The techniques in the last lesson will help you develop a rich vocabulary of concepts related to your problem domain.

In this lesson we will look at the various ways in which this vocabulary can be structured to give you a more analytic understanding.  Taking this more analytic approach can reveal yet more distinctions, further expanding your domain vocabulary, or allow you to create rich models of the user behaviours and other aspects of the potential solution or situation in which it to be deployed.  Furthermore, this structuring allows you to identify the most appropriate inspirations for our work and use these to suggest solutions combining existing features in a novel and also principled way.

4.1  Vocabulary to Structure

The good/bad prompts in bad ideas method, and the externalisation techniques in the last section all encourage you to identify and name important aspects of your design space.  In this section we will discuss why this naming is important, and some of the kinds of vocabulary generated. We will start to identify the ways in which this may be structured to lead to a rich understanding of your problem domain, ways that will be elaborated in greater detail in further parts of this lesson.

4.2  Embrace Opposites

Linguists find that one of the most critical aspects is the binary distinction, the features that hep you distinguish the sound of an d’ and a ‘p’, or the semantic distinction between cat and not-cat.  It is easy to see the world in terms of dichotomies: black/white, left/right, introvert/extrovert, concrete/abstract.  Often in this course we have seen how embracing apparent opposites leads to more creative thinking.  In this section we will see how this can be applied to the distinctions that arise in your own problem domain – often turning either/or into both/and or seeing something in between.  Sometimes too, deliberately forcing these distinctions can feed your own emotional response leading to new ways of seeing.

4.3  Multiple Classifications

Are you a tidy librarian sorting your books by genre, author or colour?  When you visit a library or a museum, everything has its place, a single location in the hierarchy.  Even in this course each topic has to fit into a lesson, and a structure within each lesson.  However, you’ll also have seen those little two-by-two matrices beloved in many disciplines form management science to HCI: urgent/no-urgent on one axis with important/not-important; or local/remote on one axis with synchronous/asynchronous on the other.   Often these simple multiple classifications, where each ting is given a vale against two or more schemes, are more powerful than complex single classifications.  In this section we will see the many ways in which multiple classifications can give you additional power to explore, analyse and find inspiration for problems and ultimately synthesise novel solutions.

4.4  Models

You may have develop a rich vocabulary to describe the taste of your cup of tea, but when it doesn’t taste right how do you fix the problem?  It is likely that you will think about a model of the tea itself,: its constituents tea leaves, water, milk, maybe sugar; and the mechanism by which it was made: boiling water, adding to the tea leaves, pouring into a cup or mug, adding the milk.  This model helps you to decide whether the problem is that you didn’t properly boil the water, or maybe didn’t rinse the cup out properly after it had coffee in it last.

In this section we discuss the ways in which you can break down user experience to develop models of behaviour that can guide your design of new systems and solutions.