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 talk about usability because I think these two are words with a slight difference in meaning that we need to discuss. 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 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 a enormous amount of utility and 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, is 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 these 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 one 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 the 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, sensor, etc., inside the camera. To make the camera functional is really important and that's one of the things that a design does. Durability, things should last a long time, in most cases. We often are faced with this problem, it's referred to as electronic waste or e-waste. A whole range of printers, old computers, mice, keyboards, etc., cellphones, other digital devices, often thrown off and they end up being electronic waste, which is a problem for landfills. It does not degrade. If water runs over the circuit boards and gets 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 cell phone, 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 repair, that's replacement. We should try and make things such as 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, right? Though cars are good because we 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's 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 the user may use, 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, there are 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's the angle of the seat? What's the angle of the back? What is the knee doing? How how is the chair off the ground? What is the position of the feet of the person who is 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 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 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, the 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 my design to minimize this so that it's 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 a 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 of 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 would make it out in the world is an important part of the process. So designers need to understand the processes of making. How do machines work? What processes are most appropriate? What materials should be utilized? How does a worker seat at a workstation in a factory and create the product that has been designed? So that manufacturability is also 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 a 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 we design 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 also important to make sure that that pill bottle is not open by children accidentally, or by someone who might be abusing these drugs, right. So one key thing the design does is it has to be made user friendly for the specific user group. So this 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 this place, 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, the 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 the controls in a 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've defined utility, the word utility, in really broad ways. Very often utility has only one meaning but if I think that design is also 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 that we design, have these aspects of utility designed into them so that people have easy access to them. Thank you.
