Hasta La Ideas

This is the second post in a 6-part series from Ziba’s Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the Introduction to the series, Teach Less, Integrate More here.

Great designers are great empathizers. It’s what separates a design that has soul from one that’s simply well-realized. In my experience as a design director and as a teacher, it’s become painfully clear that the ability to connect with users is something design students must learn, as crucially as they need sketching and CAD.

Unfortunately, the most common student design project has students designing with themselves as the target user. Research becomes a box to be ticked, and certainly never integrated into the design process. The real world, though, is full of unfamiliar design targets, and schools have a responsibility to teach the difficult skill of taking on their perspectives. What students need to learn is not just empathy, but extreme empathy—the flexibility to inhabit the mind of someone dramatically unlike themselves.

In student projects as well as professional practice, we observe several users fitting a target profile, then build a character that summarizes and exaggerates their functional and emotional needs. But students too often make the more comfortable choice by picking a friend as their target. That’s not good enough. Because this is someone they’re already familiar with, they’re blinded to the details. More important, it lets them off the hook of doing real research. A real strategic target is like a character in a movie: aspirational to others and inspirational to the designer.

It also bypasses another needed skill: learning to love someone unfamiliar. I recently put my students at the University of Oregon through a character-building exercise. During the first critique, one group summed up their presentation by describing their character Michael as ‘a bit of a douche.’ While he may have had qualities they didn’t appreciate, they were going to be spending the next 12 weeks with this guy, so I let them know they’d better find something they liked!

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