Devil's in the Detail: Design in Technology

by Rhea Majumdar

At the core of every great business, product and software is great design; it is the building block, the blueprint, the master plan. Design is that of empathetic utility -- it makes technology more human.

It is a broad discipline and spans across fields -fashion, technology, architecture, and so on. Within just technology, there are roles that have more prevalence now more than ever; they existed within broader roles for quite some time, but demanded their own specialization. Some include, but are not limited to: web designers, visual designers, UI designers, UX designers, augmented reality designers, game designers, animators, interaction designers, product/packaging designers, etc.

Designers within technology are tasked with understanding business etiquette and common practices and use that knowledge to strategize to create user-centric designs. Don Norman’s 'The Design of Everyday Things' summarizes the evolution of design’s role within technology well -- as he puts it, “The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology… and the challenge for the designer” (Norman, 2021, p. 34). It is definitely paradoxical, but designers all work under the same principle -- despite the digital age accounting for drastic changes in how we

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