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| Home > Bits and Atoms > Designing with Intent ... industrial design, human factors and morality |
| Designing with Intent ... industrial design, human factors and morality | | Date Created: Mar 15, 1985, 03:22 PM |
by Gregory Daigle
Senior Designer and Research Manager, Wm Stumpf + Associates
Appeared originally in Interface '85, a joint publication of the Human Factors Society and the Industrial Designers Society of America.
Many industrial designers have only an abbreviated appreciation for the field of human factors. The fault lies partially in the limited overview of human factors taught in design schools. As they graduate into the professional ranks of design, knowledge of human factors may be limited to experiences with standard anthropometric and ergonomic look-up tables. Both students and beginning design professionals would benefit from a more expanded view of the breadth of human factors concerns. To this end a model familiar to many designers and often referred to in design methodology classes is described below. It will help explain to designers the power of an expanded model of human factors.
The model is the five-tiered "hierarchy of needs" proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow (1968). It is an set of conditions necessary for optimum human development. His model classifies human needs into a series of increasingly higher levels of motivations, each emerging as soon as the immediately previous levels of needs has been satisfied. The hierarchy is:
1) physiological needs
2) safety needs
3) social needs
4) ego needs
5) self-actualization needs
Each of these five needs will be linked to an area of human factors which can be affected by design.
The Needs as Human Factors
The first two areas, physiological factors and safety factors are the human factors most familiar to designers. Physiological factors include the most basic needs of thirst, hunger, sex and sleep; but also those of cleanliness, quite, privacy, etc. For example, any designer engaged in tableware design should not consider making a reusable piece which is impossible to clean. The same should also be true for any other product likely to collect dirt, dust or grease. A dishwasher which puts out as many decibels as a jet engine can not be considered desirable for the home kitchen. Similarly, a noisy matrix dot printer in the office is a headache for everyone. Privacy is another basic need. Privacy to make phone calls at an airport, privacy in your office workspace, privacy of your bank records, all satisfy a basic physiological need for reducing stress.
Safety factors protect one from physical harm. You need only to drive all day in a vehicle with poor ergonomic design to know that anthropometric and ergonomic considerations keep you safe from harm and save you trips to the chiropractor. Safety factors also protect from harm by providing for medical and counseling care, due process, confidentiality and job security. Medical care comes not only from the design of medical tools but also the design of caring environments, such as those providing non-glare work surfaces and healthful chairs. Designing for due process can take the form of clear, understandable signage in an otherwise faceless governmental office. Financial records confidentiality can be better achieved through software recognizing the need for confidentiality as well as the legitimate needs of the government and employers. Finally, a greater sense of job security can be had if an employee is able to select and even modify the tools needed to do work to the best of his/her ability. Tools can range from simple hand wrenches to amino acid synthesizers.
Social factors are less familiar to designers. Social factors are those for relating to others. Recreation, love, identification, social and personal interaction, acceptance, companionship and role models are examples. Recreation isn't just designing a better football. It's building playfulness into common objects so that using them includes elements of play. Objects can elicit social interactions, such as tools specially designed to be shared by a variety of users and which encourage respect for the other users. A swiveling front passenger seat in a family van encourages personal interaction during long drives between a parent and the children in the back seat. A sensitively designed child's orthopedic appliance may mean acceptance and inclusion into a new neighborhood of friends.
Ego factors are composed of needs for status, self-esteem, education, mutual respect, assertiveness, understanding, and self-assessment. They can include giving variety to a product line to bestow degrees of status or indicate levels of success and achievement. Self-esteem can be heightened by designing a flexible teaching machine to improve educational achievement for slow learners. As phone message recording machines allow users to sit by and screen callers, they encourage avoidance. It would be just as easy to design a machine to encourage assertiveness, even help you practice assertive responses for the telephone. Understanding how objects work could be encouraged more by infusing a little humility and humbleness. To make the object easy to understand; investigation should be encouraged. No black boxes, no mechanisms which can't be repaired.
The last area, self-actualization factors, is the least familiar because most people spend little time operating at this elevated level. Included are: cultural opportunities, freedom of expression, intellectual stimulation, continued self-development and use of creative abilities. Designs encouraging and promoting these factors would embody similar features, including:
- flexibility of use in unanticipated situations
- products best described by their usefulness, not stylishness
- form related to performance and visual syntax, not stereotypical or hackneyed
- symbology of the form is not literal, crass or bigoted
- emphasizes the positive aspects of life, not just avoidance of the negative.
By now it should be apparent that a single product can satisfy more than one area of factors at a time. A product can be easy to clean, safe to use and easy to share. A product should be designed to operate in as many areas and consider as many factors as possible. Designers will have to rely on knowledgeable human factors specialists to provide them with the most reliable and accurate factors-related databases. This means relying on the expertise of anthropometrists and ergonomists as well as biostatisticians, psychologists, anthropologists, social workers and others who study the human factor.
The prior model is just a brief checklist of human factors. The real challenge is to apply a methodology. However, separate from model and method there is a third issue: moral intent. Intent, like "spirit of the law", describes how well a methodology is applied. Poor intent can subvert both method and model. The following discussion will explore the effect of three levels of moral intent on the quality of methodology. The example of one human factor, "safety" will be followed for each level of demonstrate the influence of intent. Also, the "designer" described at each level is hypothetical being, since no person is likely to operate exclusively at one level.
The three levels of design intent are:
1) Pre-conventional Design Intent
2) Conventional Design Intent
3) Principled Design Intent
Intent and the Quality of Methodology
Their descriptions are derived from John Stewart's (1975) work in moral educational development. These levels can be thought of as a sliding scale graduated in degrees of directedness. At the first and lowest level, Pre-conventional Design Intent, the direction of intent is turned inward upon the designer (egocentric) rather than toward the ultimate users (exocentric). It precludes normal design conventions, hence is pre-conventional. Satisfying the designer's point of view becomes the focus of the intent. End users and others who will be affected by the product are of no consideration to the designer at this level. No research is undertaken or even considered. No efforts are made to improve the product and any changes are for novelty's sake only. The only consideration of the designer is to seek gratification (reward) and avoid blame (punishment).
For example, a designer operating at this level of intent would put the absolute minimum of effort into the human factor area of "safety". A typical response would be to knock-off another design already on the market, that is, copy it as closely as possible to incorporate its safety features but not improve on those features. If there are safety problems the response would be to cover them up or hide them as long as the blame doesn't fall back on the designer.
One overpowering motivator at this level is the avoidance of lawsuits. Of course more conscientious designers also seek to avoid lawsuits. Here, avoidance is the only motivating factor. At this level if a designer avoids litigation and other "punishment", and if the design conforms to his desires, then it is judged as "good" design.
Moving up the scale away from such absolute egocentric judgments towards a more outwardly directed orientation, the designer begins to see "good" design as one which satisfies his own needs and occasionally those of others, but only if they produce some direct benefit to him Design concessions are given very begrudgingly and only if something else is given in return. Reciprocity is mechanical. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Product safety problems are rectified only far enough to please the client. If there is a potential safety problem but the client accepts the risks, then the designer does not address the problem since it results in no immediate personal gain.
The second level of intent is more familiar, less polarized, more conventional, hence the term Conventional Design Intent. At this level the designer begins to judge the rightness or wrongness of a design through comparisons to implicit norms. These norms may be benchmarks for measuring implicit quality standards like "straightness" and "smoothness", or performance measures like "roundness" and "accuracy". A design is compared not directly with other similar designs, but to a stereotypical image of that category of design, like "comfortable chair" or "fast car".
Design problems are approached by rigidly categorizing them or offhandedly labeling them rather than giving them individual consideration. There is conformity to what is "normally" acceptable to the design profession, though "normal" is subjective. The designer becomes more outwardly oriented than before but stops short at tastes known by inference only. This level requires some knowledge of what other people (even other designers) think is "good" design. But it is based upon stereotypical notions of how products should look, perform, wear, etc.
At this level of intent the consideration of human factors areas is also stereotypic. Anthropometric and ergonomic testing may be performed on the designer, the people in the design studio or others readily available for on-the-spot testing or measurement sessions. At this level designing for human factors safety considerations would be based on implicit norms or what the designer believes to be "adequate" safety features.
A designer operating at the upper ranges of this level would begin to rely upon more explicit standards. We would begin to see the designer bring in substantiating studies or references to accepted design standards. Anthropometric measures of "normal" populations may be referenced, but designers at this level may use "average" measures and percentiles without rigorous consideration of their user population, measurement techniques or statistical methods. Such useful information may be misinterpreted by designers looking for an easy concept to grasp. Review of original data bases or embarking on original research would not occur at this level. There is reliance on "design standards" as the acceptable norm for safety.
The final level of intent is the most outwardly directed and concerned with others who may come in contact with the product. It is much more free of egocentric constraints than the previous two levels and is based in principles of justice. This post conventional level is termed Principled Design Intent. A designer working at this level may begin with explicitly known standards, but modify them to provide better solutions to design problems. It is a collaboration between the known norm and the creative notion a designer has, resulting in a product composed of arbitrated values: the known and the innovated.
Principled Design
A competent designer may design a gas range using a control layout considered safe and generally accepted by the profession as a design standard. The principled designer may see the potential for an even safer layout and risk abandoning the design standard for one with greater performance ... adopting a dynamic performance standard in place of the stagnant design standard. This is not making change for its own sake but is the principled and creative process of innovation.
The upper range of this principled level is a domain where few designers have trod. At this level good design is an absolute without compromise, adhering to principles of justice and reciprocity for all who come into contact with the product during manufacture, during use and after its life cycle. Not only does the designer question the safety of the user but also every person involved in its manufacture, people likely to be standing by as the product is being used, and society in general. If designing a weed trimmer, a principled designer would have to consider how much pollen is thrown into the air and the potential discomfort to allergy sufferers living nearby. They would ask if cutting the weeds the best solution for all? Perhaps a non-toxic, non-polluting organic chemical would be better. What would be its medical side effects or environmental impact for future generations? Ultimately, the measured benefits to direct and indirect users are weighed, now and in the future. The best solution is that which is most principled.
References
Maslow, Abraham H., Toward a Psychology of Being, Princeton, J.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1968, p. 83-92.
Stewart, John S., The School as a Just Community: A Transactional - Developmental Approach to Moral Education -- A Working Paper, (unpublished, prepared for presentation to the Moral Education division of the Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting, Kansas City, Missouri, March 24, 1975.
© 1985 Gregory Daigle |
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