A common misconception about design is that it's all one discipline. A former colleague of mine, Dan Saffer, wrote a brilliant book entitled Designing Interactions. In it, Dan sheds light on how professionally trained designers in various disciplines overlap and critically how the design of a users experience requires the input of a multitude of professionals. Let's have a look. We'll start here with visual design, which is where I'm trained. Visual and graphic design are the art and practice of planning and projecting ideas and experiences with visual or textural content. The form it takes can be physical or virtual, and it can include anything from images, words or graphics. I guess a good example of visual design would be the visual identity for the NHS Digital Academy. Architecture, we're all familiar with. It's the art and technique of designing and building as distinguished from the skills associated with construction, of course. Architecture most definitely requires a great deal of empathy for end users. To understand how people use space and to ensure a really large scale investment, would make sense. Another discipline is information architecture. Information architecture is a practice of design that gets very little attention. It is of critical importance in the communication of information and health and care. Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something, be it data, text or education information to be understandable. The best story that I have of information architecture is looking at the cover of say, the New York Times. The New York Times has a big logo at the top that says, "New York Times." Then, you'll often see on many newspapers, a main image with a big headline and lots of texts underneath. Maybe there's another smaller image here with again, more text underneath. Probably a story at the bottom following the same format, and then another headline here at the top with a long column article down the side. Now, information architecture would help you determine which are the most important articles on this page. Most people would think that the most important article on the page is this big image here. But in fact, information architecture tells us that the eye follows the New York Times all the way to the right, and then down. Next time you pick up the paper, you'll notice that the most important article on the page, is this far right column going down. Information architecture helps us guide people to the right information at the right time. The next practice is industrial design. Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured. Industrial design focuses on the appearance of a product, how it functions, how it's manufactured, and the value it provides for users. Often, ergonomics are considered in industrial design. Then, we've got human factors. Now, human factors examines the relationship between human beings and the systems with which they interact by focusing on improving efficiency, creativity, productivity, and satisfaction. The goal is really about minimizing errors. You can see industrial design and architecture have a relationship with human factors, especially around that minimization of errors. Next is interaction design. Now, interaction design is the design of the interaction between users and products. It often involves elements like statics, motion, sound, and space. In the design of digital interfaces, interaction designers and visual designers work very closely together, and sometimes these are the same person. Then, we have sound design. I know what you might be thinking, sound design has no place here, but sound design is quite important. Sound design incorporates the use of sound to evoke emotion or action in a product or service. Sound designers are sorely needed in healthcare environments, as we've seen from alert fatigue. Check out an interesting article in the optional reading about how a musician considered the design of a heart monitor for patients. It's really quite interesting and how it can play a role in this ecosystem. Then, we have human computer interaction. Human computer interaction sits about here. Now, human computer interaction is a multi-disciplinary field of study focused on the design of computer technology and in particular, the interaction between the users and computers. While initially concerned with computers, human computer interaction has since expanded to cover almost all forms of information technology design. It sits very well in the academic setting, as does the study of human factors. We've looked at all the different practices of design here and how they interact. What does this all add up to? At the core, this whole thing adds up to what we often call UX or user experience design. It's the sum of this whole practice. User experience design, which sometimes referred to as UX design, encompasses countless design decisions made by a diverse group of designers and stakeholders to provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. In common practice, designers work together in teams and bring together the appropriate disciplines to fit the challenge at hand, and critically, you guessed it, patients. Patients, members of the public, members of the workforce, whoever your user is, needs to be a member of this team at the broad level. They are hugely important, relevant set of expertise for any design initiative. Now, we will post the actual image from Dan Saffer because while I am a visual designer, I'm not an artist. You'll have an opportunity to download this image and have a closer look.
