas non-verbally through platforms such as Solidworks. When we were tasked with creating our objects in 3D, I was a bit nervous that it would be very difficult. I remember the first tutorial being the most difficult and taking me a lot of time because I was trying to figure out where each of the tools was located. Throughout the tutorials, I would often mess up and this would require me to go back a few steps which was annoying. I thought the drawing part was especially cool because I liked how we could create the drawings digitally. My hand-drawn sketches tend to not be particularly good, and they can be hard to understand, but with Solidworks, I was able to create a nice drawing that was easy to understand.

Good design involves good detail, and CAD sketching and modeling help us explain our details more clearly. If I were to draw out my object it would be harder to understand compared to if I created it on Solidworks. My wallet in Solidworks (Figure 3) has much more detail than it probably would have had if I had drawn it by hand. This is because every tiny detail has a dimension that is necessary to create the object. The tools that are included in Solidworks are there to help you best communicate your ideas through a platform that everyone can understand.

Figure 3

In conclusion, this class has taught me some very important values about good design such as the importance of accessibility, equity, and simpleness. Not only that but I have learned new skills such as Solidworks which strengthens my abilities to design well.

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