Improving the World as a Solo Designer: Strategies and Steps to Take
In a recent video, Don Norman, co-founder and Principal Emeritus of the Nielsen Norman Group, encourages designers to take a human-centered approach to address major societal issues. This approach emphasizes understanding users' goals, contexts, and limitations to create designs that serve real human needs, rather than just aesthetics.
For complex problems embedded in large-scale systems, Norman recommends combining humanity-centered design with systems thinking, incremental and modular solutions, and involving the population's insights to pragmatically improve issues step-by-step.
Practical steps for designers include prioritizing usability and human needs over style or superficial features, employing people-centered design to engage and incorporate users' input continuously, using deep analysis tools like the "5 Whys" to identify root causes, considering the broader socio-technical systems impacting the problem, taking small, sustainable design steps, and remaining ethically thoughtful by questioning design decisions and ensuring inclusivity and fairness.
Norman's vision is for designers to move beyond traditional aesthetics-driven design and embrace a pragmatic, humanity-centered mindset that can contribute meaningfully to societal challenges, both on a large and small scale.
The video also suggests that designers can make a difference by joining organizations or companies already addressing societal issues, such as a "b-corp," a type of corporation in the US that legally addresses societal issues.
While Norman acknowledges that working on major societal issues is difficult, he emphasizes its importance and encourages designers to take action in their chosen area. The video serves as a resource for designers looking to make a difference in societal issues, with further insights from Don Norman on how designers can address their chosen issue.
By focusing on human-centered design, designers can reap rewards for the planet and its people, as they work to solve major societal issues and contribute to a better world.
- In the spirit of pragmatic design, graphic designers might leverage human-centered approaches to create visually engaging and intuitive designs that cater to real human needs, ensuring a positive impact on personal growth and education-and-self-development.
2.Driven by the desire to make a difference in the world, interaction designers can seamlessly integrate system thinking and population insights into their designs, fostering career-development opportunities by building solutions that lead to sustainable personal growth and societal change.
