Design thinking is one of the most used strategies in user experience design, this is done by placing the user and their needs at the center of a product design. This design process involves finding through research (ethnographic or quantitative) their pain points, problems, desires, demographics, and motivations. This creates a design process that also allows the opportunity for the design process to be multi-disciplinary, including user interface, user research, ethnographic research, and artificial intelligence. Subjects like ergonomics and Design Science determined design decisions, and designers had highly specialized ways of working.
Materials
Timeline.js was the tool used to create this timeline visualization. It is a low-code and open-source tool that uses inputs from a linked Google spreadsheet to generate visual timelines with dynamic graphics and content. All the information was fed into the spreadsheet along with text and images that would support the content and layout. The information used for this timeline was mainly sourced from various significant websites such as Medium, Wikipedia, and Interaction Design.org.
Find Timeline Visualization Here
Process
To start, I considered exploring an exciting topic that included a certain amount of dates and information for an appropriate timeline visualization. That’s how I identified that an evolution or historical aspect would be helpful to me and the students in the School of Information. I decided to work with the history of design thinking.
Then proceeded to do research and read on websites that had information about the history of design-thinking: its early stages, as well as overlapping years of solidification of this “movement” throughout the United States. I selected 6 main events between the early 1950s and up to the early 2000s.
Results
When it comes to dates and lengthy information, it is useful to display in a dynamic way where users can interact (back and forward) to process information, connect text content to images, and easier to understand.
Reflection
The evolution of design thinking came out in hand with the evolution of technology after World War II. The need of the Western culture to center the human behavior and interpretation. Perhaps our physical evolution stopped many years ago but it is proven that the intellectual one has just gotten started. This is one of the main reasons why is believed that design is intrinsically connected with psychology and sociology. Design thinking continues to gain ground across a wide range of industries and is still explored and enhanced by those at the forefront of the field.
References
The History of Design Thinking, Dam and Siang (n.d), The Interaction Design Foundation, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-get-a-quick-overview-of-the-history#the_1960s:_attempts_were_made_to_make_design_scientific-0
Design thinking, Wikipedia (2023), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking
History, (n.d), IDEO, https://designthinking.ideo.com/history