What is inclusive design?
Inclusive design is a design, product or service that is accessible and easy usability for anybody. Good Inclusive design will make the design understandable and function well for all people.
Why is inclusive design important for digital designers to understand?
Inclusive design is essential for digital designers to learn and understand. In todays world inclusive design is seen everywhere and it is important to keep all people in mind when designing. Designs can easily fail if they are difficult to use and if they are not inclusive for all.
Why are empathy exercises helpful for designers to conduct?
Empathy exercises are important and helpful for designs to conduct to help them grow as designer. Empathy excercises help especially during the beginning phases of designing. Empathy excercises also help designers grow and understand the people that would use their designs.
Empathy Activity
For section 1 "Get orientated" I decided to choose slide #4. For this exercise I was tasked with roleplaying a discussion like "ordering coffee or making a return" with a human and with a human roleplaying a computer. I had my brother play both parts and found his reactions for acting like a human and a computer were vastly different. We role played as someone trying to order items on amazon. When my brother was playing just the regular human I found he was over explaining to me "why I should purchase this product" and he seemed to be almost joking around more. When my brother was role playing as the computer he went way more monotone and simplistic with his word choice. I guess the way this could relate to my design work in the past is when working on projects for my ux / ui classes I found that simplicity and easy to navigate design is essential and it makes sense that computers and technology are more forward with their designs and words.
For section 2 "Frame" I decided to choose slide #8. For this exercise I went on a walk with a friend and asked him questions about his interactions with people, family, work, school and found very interesting answers. I found that even though he can be more introverted certain environments turn him way more extroverted. Places like school he seems more engaged and willing to open up - but places like work he finds it stressful to be more open and finds he cannot focus as well.
For section 3 "Ideate" I decided to choose slide #14. For this exercise I needed to choose an existing design or prototype and identify the key roles technology plays for those designs. The design I decided to choose was my logo for my surf and skate company. The logo is simplistic using popping pantone colors that work well on most shirt colors. I understand how huge technology played for designing this logo. I for one never drew the logo to start - I used a cintiq to create the logo and I understand that technology like dye sub printers and embroidery machines play a huge role for the manufacture of the products that use the logo.
For section 4 "Iterate" I decided to choose slide #15. For this exercise I needed to list the micro interactions of the design. Some include: the colors, line width, font, texture (when embroidered), the colors of shirt used, dye-sub, etc... To test the effectiveness of this design I send a few iterations of the design changing the colors, font, etc... to a friend groupchat of 15 people. I got many different responses with many people flocking towards the simplistic designs and popping colors.
For section 5 "Optimize" I decided to choose slide #17. For this exercise I decided to choose the support card "Physical Context". This support card directly relates to the designs mentioned in steps 3 + 4. The design is meant to be worn on t-shirts in outdoor settings. The designs function and goal is to be used a Surf, Skate, and Snow logo that can be used when performing those activities.
What was your biggest takeaway from this empathy exercise?
My biggest takeaway when performing these empathy excercises is that it truly is important as a designer to know and understand the people that you are designing for. Empathy exercises do help you grow as a designer and they definitely help you produce better designs for all people.
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