Putting people in the centre of design: what does this really mean?

Modern forward-thinking design people often put people at the centre of their design work, and talk about "co-creation", "codesign" and similar terms, but I think there is a challenge to be made that the relationship between the "co-designer" and the "designer" might not be quite as evenly balanced as it should be. This talk is based on work we are doing at the UCL PEARL (Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory) to understand how exactly the "person" can really be at the centre of design. This means understanding multiple information strands - no conventional discipline covers all the necessary components of this relationship, so we have to fuse disciplines together to begin to understand what is (or should be - or could be) happening. We do this in practice, with a variety of scales, from understanding the neurons and their responses to impulses from the environment to the way in which those neurons determine choices about the movements need to, for example, board a bus, walk in a street, play in a park, navigate a supermarket, cope with being on a crowded metro train, decide whether or not to cross a road in front of an approaching car, or even to express a patient's sense of pain to a medical practitioner. This leads us to start thinking not only about designs that could help any of these problems, but also about the process of person-centred design itself. We do all this at life scale and more will be revealed in the talk!

Prof. Nick Tyler is the Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at University College London.

This seminar will be held via Zoom   

Meeting ID: 910 3313 3550 
Passcode: 711409