Development Through Interviewing.

The process of designing is long and tedious and when you're just about done with the tedious part you do it again. From what I've found in my short half semester of designing is that every bump that you hit, you will hit again until it is smoothed over and no longer gets in the way; it's a very repetitive process! A visualisation of it that I learnt in my university Design courses is the Double Diamond Design Principles, a diagram of two diamonds point to point which flow into one another like an infinity symbol. It shows how every process is repeated again and again until the perfect product for the brief has been made and the designer can leave the loop.

I've found that the loops I make in my design diamond always hits a certain bump I can never seem to smooth out. It disrupts my flow and my looping gets thrown wildly off track every time I come across it. My bump is interviewing. I can't seem to get it. Every design I have made whether it be the paper prototype wallets we made in Design100 or the posters we made in Design101, I can never find the right questions to ask. I'm stuck for sure. I'm no where near my end goal, no where near being able to jump out of my loop just yet but I never seem to even be sure what I'm confused about. More information would be fantastic and I can see how my end results would benefit so much from more of the right information but the little steps in between have me stuck.

In one of our classes earlier on in the year we got introduced to the 'why' theory. So it goes, don't have any more questions? Ask why to the answer of the previous one, get the client talking and you'll find out things you never would've found through simply asking a list of preconstructed questions. So to improve on my skills as a designer and help to flatten the bump in my loop I've been asking why at every chance possible and I've found I'm getting better at constructing questions around the normal answers I get when asking why and that I am also improving on my ability to pick interesting things out of people's stories to question further which is opening so many new paths, but I still have a wee way to go.

#DES100

Maciej Lipiec. (2019). 'Beyond the Double Diamond: Thinking About a Better Design Processes Model'. UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/beyond-the-double-diamond-thinking-about-a-better-design-process-model-de4fdb902cf

Zac Fitz-Walter. (2020). Design100. In speech it was iterated that the 'Why Theory' is useful in design processes.