At IDEO, Jane Fulton Suri and her team use images to understand they ways that ordinary people use various objects in everyday use. The team has effectively developed a human-centered design process whereby they study how people interact with different environments in order to come up with new designs. Observing these everyday interactions we see how design plays a direct role in our lives and how it comes to change and shape our environment – and how we, in return, are shaped by it. Jane uses what she has sometimes witnessed herself or captured in a picture to learn “firsthand about the context, habits, rituals, priorities, processes and values of the people” , and by studying the images Jane and the team can ask themselves various questions about, how the user is interacting with objects they are using, what they do whilst using them and what activities they do when in the environment.
One example of Jane's work, which can be found on page 167 of the document is about a travel agent who developed her 'own unique way of holding conference calls'. Basically the travel agent calls every person that she wants to take part in the conference individually, and would switch the phones speaker functionality 'on' so that eventually, everyone could hear everyone. She could then do as she wanted, controlling the conference by muting, ending individual calls or picking up the handset in order to talk in private. This improvised way of what she clearly felt was a poorly designed or too expensive 'proper' conference call facility is actually quite visual and allowed her to easily keep track of active connections between all the callers.
In this example the travel agent has single-handedly designed a new system adapted to her unique situation which works for her. This is true for lots of things in real life as people can be extremely creative when they have to work with something which frustrates them, so they develop work a rounds and effectively re-invent a design to suit their own style and context. Despite knowing that almost all designs have their failings, Jane doesn't believes that not everything in our surroundings has to be re-thought or re-designed with some unique idea to make it more exciting. She says as designers, we shouldn't attempt to re-design everything we see in our daily life, instead we should concentrate on how we could improve things to make them simple and more efficient and try not to over-think.
