- Greetings, everyone.
Today's talk is titled,
"Design for Utility and Usability."
I believe that design has three primary goals,
beauty, utility and sustainability.
And in today's presentation we'll talk about utility,
but also we'll talk about usability,
because I think these two are words
with a slight difference in meaning.
(gentle music)
When I think of utility,
I think of the Swiss Army knife, right?
It's a very simple product.
It has a series of tools that are a part of it,
like a scissor, like a knife,
some of them have nail cutters.
So it is a small device.
It is a compact device,
but has an enormous amount of utility,
enormous amount of functionality.
And it is fairly easy to use as well, in most cases.
So let's talk about what utility really means,
and can we break it down into a series
of subcomponents of utility?
So the word essentially means
that if something is utilitarian,
something that is easy to use, it is functional.
It has a certain functionality that it performs,
that's one important thing.
But I would like to imagine the word utility
to have a lot more meaning as well.
One of them is durability.
That's something that is also durable,
something that lasts a long time.
I also believe that something that is utilitarian
should also be easy to maintain.
So maintainability is another important thing.
It should be able to be repaired.
So repairability is another part of it as well.
It's a product that should be safe.
Safety is a part of utility.
It should be well-designed
in the sense that it has the right kind of human factors
and ergonomics in it,
which means that it should fit the human body really well.
Manufacturability is another important criterion.
A designer might create a product,
but if the engineer says,
"Well, this is fantastic, but it can't be manufactured,"
it's a problem.
So it should be something that has utility,
means it also is manufacturable.
It should be affordable.
It's something that is, I think,
a key part of what design should do.
It should not have products that are out of reach of people.
It should make products affordable.
It should be efficient.
The components inside, the batteries,
the power systems should be such
that it uses this energy efficiently, uses it well.
So efficiency is another part of utility as well.
It should be user-friendly.
Very often we have a ton of products that do a ton of stuff,
they have many, many, many features in them.
And adding all those features
actually reduces user-friendliness.
They become confusing, they get hard to use.
So one important part of utility
is that it also is user-friendly.
And, finally, usability.
Just because something is functional,
or it is utilitarian,
doesn't mean it is usability.
So, for me, usability and user-friendliness
go hand in hand.
If something is user-friendly,
it also means that it's usable.
It's easy to use.
So these are the components
of what utility actually means for me.
And let's talk about each of them, one by one.
So let's take the first one, functionality.
When designers create products,
they work hand in hand and work very closely
with a whole range of other disciplines,
including engineering.
So what engineering does is,
for example, for something like a camera,
engineering has to make sure
that it has all the right kind of components,
parts, technologies inside it,
so that it's able to do what it should do.
So, for example, in this case for a camera,
you need to make sure
that it has the right kind of functionality
in terms of getting the image,
processing the image, saving the image.
All those things happen because of a series of chips,
motherboards, sensors, etc., inside the camera.
To make the camera functional is really important.
And that's one of the things that design does.
Durability, things should last a long time, in most cases.
We often are faced with this problem
of what's referred to as electronic waste, or e-waste.
A whole range of printers, old computers,
mice, keyboards, etc.,
cellphones, other digital devices,
are often thrown off and they end up being electronic waste,
which is a problem for landfills.
It does not degrade.
If water runs over these circuit boards
and gets into into the soil,
it could create soil pollution.
So all these components that sit inside
our digital devices have to be dealt with.
We have to find a way of making our products durable,
making them last a lot longer.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency
in the United States,
the average life of a cellphone,
of a mobile phone, is about nine months.
What happens to them after they are done
with those nine months?
Often they are thrown, they're tossed.
Very often they continue to work.
They're not completely broken down.
But because there's a newer device,
because there is something that's a lot cooler,
a lot faster, a lot more beautiful,
people discard their old devices.
What we need to do as designers
is to think of a way
by which we can make products more durable.
We can make them last a lot longer,
because that is a lot better for the environment.
So durability is one key part of utility.
Things also should be able to be maintained.
Very often things break down.
Something goes wrong.
And in many cases, especially with digital devices,
especially with electronic products,
they are almost impossible to fix.
You can replace certain parts.
You can take out motherboards, you can take out chips,
you can take out processors and replace them,
but that's not necessarily repair, that's replacement.
We should try and make things
such that they can actually be repaired.
One good example of that is cars.
The automotive industry has done a good job
of creating a whole service industry around cars.
You buy a car,
it's a pretty decent investment of money
and time and effort.
You keep it for a long time.
People keep their cars for 10, 15, 20 years.
And it's critical that we have systems in place
that allow us to repair these vehicles, right?
This, however, does not exist in all product domains.
Like though cars are good because we have have technicians,
companies, service presenters,
all of these people have created an ecosystem
by which cars can be repaired,
it would be good to have a similar system
for all the appliances,
all the products that we use in our everyday lives.
Safety is another key part of utility.
And let's take another example of cars.
Very often cars get into accidents.
Very often people get into injuries.
What can we do by design
to make sure that these products are safe?
Well, we have things like airbags.
We have things like testing.
What you see in this case is crash test dummies.
Before cars go out into the market,
they are tested by companies.
They run them into brick walls.
They run them into situations
where people inside get tossed around,
get thrown around with seat belts, without seat belts,
with airbags, without airbags.
And that process ensures the safety
of these products that we use everyday.
So safety is another key part of utility.
Ergonomics, another important concern for designers.
What is the fit between the human being and the product?
Is there a connection?
Can the products be comfortable for us?
And therefore, there are a whole range of ergonomic charts,
and a whole range of human factors charts,
that look at specific things like you see in this case.
What is the viewing distance between the eye and the screen?
What is the viewing angle?
What is the position of the wrist, is it straight?
You definitely don't want your wrist to do this,
because that creates carpal tunnel syndrome.
You want your wrist to be pointing down.
What is the angle of the seat?
What's the angle of the back?
What is the knee doing?
How high is the chair off the ground?
What is a position of the feet
of the person who's sitting in this chair?
So what you see here,
is you see a series of specific areas
of this workstation design from height,
to distance, to angles,
that allow designers to make sure
that the products that they design,
that they create, are ergonomically appropriate,
making them safe for people
from a health perspective, right?
We don't want people to have carpal tunnel syndrome.
We don't want people to have back pain.
We don't want people to have foot pain.
The key thing is to make sure
that the products are designed in such a way
that ergonomically it's suitable
for the shortest woman, the shortest man,
tallest woman, tallest man,
the widest person, the narrowest person.
All of these people and their specific needs
have to be taken into account
when products are being designed for people.
The company Herman Miller does a really good job
of thinking of ergonomics
as a part of the work that they do.
So this is a chair called the Embody Chair,
it's a task chair.
An enormous amount of research
has gone into the ergonomics
and human factors of this chair to make sure
that it is comfortable for a wide range of people.
It has several adjustments on it.
The seat lowers up and down.
The back is entirely flexible
that it flexes to the needs of the people.
The armrests go up and down,
but also go outside if you need to.
So all these are specific features
designed into the product
to make sure that it is ergonomically correct
for a whole range of individuals
and a whole range of specific user needs.
One of the things that the company has done
is in terms of looking at the pressure mapping of the chair.
So when someone sits on a chair, where is the pressure?
Where does the pressure build up?
Where is the heat build up?
And what can we do by design to minimize it
so that it's a comfortable seating arrangement
for the people who sit in the chair.
You see that with keyboards as well.
We all know that keyboards are extremely clumsy devices
by which to input data,
but can we design a better keyboard
that brings in your hands at an angle?
We all know that as we stand or sit at the keyboard
our fingers, our hands, come in at an angle,
we don't sit like this.
So this keyboard, what it does is it's at an angle
that allows your fingers to come in at a natural angle.
So these are examples of ergonomic products
that are designed with another kind of utility in mind,
something that fits the product to the human body.
We shouldn't have to fit ourselves to the product.
The product should fit to us.
That should be the goal of all design.
Products have to be manufactured
and thinking of manufacturability,
thinking of how they will make it out into the world
is an important part of the process.
So designers need to understand the processes of making,
how the machines work,
what processes are most appropriate,
what materials should be utilized?
How does a worker sit at a workstation in a factory
and create the product that has been designed?
So that manufacturability is also a key part
of utility of the product.
Affordability, we want to make sure, again,
that we don't create a situation
where certain products are only affordable
by certain aspects of society,
certain products are not.
So one thing about products is to keep in mind
that if we can make things more affordable,
we make them more accessible to people as well.
There's a different kind of access to think about as well.
One of the things we have to keep in mind
is the needs of people with disabilities.
Not everyone can walk, not everyone can run,
not everyone has perfect health.
So we have to make sure
that in the products that we design,
we don't create situations where we cut access for people.
So accessibility is also a very important part of utility.
User-friendliness, are the products that have been designed
easy to use for the people that they're designed for?
Now, pill bottles, in which we store our medications,
is an interesting case study.
You want to make sure that a pill bottle
can be easily opened by people
that need to access that medicine, right?
For example, adults, older adults,
people who might be 65, 70, 75 years old.
As you get older, you might need more medications.
So it has to be easy to open
by someone who has arthritic fingers, for example,
who doesn't have as much strength.
But it's also important to make sure that that pill bottle
is not opened by children accidentally,
or by someone who might be abusing these drugs, right?
So one key thing that design does
is it has to be made user-friendly
for the specific user group.
So they should be extremely user-friendly
for the person who actually needs the medications,
like an older adult,
but extremely user-unfriendly for a child
who might be able to access the medications, right?
So that's a really important goal for design.
Usability, it's different from utility.
How easy is it to use something?
And here we see an example of the cockpit of an aircraft.
The cockpit of an aircraft
is an extremely complex environment.
There's a whole range of different kinds of controls,
as you can see in this case.
There's displays, there's levers, there's dials.
All of these have to be controlled,
have to be managed, have to be monitored,
have to be observed, kept an eye on,
to make sure that the plane
does what it's supposed to do.
That plane does not crash.
What happened in this case is by ergonomics,
by human factors, by careful design, by graphics,
one has to make sure that the design of this cockpit,
of these controls in the cockpit, is usable.
It is something that people understand.
The controls should say what they do, right?
And that's another really,
really important part of the design process.
So what we've talked about today is we have defined utility,
the word utility, in really broad ways.
Very often utility has only one meaning.
But if I think that design is all about beauty,
utility and sustainability,
I have taken liberties with the term utility.
I've expanded the meaning of the term utility
to include a whole range of things like affordability,
accessibility, user-friendliness,
usability, functionality, etc.
The goal of design should be to make sure
that all products, all buildings,
all interior spaces, all graphics of a design,
have these aspects of utility
designed into them so that people have easy access to them.