This is a memento mori to an architecture of aristocracy.
All parts of the building have been user tested and approved for office use in accordance with North American safety requirements.
Can you tell me the last time you were frustrated with a product? What features did you dislike and why? Has this changed your previous experience, and if so, how?
These are the typical questions for a user interview as part of a project team’s ideation and prototyping phases. UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover design problems and opportunities. Product design is centered around an explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments. Participants are involved throughout the project life cycle, and more importantly, they become an integral part of the evaluation process that drives iteration.
Why is this not the case for architecture?
“Architecture as a product” is a memento-mori to an age of architecture shrouded by the aristocracy of polemical figures. It builds upon the provocation of interrogating building design by leveraging deep knowledge of user research and psychology to create novel interventions of value to the targeted stakeholder community. Recognizing market opportunities makes architects better designers because it demonstrates a holistic understanding of a building in relation to a larger socio-economical model. Architects must be able to envision why people want to use what they have built and how to accommodate different user personas and preferences.
The design process requires navigating through a system of spaces, each eliciting different forms of engagement, activities, and emotional responses. That’s why design thinking can feel chaotic to people first experiencing it. Design projects ultimately pass through two spaces (ref. Canonic Object 1) the solution space and the problem space. Unfortunately, architects are guilty of neglecting the latter by not conducting user research and acquiring data to support what they perceive as the problem.
* Notice in the Roschuni Process Map, there is an equal weighting between problem development and solution development.
In the Vanna Venturi House we see architecture take on a submissive role, by positioning an antiheroic and feminist figure at the center of a building, Venturi ridicules the notion that architects are godlike creators.
Taking an empathetic approach, we should take inventory of existing knowledge and conduct exploratory research to identify pain points in “othered” experiences.
Canonic Object 2: Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi 1964
Canonic Object 1: Roschuni (2012) Process Map
A Norman door is named after Don Norman, a pioneer in the field of user experience UX/UI design. It details any door that needs to be clarified or easier to use. For something so intuitive as to push or pull, some doors require printed instructions to operate.
A poor user experience extends to the most fundamental and minute details. If you feel frustrated by this product, please don’t hesitate to contact 341333-9540 for detail and feedback.
In The Design of Everyday Things, the seven stages of action are broken down into one goal, three executable steps and three evaluative measures: • Forming the goal
Forming the plan or intention
Specifying an action
Executing the action
Perceiving the state of the world
Interpreting the state of the world
Evaluating the outcome
Each action requiring a cognitive differentiation between visceral, behavioral and reflective.
Applying a basic understanding of user experience design. The Node Chair was designed in response to a changing educational environment where the space and furniture needed to respond to a more collaborative and active learning curriculum.
Innovative design allows for educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses.
The Bilbao Effect has been well documented as iconic architecture generating economic growth, uplifting cities’ status, calling to foreign investors and visitors.
The museum is pertinent to architecture as a product because Gehry recognizes an market opportunity in his own architecture applied to a post industrial city to instigate change and economic boom.
“Many people believe that Edison’s greatest invention was the modern R&D laboratory. Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, he broke the mold of the “lone genius inventor” by creating a team-based approach to innovation.”
- Design Thinking By Tim Brown 2008
The Seattle Public Library is canon-breaking on its own. What connects this project to a human-centered design process is Koolhaas’s rigorous interrogation of the modern library program. Recognizing the library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, the building aimed to facilitate a multi-media and social user experience.
It’s hard to talk about architecture as a product without acknowledging it’s shadow, the cycle of investment and disinvestment that shape the built environment. In industrial design, there is a necessary practice of planned obsolescence.
How might building design consider obsolescence into practice?
Well here is an attempt. Controversy surrounding the demolition of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower presents us with a unique opportunity to reexamine the conflict between economic development and architectural conservation.
How the building might have performed if the design changed along with its marketing strategy?
*Please refer to Obsolescence: An Architectural History by Daniel Abramson to troubleshoot any questions.
Kramer, Julia, Celeste Roschuni, Qian Zhang, Lauren Zakskorn, and Alice Agogino. 2015. “Design Talking: An Ontology of Design Methods to Support a Common Language of Design.” In .
Norman, Donald A. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things. Revised and Expanded edition. New York, New York: Basic Books.
Schwartz, Frederic, Vincent Scully, and Robert Venturi. 1992. Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill. New York: Rizzoli.
“TheDesignExchange – BEST Lab UC Berkeley.” n.d. Accessed October 13, 2022. https://best.berkeley.edu/best-research/ thedesignexchange/.
Ulrich, Karl T. 2016. Product Design and Development. Sixth edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
“Usability Testing 101.” n.d. Nielsen Norman Group. Accessed October 13, 2022. https://www. nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/.