Insights from “Thoughtless Acts” [Business Week]
Veteran designer Jane Fulton Suri who is the author of the new book Thoughtless Acts, discerns unmet consumer needs via keen observations of ordinary people doing ordinary things.Some industrial designers sketch, some study new material technology, some collect inspiration from garbage. Fulton Suri watches and looks, and then presses her observations into the design of products and environments.
As the leader of the “human factors” group at IDEO, the international design consultancy, she and her colleagues will watch kids brushing their teeth, parents pushing strollers, or patients checking in at the emergency room, trying to find opportunities for design to improve the experience. Yet often that means looking for something less obvious: the ways in which the experience can improve the design.
UK government study on ‘people centered design’
I recently came across a paper published by the UK Department of Trade and Industry, that focused on how US companies were innovating through UX techniques, or what they refer to as PCD (people centered design). I think this is an important document f…