Interplay between user centered design and design management in creating an interactive platform to support low carbon economy

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The interplay between user-centred design and design management in creating a EU-funded interactive platform to support low carbon economy

Luca SimeonePhD StudentMalmö University

DMI ConferenceSeptember 2014, London




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Introduction and aims




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What is TESS?• My research has been conducted within the framework of TESS.• TESS is a EU-funded research project recently started (December

2013).• TESS stands for Towards European Societal Sustainability and –

among other objectives - is oriented towards:– Mapping the community-based initiatives for low-carbon economy (e.g.

projects working in the areas: renewable energy, car sharing, community farming, recycling, building cycling tracks, compensation of CO2 emissions…)

– Creating an ’online assessment tool’ to evaluate the potential of these initiatives to scale up

– Creating an interactive platform to connect all the relevant stakeholders (NGOs, public organizations, policy makers, activists, private companies…)




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Design workshops for TESS• I am in charge of designing the interactive platform.• I organized a series of collaborative workshops with multiple

stakeholders where theoretical approaches and techniques from both user-centred design and design management have been applied to design an early-stage prototype of the interactive platform.

• With these design workshops, we did not need to get to a final graphic layout for the platform, but we had to:

– Define content and functionalities of the platform– Design some sketches of the home page and key internal pages




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Research question

• I analyze a TESS workshop (Design Management Lab) and reflect upon its outcomes.

• How can design management complement user-centred approaches in the early stages of the design process?




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Design management lab




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Design Management Lab: overview

• Specific design workshop held at the Politecnico di Milano in January 2014.

• I organized and facilitated the workshop.• About 20 people, mostly students from the Master’s

Programme in Service Design at the Politecnico and professionals from external design companies, teamed up in 4 different groups and worked for two days in order to get to a first proposal for the user experience design of the TESS interactive platform.




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Design Management Lab: agenda• First day

– Initial briefing about TESS and user-centred design methods (1 hour)– First design cycle aimed at producing a first version of the user

experience design for the TESS interactive platform (7 hours)

• Second day

– Presentation of design management (30 minutes)– Collective exercise on budget (30 minutes)– Collective exercise on organizational stakeholder mapping (1 hour)– Second design cycle aimed at re-working and finalizing the user

experience design for the TESS interactive platform (5 hours)– Final presentation: each group had 15 minutes to show their work to

the jury




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Outcomes of the first design cycle, when participants mostly use UCD techniques.Most of the participants are already familiar with UCD but not familiar with design management.

First day




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First design cycle: outcomes

• All the groups produced similar outcomes

– Personas– Site trees– Wireframes




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First design cycle: sample outcome 1




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First design cycle: sample outcome 2




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Participants get exposed to a design management approach

Beginning of second day




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Second design cycle: initial exercise 1• During the first day I gave a rough idea of the total budget (600.000 €)• During the second day, collective exercise on analytical budget

Overhead, taxation: hidden costs!




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Second design cycle: initial exercise 2• Collective exercise on organizational stakeholder mapping (1 hour)

According to one group: “We reframed the problem: How can the TESS interactive platform support policy makers in their daily – probably conflictual – activity within their organizations?”

VS.

Power plays

Economic lobbies

Political conflicts




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Outcomes of the second design cycle, based on interplay between UCD and design management approaches

Second day




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Second design cycle: sample outcome 1

All the groups reworked on the information architecture, they realized that the economic resources did not allow developing and maintaining all the functionalities they proposed during the first day.




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A group realized that a single website was not enough and they suggested creating two websites targeted to different categories of users.




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A group decided to abandon the personas and they worked instead on a quite complex visual representation that did not show individual users, but organizations (initiatives, general public, etc..) and some of the interactions among them.




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Another group re-worked on the format they had previously used to represent personas, labeling it as a ‘quick customer journey’ and adding some more details that could – at least partially – illustrate the more complex scenario emerged from the stakeholders’ analysis.




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Discussion




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Discussion 1/2• I am not arguing that either user-centred design, design

management or even interaction design should stay on top of the others, but I am rather suggesting that they offer different perspectives on the design process. I am claiming that adopting different vantage points, designers can have a clearer picture of the design situation.

• Representing the final user as a persona (UCD) is an important design technique to keep in mind the final audience, but the audience is not composed of users that act as isolated individuals. Users live and act within organizations and organizations live and act within a wider context where they have to interact with other organizations




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Discussion 2/2• Design management allows reflecting upon the organizational,

structural, systemic level of the design process. In terms of scale, it is like design management operates at a different level of zoom compared to user-centred design and allows a broader view.

• At the same time, user-centred design offers a closer perspective and as such can be more easily operationalized during the design process.

• Interplay as a deliberate intention of changing viewpoint during the design process (back and forth).




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Limitations• Techniques I used are not paradigmatic (e.g., personas have

been criticized)• Analysis on only one workshop




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for further details:Simeone, L. (2014), Interplay between UCD and design management in creating an interactive platform to support low carbon economy. Proceedings of 19th DMI: Academic Design Management Conference, London (UK), 2–4 September 2014.

to get in touch: [email protected] produced by the participants to the Design Management Lab at the Master’s Program in Service Design of Politecnico di Milano

thank you

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]