User Centred Design Part 2: The Principles

1. Its empirical: Forget about big theories, this design method is about user behavior and user experience. 
2. It’s iterative: It’s a sociological process in which the research phase is followed by the phase design phase.
3. It’s participative: The user takes part in the design process, because of that the product needs to adapt to the user, not viceversa. 
4. It takes into account human diversity: Find the best fit / adjustment for the maximum number of people.
5. Taking into account that the user task, recognizing that the task is specific to each user. 
6. It has a systemic approach: the relationship between the user and the product takes place in a social, technical, economic, political and environmental.
7. It is pragmatic: it recognizes that there may be limits to what really is practical in each case and find the best result within those limits. 

This image from Pascal Raabe explain it:

User Centred Design Part 1

It’s easy to explain what is the UCD is simply: design for the user, thinking, dreaming, sleepping, and again thinking about and with the user. All starts by saying that the user is a person, a human, a unique human being with a culture and traditions.


In order to applies this method we need to:

1.Specify the context of use of the system or product that we want to design.
2.Specify the requirements
3.Create design solutions
4.Make a design evaluation



The user centred design has some bennefits like:

Start a true relationship between the people and the products

It’s a persuasive tool that is used to communicate what you want

Allow us to observe the user behavior


O’ Brien (2006) said us that Stephen Pheasant (Royal Free Hospital of London, Ergonomist) was the person that develop the UCD principles.




In the next post we well talk about this UCD principles....

The Gerontodesign Process

As we said at the beginning of this blog, gerontodesign is defined by Joaquim Parra as the agglutination of the gerontology and the design, but we think : What design?

---What are the features of this design that is agglutinated with this socio anthropological science? ---

There are to many design methods, but one of them call our attention, this method is the UCD or User Centred Design, is kind of funny or may be its the destiny that this design method make use of ethnography research and gerontology uses too.


The UCD helps the designers to understand how people uses and don’t uses the products, this results in reducing the impact of use (Lofthouse V. & T. Bhamra, 2007).


Also in this design process we make use of an anthropological technique called monographs, this technique was developed bythe French sociologist Federico Le Play.


The gerontodesign process is composed by design methods and anthropological techniques all this is implemented using the following technologies: videocamera, cellphones, camera, Aging Suit and Computers systems.

Mexican Elders and their needs

For this design research we focus on mexicans elders and their needs in order to create some design strategies, firstable we start to search everything about  tthe main diseases that mexicans people presents, the SABE 2001 tell us that there are a relation between the diseases and the disabilities. 

SABE 2001

Hight Blood Pressure or Hypertension is one of this patologies that evoque the generation of some kind of disabilitie.




The ENSAEM 2001 ( National Survey of Aging in Mexico) show us that

12.2 of 100 persons that live in the country have problems to prepare their meals also this problem is presente in the life of 9 of 100 persons that live in the city.




There are a lot of activities that a human does, because of that the experts have been divided this activities in Intrumental activities and Daily life activities.




Instrumental Activities:

To prepare meals

Shopping

To take their medicine

To handling money




Daily Life Activities

To walk

Take a Shower

To eat

Go to the bed





As an observers we can see that there are to many products focus on walking and bathing activities, sadly this products are to expensive and inaccessible for the most of the mexican population, so do are some architectural proyects.


There are to many products that are focused on helping the elderly to prepare their meals, some of this products are presented right here:

Mixers

Maybe this examples are gerontodesign products, maybe…. but there is a little fact call emotional design that in some of them is missing….maybe