I have design, research and strategic design expertise. I can think differently and push boundaries in design. I am skilled in 'problem finding' that expands the scope of opportunities and snitches out potential disruptions. While I do like to create beautiful prototypes with Figma and have lectured about visual design, I can do much more than produce designs. Next, I will discuss my skills through the pieces of design work: understanding people and situations; defining design-guiding constraints and expectations; brainstorming and idea workshops; prototyping; testing, and documenting the design and the design process.
Understanding People and Situations
I recognize that it is important to be empathetic and understand users' needs, desires, and aspirations. It is also crucial to prioritize the user. This can lead to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn can increase sales and profits. By understanding the real needs of customers, costly redesign and product failures in the market are also avoided.
At the same time, I recognize that leaders in design and development do not solely rely on what is currently true in the world according to sales figures, interviews, and surveys. Leaders also invest in speculative design and the exploitation of its fruits. In speculative design, designs are used to ask unconventional questions and challenge prevailing perceptions. This generates knowledge of technology and market risks and opportunities, as well as a deeper understanding of the connections between things. When an organization has the ability and understanding to utilize this knowledge, which is not a given, it is excellent.
As a doctoral researcher, I conducted high-level user interviews and survey research for my speculative designs. For example, I produced information on the application of advanced artificial intelligence to guide online news commentators towards more civil discussion — a couple of years before ChatGPT was released and made my speculations possible.
Defining Design-Guiding Constraints and Expectations
By clearly defining design constraints and expectations, we can focus on creating excellent products that are feasible within the given resources. Well-communicated design constraints and expectations also reduce the risk of misunderstandings and save time at different stages of the project.
Some common design constraints and guides:
- User requirements and desires.
- Conceptions developed through speculative design and reflection on the course of action.
- Case studies used in design.
- Design areas. Good design is evidenced by not overlooking any area, such as accessibility, in design.
- Design choices within areas and dimensions. Excellent design is evidenced by meticulous and precise consideration of all details. The winning product is often not revolutionary in terms of its areas compared to other products, but the choices within them are made more carefully and precisely.
- Usability and information architecture principles.
- Principles of visual design.
- Functions that promote the ethics of products (e.g., how they aim to increase users' activity, responsibility, understanding, and decision-making ability). I am familiar with the topic through my doctoral research.
Brainstorming and Idea Workshops
The creative brainstorming process can develop innovative solutions that stand out from competitors and create new market opportunities. I have extensive brainstorming skills and experience in organizing idea workshops. I can quickly sketch ideas and wireframes on paper and brainstorm openly with others. Additionally, I can use critical and speculative design tactics in brainstorming, such as aiming for a dystopian idea. This helps break boundaries and, on the other hand, consider the ethical questions of design. In 2024, I led idea workshops on the artificial intelligence of future media consumption.
Prototyping and Testing
By developing prototypes and testing them with real users, we ensure that the product is user-friendly and exceeds user expectations before larger investments. Prototyping also reduces post-market launch repair costs and product defect-related risks.
I am proficient in building prototypes using Figma, Balsamiq, Gimp/Photoshop, and HTML. I also master responsive, or device-adaptive web design.
When usability and clarity are at an appropriate level in the early prototype, I am able to make a final-looking prototype that more clearly communicates the product idea. I achieve this through my skills in visual design. I have also lectured on visual design to TAY master's students. On the other hand, I want to note that my research and strategic expertise set me apart from those focused on the visual side.
Documenting the Design and Design Process
By performing careful documentation, we ensure the continuity and efficiency of the design process, which can reduce the costs and time of future projects. Additionally, when the design process is well documented, it eases the orientation of new team members and reduces the dependence on individual persons, which improves project management and reduces the risk of errors. I am quite familiar with what all needs to be recorded from the design.
I sketched ideas on paper and discussed them with my design team. This sketch-discussion cycle repeated three times, resulting in a total of about 60 ideas. My design team included myself and two colleagues, both of whom had expertise in user experience design and software engineering. In my sketching, I used two different critical design strategies: (1) the designer aims for the result to embody irony, sarcasm, parody, or ambiguity, and (2) the designer selects an existing practice, modifies it slightly, and then considers whether the result is ironic, parodic, etc.
The 6 ideas I chose and presented at the meeting were part of interviews with 10 experienced Finnish journalists. I co-designed the interview process and questions with another research colleague, and this colleague conducted interviews with journalists at their workplaces. (Later in the research project, I was responsible for conducting the interviews.) Interviewees were asked to think aloud about the ideas presented to them, considering feasibility, and other aspects. I wrote a research paper based on the analysis of these interviews, focusing on the four ideas that generated the most discussion, one of which was this audience idea.
I created more refined versions of the selected eight ideas using Adobe XD and constructed illustrative visual narratives for them. I also discussed these ideas with my design team and refined the images and narratives based on their input. I used them in an online survey targeted at news commenters.
2. We Conducted Surveys on the Understandability of Magazines and Interest in Augmented Reality Content
The sketches start with the basic idea of the starting screen, followed by the tutorial screen for first-time users, and then the multi-content screen that briefly displays all the additional content of the current article. The remaining screens are content screens, such as discussion area screens and image library screens, to which the user would navigate from the multi-content screen.
5. We Used MarvelApp and Photoshop for Prototyping
News comment sections provide an opportunity to maintain public discourse. However, uncivil commenting is unfortunately common. We explored how to address this issue through speculative design. After creating eight slightly strange design proposals, we asked 439 news commenters from around the world to react to them in an online survey. We hoped that our proposals would provoke the commenters to reflect on them. Fortunately, that is what happened: we received a large amount of diverse, relatively in-depth reflections on the proposals.