User & Society
Designers have to design responsibly and ethically. They are able to empathize with others and have a sensibility for social, political and cultural contexts of design.
Activities
In my first year, I did the courses ‘User-Centred Design’ and ‘USE Basics’. After that, I chose the USE trajectory of ‘Human in Technology’. This USE trajectory was about human-computer interaction and AI. During my internship at Schiphol Innovation Hub and the LILO project, I developed more on this area of expertise.
Examples
During the course ‘User Centered Design’, I learned the basics of designing from a user-centred perspective. Throughout my studies, there have been moments where I was asked to design from another person’s perspective. From my experiences, I’ve learned that empathizing with somebody based on assumptions is absurd.
As a designer, we can not imagine how others think and feel, without meeting these people. Designers who are asked to design for contexts they are unfamiliar with should always connect to the users and other stakeholders first. I believe that only by exchanging information with others - talking with people, experiencing what they’re experiencing, learning about the context of the problem - we can design well-functioning and long-lasting solutions.
Project one had a strong focus on interaction design. We developed a kinetic garment that changed according to the users’ experience of heat. The garment had ventilation flaps that could open and close on command. If the user was cold, they would stroke the upper part of the opposite arm and the ventilation flaps would close. The interaction
imitated the movement of shivering with crossed arms. If the user was warm, they could make the movement of rolling up their sleeves to open the flaps. To come to this design we used embodied prototyping methods where we acted out cold and warm body movements. This is an example of a project where we combined knowledge from user experience and interaction design techniques in a concept.
For my internship project at the Schiphol Innovation Hub, we researched how we could verify that all passengers at the airport are COVID-negative. The proposed solution was a digital health passport. The health passport would be an app that showed your vaccination and corona-test history. I struggled with some ethical concerns in regard to the proposed solutions. Can we limit people’s freedom based on their health status? After discussing this topic with multiple experts, I found out that Schiphol can not make that ethical decision. This question was the responsibility of the government. This research has made me realize the importance of a strong ethical value as a designer and that complex ethical cases like this should not be evaluated by an individual but by a collective.
Conclusion
Ethics and morality are extremely complex topics. What I’ve learned over the years is that it is something we should continue debation on these topics. Only by debating with others, we can form opinions about it. Stop assuming, and start engaging.