The Impact of Data on the Role of Designers and Their Process

Abstract

With the advance of the Internet and the Internet of Things, an abundance of 'big' data becomes available. Data science can be incorporated in design, which brings forward various opportunities for designers to benefit from this new material. However, the designer's perspective and their role remains unclear. How do they think about and approach data? What do they want to achieve with this data? What do they need to take ownership of designing with data? In this paper we take a design perspective to map the opportunities and challenges of leveraging large data-sets as part of the design process. We rely on a survey with 75 participants across a Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and in-depth reflective interviews with a subset of 9 participants. We discuss the impact of data on the roles designers can adopt as well as an approach to designing with data. This work aims to inform on educational support, data literacy and tools needed for designers to take advantage of this new era of design digitalisation.

Reconstructing Intimate Contexts through Data Donation: A Case Study in Menstrual Tracking Technologies

“…For this reason, designers and researchers have been developing methods to harness behavioral data, where reconstructing the context of the data is critical [31,36,52,54]. Although these methods have great potential, in practice, they represent a challenge, especially for novice designers and researchers [31,39]. Since they often involve building probes and prototypes or adapting existing devices to collect data, these activities are expensive, and effortintensive [31].…”

“…However, developing probes and prototypes that collect behavioral data is expensive, effort-intensive [31], and represents a challenge, especially for novice designers and researchers [39]. It underscores the importance of reducing the need for functional and robust prototypes at the early stage of research and facilitate the use of behavioral data throughout the process.…”

Understanding the Challenges Around Design Activities That Incorporate Behavioral Data

“…However, a prerequisite for these is to investigate the challenges that designers (currently) encounter in practice when engaging with behavioral data as part of their process, for instance, related to stakeholders, the context of use and objectives. Yet, research on the challenges designers currently face narrowly focuses on the technical skills required to engage in data-intensive activities, such as collecting, analyzing, and handling data (e.g., Lu et al (2021); Briard et al (2021)) without also acknowledging other types of challenges that emerge throughout the process. In this paper, we investigate: What are the overall challenges designers encounter in design activities involving behavioral data?…”

“…We recognize the value of looking ahead and anticipating future challenges. In doing so, the literature calls for new roles and activities (Lu et al, 2021), methods and frameworks (Jung et al, 2019;Briard et al, 2021), and tools and guidelines (Gorkovenko et al, 2020;Briard et al, 2021), that support designers in integrating behavioral data into their processes. However, a prerequisite for these is to investigate the challenges that designers (currently) encounter in practice when engaging with behavioral data as part of their process, for instance, related to stakeholders, the context of use and objectives.…”

Matching Synthetic Populations with Personas: A Test Application for Urban Mobility

“…A datadriven design process impacts the role of designers and the collaboration between designers and data scientists. Lu et al (2021) list four roles that require new skills from designers: (1) Translator, to be aware of the data science jargon to communicate with data scientists; (2) Empathiser, to be able to tell stories based on data; (3) Project leader, to ask and answer questions through data; and (4) Analyst, to decide what data to collect and how to process them. This paper contributes primarily to designers' roles as translators by aligning two traditionally distant user-centric tools and proposing a workflow that combines them to feed both processes with novel insights.…”