The True Benefits of Designing Design Methods

This paper calls for a new way of understanding and using methods in human-centred design. Design researchers have recently been active in developing new types of methods aimed at greatly improving their empathic understanding of people’s holistic experience, and their design imagination. The strong motivation for a new methodology stems from critical reflection on scientific rationalisation of human-centred design, which attempts to pin down the design process and develop abstract user models. Despite this, the design community has shown a tendency to use a conventional, scientific rationalisation when applying a stream of new design methods. In this paper, I analyse misinterpretations of the new design methods, which I call ‘empathic design methods’, and seek a more constructive way of understanding and describing how they actually work, going beyond ‘method-recipe’ convention. By analysing design students’ learning diaries, I investigate what learning is going on in method-making processes and demonstrate how those processes help design students to gather contextual knowledge of a design project and to develop their empathic understanding of users.