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Design Process in Daily Life
Ponderings of life often bring strange questions and innovative perspectives. The design process allows an organized system to analyze these otherwise abstract notions. By asking “what is? what if? what wows? what works?” when approaching life on the daily, the benefits from input to outcome may exude functionally exponential results.
What is “daily life?”
Life is a combination of survival, existence, and realizations of curiosity. Google’s Dictionary Box (based on the definitions from Oxford Language) defines daily life as: “the activities and experiences that constitute a person’s normal existence” (2023).
Survival is a primitive form of existence in which security needs must be met on a day-to-day basis. An existence based on survival is vastly different from one based on a focus of desires and wants as a result of curiosities (such as the use of electricity) consistently realized. This lends to interesting developments in cognition and varied responses to stimuli as basic task-switching must be adjusted according to presence of situation (Guastello, 2013).
What if?
What if survival and existence needs are met? What if realizations of curiosity are pursued?
“The ILO report for the 1976 World Employment Conference defined basic needs in terms of food,
clothing, housing, education, and public transportation” (Emmerij, p.1, 2010).
Once basic needs are met, focus on desires can become so strong that that the initial stability to existence may enter a zone of threat to sustainability. Realizations of curiosity can lead from progressive inventions such as the wheel or space flight to incarcerations and societal dysfunction.
When desires threaten the balance of basic security, the plausibility for long-term stable investments of energy to desire must be considered in the following steps:
- What wows?
- What works?
What wows?
Humans are innately prone to curiosity. The magnetic forces that interact with the water present in a body that one utilizes operate on a balance of poles and meridians throughout various processing systems (RationalWiki, 2023). The constant concentric flow creates a tidal effect within the magnetic process, thus inducing a human pendulum effect. Taking into consideration that a point of stasis is present in every swing, one is able to locate a center of static harmony from which to vicariously observe the extremes of the arc. By surveying from a point of chaotic stasis, the extremes properly operate as the “wow” factor bringing realistic balance into the present.
The “what wows?” drives goal-seeking regardless of location on a swing as behavior ultimately determines the result without relation to the concept of goals. One may daily find a “wow” factor in a documentary on Shackleton’s journey, yet continue to move through an existence that is not present to this this factor.
What works?
“What’s life?/a magazine/Where’d you get it?/newsstand/How much?/50 cents/Ain’t got it!/That’s tough!/What’s tough?/Life./What’s life?/a magazine…”
Throughout cultures, lymerics such as these are often uses as learning tools to improve language and communication. Upon further inspection, it can be seen as an example of how the human existence is built on cyclical curiosity. By way of repeated questioning and answering, a trial-and-error process of divergent thinking known to be most proficient among humans leads to the insight and reasoning necessary for application of original thought (Goldstein, 2018).
Conclusion
When utilizing cognizant mindfulness and divergent thinking, the process of daily life becomes a stable system of security that meets needs while encouraging wants to fuel the realizations of curiosity. By searching for stasis, the human centric design can be realized every day.
References
Emmerij, L., The Basic Needs Development Strategy – United Nations. (2010). Retrieved January 1, 2023, from https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2010_emmerij.pdf.
Goldstein, E. B. (2018). Cognitive psychology: connecting mind research and everyday experience (5th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Google. (2023). Google search: what is daily life. Retrieved January 1, 2023, from shorturl.at/mEH28.
Guastello, S. J. (2013). Human factors engineering and ergonomics: A systems approach, second edition. Taylor & Francis Group.
Meridians. RationalWiki. (2023). Retrieved January 1, 2023, from https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Meridians.
Photo by Maghie Raye
Human Centric Designs 