Product Psychology: Teaching Students How to Get Inside User's Heads

The process of conducting user research and utilizing that research to drive design is standard curriculum for any industrial design program. It's typically taught as one of the first of many design process steps in project based studio courses. But with equal emphasis on each step, there is little time to learn about the many research and development tools available and how to use them. 

How would learning outcomes be improved if the processes of conducting user research and its utilization were placed under a highly focused microscope, enabling students to learn all of the necessary details?

At Art Institute Hollywood, industrial design students are tasked with developing a new product idea that will be manufactured by a client company, for one or more target user groups. After carefully studying the client company and its products, students focus their microscopes on the target user's lifestyle and daily lives.

As an example, a student with a client company that manufactures quality plastic cases, and target user group that includes teenage girls, developed a new product idea: unique travel make-up cases for women. The student went one step further, and verified the designs by surveying test subjects from the target user group.

My experience is that students that have this focused opportunity - are better designers. And their product designs are better informed as well.

Do Design Students Differ From School to School?

I've taught a wide range of students in a quite a wide range of design schools. In the midst of working with design students, I have found myself wondering whether they differ from one school to the next. Do students at school A have distinct characteristics that set them apart from design students at school B, or school C, or school D?

Why would I even entertain the idea that students from one school might be different from those at another? Here's why: I am constantly told that this is the case by my students, and occasionally by non-students. "The students here are this way...", and "School A students are that way..." goes the usual rant.

So. I set about to take a look at this described "phenomenon" and determine for myself if it was indeed the case. Or not. What I found was this. Design students are both the same, and different - from one design school to the next.

In any design class, in any design school, students appear to be the same. There always seems to be lazy students and ambitious students, spoiled students and humble students, students that can't draw the left side of a barn and students that can render that barn so well you can touch it and feel it.

And at the same time, students in any design class, can be very different. They can be shaped by their design school. By its policies, its support (or lack), the design program itself, by its instructors, and by its administrators.

More importantly, I found that students that are ambitious, that are humble, that even if they can't draw the left side of a barn - want to learn how to render the entire barn (this is a metaphor) tend to overcome any obstacle. And tend to succeed.

Its good news. And its something I mention, whenever I hear the usual rant.