Dinosaurs & Design

I’ve figured it out! Yep, that’s right, in all of my 3 years as an industrial design student I’ve figured out the secret to good design. How did I do it? I listened to dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs. As in... old people, not actual dinosaurs. I talked to my 75 year old great aunt and 78 year old grandmother about their past experiences, so that I could get their perspectives on life.

You see, design is kind of like elderly wisdom. It’s trying to understand life in a way that old people do because they’ve lived long enough to really get it. And it’s using that understanding to solve for peoples' needs. So I decided to go straight to the source. I grabbed the two oldest people I know and I got to digging. I interviewed Mimi (left) and Hossie (right) to try and obtain some of that wisdom. What I found was truly revealing.

Zeitgeist. A word whose etymology comes from the German words Zeit ‘time’ and geist ‘spirit’. In essence it is a spirit that defines a time in a specific culture. Micro zeitgeist is my version of the word. Its meaning is the same, but on an individual level rather than a cultural level. When you experience it, it’s invisible - in everything you think, do, touch, hear, smell, live through, and remember. When it’s over, it becomes the spirit that defines that time in an individual’s life. It shapes who you are.?Capturing this spirit is key for designers to be able to practice empathy, and use it to design meaningful experiences.

?When asked to describe their pasts and tell me a period in their life where they experienced this sort of micro zeitgeist, I was delighted to hear what they had to say. Mimi described in great detail a time where she and her extended family got together very frequently, and how the lessons she learned in that time are still prevalent today. Hossie described an experience that really stuck out to me. She described a time in high school when she campaigned for JFK.

An ink blot that stained her adult years, this experience remains almost tangible in Hossie’s words. But it didn’t start out that way. Throughout her interactions with the Kennedys, Hossie never thought to herself “I will look back at this experience as something that defined an entire period of my life”, but uncovering that tidbit from her past gave me a special insight into why she is the way she is.

As designers, our job is to understand the feelings of our target user, which can help us uncover that micro zeitgeist, and lead to us to identify their core needs so we can design for them in a way that works in harmony with their knowledge and experiences.?

Talking to all kinds of people with vastly different backgrounds and experiences is something that brings me a lot of joy. Getting to know the parts of them that shaped who they are is a special experience that can be truly rewarding. It?gives me the opportunity to practice empathy, expand my perspective, and carry it into the work I do as a designer. So, maybe I didn't figure out the secret to design for everyone, but I figured it out for myself.