Era 3: Human-Centered Design

To meet new demands from increasingly savvy customers in the digital age, ID created groundbreaking programs in human-centered design and strategic planning. While ID students have continued to delight in experimentation and systems design, taking a human-centered approach to a design problem has become vital to their work.

The laboratory played a major role in the development of design processes. Many disciplines within ID used it for the invention and development of new artifacts, systems, procedures, and institutions, as well as to pursue a common design methodology to find new ways for humans to benefit from computer technology.

Today, ID Action Labs reflect the laboratory legacy. Multidisciplinary teams of advisors, partners, and sponsors in nonprofits, communities, and corporations work with ID researchers on sustainable, equitable, and just solutions for cities, education, entrepreneurship and finance, food, healthcare, and technology.

Heating, plumbing, and telephone service in a middle-class home required expensive electrical, electronic, mechanical, and other standard services. The team believed that major savings could be achieved by integrating technological systems with building structure and producing optimal systems in factories.

Aquatecture had four subprojects—Floating Fields, Cross-Roads in the Sea, Patterned Energy, and Mobile Offshore Industry—that speculated on how to develop a “macro-designed” environment with available technology to expand uses of the seas, lakes, and rivers as space, media, and sources of energy, food, and raw materials.

Fire Reversed aims to replenish and reinforce Earth’s photosynthesizing process, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through regreening deserts and barren land through domes under which selected plant ecosystems can thrive, and with a simulated floating environment built in mid-ocean areas.

Fire Replaced explores the use of space-based solar power to replace carbon-based fuels to produce heat, light, and energy to prevent further exacerbation of global warming. The project was honored as the Environmental Category Grand Winner in Popular Science magazine’s “100 Greatest Achievements in Science and Technology.”

The team sought to (1) satisfy customer needs at every interaction within the retail facility; (2) rely on user-centered approaches, systemic view, and simulation of solutions; and (3), use all relevant aspects of design, architectural building systems, graphics and identity subsystems, and products and retail environments.

The Whole View model is a tool produced by Patrick Whitney in collaboration with the ID community. While Owen’s “Structured Planning” tool facilitates the optimal beginning to a project, the Whole View Model provides a tentative structure for knowledge of design, as well as a pathway for design teaching, research, and practice.

Pediapod, designed by ID product design student Brian Stonecipher, is an operating table for infants. Physicians at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, Chicago, which prototyped the product, found it reduced setup and teardown time and reported that it made infant catheterization procedures safer and smoother.

Its human-centered innovations include an undercut frame for easy carrying and resizing; snap-on straps for securing it to the operating table; mild Velcro restraints built into a disposable surface pad, with higher-force ones that clip to the frame; and a low product profile, for easy access to the patient amid their equipment.

The team used a modified version of the POEMS framework—People, Objects, Environments, Messages, and Services—developed at ID. POEMS helps document how people interact with the designed world and provides a user-experience framework that helps analyze physical, cognitive, social, and cultural aspects of daily life.

The team worked from high-level design criteria (such as access to credit, economic opportunities, and secure earnings), and then mapped them to both a list of basic needs (such as employment, safety, shelter, and water) and design criteria to ensure that each concept existed independently, and was intrinsic to the system.

After lauding Whitney and his leadership in the effort to turn design into a respected modern discipline, Berner wrote that business culture demands managers who can master the process of innovation, not “administration”: “Patrick Whitney has made ID one of the best sources of creative talent for business today.”

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, ID faculty members Dale Fahnstrom and Greg Prygrocki combined multimodal technologies, sensorial objects, and open-ended activities in a physical space to create new experimental opportunities for exploring, tinkering, learning, and interacting in the virtual world.

They introduced “ThinkeringSpace,” a hybrid system of networked and remotely accessible physical environments that seeks to bring school-age children together to tinker with things, both physical and virtual, to reflect upon what they do and discover, and then elaborate their ideas in ways they can share with others.

ID students used the ID process—in-depth research on target audiences, market context, technology trends, and cultural dynamics, followed by structured methods, tools, and frameworks to create a viable conceptual direction—to develop a communications strategy for CeaseFire Chicago, an anti-violence organization.

The objective was to change thinking about the social norms and behaviors that perpetuate the transmission of violence at the individual and community levels. Over a period of three months the project team interviewed CeaseFire staff, area residents, local stakeholders, and potential enabling partners to define the problem.

ZeroZero refers to the intersection of State and Madison Streets, the “zero zero” point in Chicago’s grid system. The Loop is an interesting “place” because it can be deconstructed into an array of historical artifacts, personal memories, political engagements, tales of business, failed dreams, and so on.

Loop Alliance worked with ID students and faculty to understand how people orient themselves. The team designed a unique placemaking experience at the location, inviting people to learn about where they were standing. Student team: Eugene Limb, Elise Metzger, Joseph Shields, Brian Strawn, and Sally Wong. Faculty: Anijo Mathew.

The India Immersion Program was started with Godrej & Boyce in 2011 as an opportunity for participating ID students to experience design through immersion in a different culture. Led by ID faculty, this initiative engendered learning experiences beyond the classroom with programs in Brazil, India, and Taiwan.

This program includes elements from the past (the Knowledge Box of 1962); the present (the Mobius strip structure, which held the current work); and the future (the Design Experience, which was an interactive physical maze that invited attendees to express their thoughts about their design process).

ID and the Design Museum of Chicago partnered to organize this exhibition, which uses 85 key stories to demonstrate the vital role of design—and ID—in improving life, from gas stations to space stations; camping shelters to an app for urban explorers; a better bar of soap to a doable reimagining of water resources for food, energy, and manufacturing.

These stories fall into four eras:
1) Experimentation
2) Systems
3) Human-Centered Design (this story)
4) [Era in Process]