How People Feel and Think

HPW Fall 2020

As designers, we constantly keep in mind that people share similarities and differences, whether it’s amongst their thoughts, emotions, or worldviews. These “human terms”, born of our unique experiences, encapsulate our identities, and make us all distinct from one another. A keyword that we touched upon was the “pluriverse”, which is a world of many worlds through the lenses of multiple people. Everyone has a subjective worldview depending on their values, environments, background, and interactions. As designers, acknowledging subjectivity allows us to resist particular mindsets and consider multiple viewpoints.

The literary proverb “to a thousand readers, there are a thousand hamlets” cleverly summarizes the idea of a pluriverse and describes how people form different opinions. Interestingly, the popular Chinese proverb references western literature, which demonstrates how people’s backgrounds may differ drastically but they are nonetheless connected to one another.

To further our understanding of worldviews, we took a simple test to explore our individual and collective worldviews. Although this test is a simplistic generalization, the results prompted us to reflect on our personal values and explore concepts that we haven’t thought much about. We also had the chance to share and learn about each other’s perspectives and opinions. We encourage everyone to check it out: https://wvtest.com/

Emotions are dynamic and complex — it turns out that people experience multiple emotions at one time with one being dominant. It is deeply intertwined with design as humans are biologically built to interact emotionally. Just as how people view things subjectively, people don’t have fixed visceral reactions to objects and situations as it greatly depends on everyone’s unique context. Designers should have the ability to anticipate the range of possible responses to a product, therefore learning about contexts and establishing intentional ones would help us design for desired emotional responses.

An example that functions similarly to this concept is the design principle of mental models. In a way, mental models are to products as emotional responses are to products, except it relates more to creating desired cognitive or physical (not limited to these two, but most often referring to these) responses through design. Designers must harbor a deep understanding of peoples’ different contexts to be able to engineer emotional responses. Likewise, that deep understanding is also required in the ability to engineer certain cognitive or physical responses.

A common occurrence for modern designers is that we tend to only design for happiness and don’t advocate for more complex, emotionally experiencing concepts. We hold good intentions to satisfy our users as much as possible, yet no one can always stay happy. It reminds me of the movie Inside Out, where the main character only finds joy after experiencing sadness. Without one there isn’t the other.

The recurring theme of embracing differences appears in design justice as well. Many designers design with a pre-set user in mind, that being a middle class, white male, even though many products target much more diverse audiences. By not considering other demographics in the design process, we are creating oppression and excluding important users that could otherwise inform better design. Having a close-minded user scope can only further encourage exclusive design, leading to the malicious cycle that designers end up trapped in.

The Matrix of Domination emerges from the concept of intersectionality, which shows how we are privileged or oppressed in relation to different social locations. Our identity is created from a combination of social locations and the degrees of our privilege or oppression vary due to the overlap. Above we have highlighted our respective social location to explore our place in society. It turns out that we are very similar individuals in terms of how privileged and oppressed we are, which stems from our similar backgrounds.

Often, as designers we might fail to comprehend the power that we hold in our world, this can be even less obvious to everyday users. Not only are there surface level responses that we form to design–physical, emotional, cognitive–there are also many subconscious ways design can alter our mental processes. Thus, it is important to approach design with an open mind and clear intentions, as it is easier than we think to fall into the trap of harmful, oppressive, and/or exclusive design. While design cannot encompass people from all backgrounds, we can only try to be conscious of who we’re designing for and consider the ones we may be leaving out. We should listen to multiple perspectives and ask a wide range of people to contribute to the design process and determine what is most needed.