My design philosophyStephanie Louraine

“Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”

-Charles Eames

To me, design is about finding and drawing connections in order to produce an improvement in the world

(aka a design)

Connections between

UsersStakeholdersClientsDesignersArtifactsPlaces

etc.

My design process consists of four components:

Experience

Empathy

Direction

Deliverable

Experience in a designerly sense can be drawn from:

KnowledgeDataInstinctsConversationsLiving life

etc.

Experience can include my experience

and the experience of others

A few ways to gain experience during the design process:

InterviewsObservationsReadingChatting with users/stakeholdersExemplar review

etc.

Empathy arises from the connection of my experience

to the experience of others

Empathy is a necessary part of design

I design on behalf of others and not for myself

“Design is, by definition, a service relationship...

Design ideally is about service on behalf of the other.”

-Nelson and Stolterman, The Design Way p. 41

Empathy

is the internalization of an understanding of humans within a problem space

Research and design insights often stem from an empathic connection

Direction is a designer’s aim and intention

-Nelson and Stolterman, The Design Way p. 113

A direction is not the finalized design

A direction is a potential path a designer or design team can take

There can (and should) be many directions proposed and explored during the design process

Exploring different directions is important because while it may be impossible to find the perfect direction,

some are better and some are worse

A deliverable is the artifact handed over to the client

It can be the result of the exploration of many directions

or it can be the detailed exploration of one single direction

The deliverable is not necessarily the end of the design process

(though it can be)

The deliverable is an artifact created to address a stopping point

It is affected by constraints of

timebudget

etc.

Deliverables in design can include

Slide decksWireframesTask flow diagramsVideosPrototypesExperience mapsPresentations

etc.

However...

While I naturally have to present these four components in some order, this order is not necessarily the order they always appear in during the design process

A few examples follow:

ExperienceThe very act of living increases a designer’s experience, so this component improves all the time

EmpathyThe designer can gain further empathy into a situation after handing off the deliverable and receiving feedback

DirectionThe exploration in this phase can increase empathy with a space

DeliverableFeedback from clients or stakeholders can be incorporated into the designer’s experience and improve empathy

This can be taken forward into a next iteration of the design

Thank you