Design (and its negotiation)

The two authors of this collaborative reflection, Stefanie and Eila, are final year NUS-trained designers coming from different fields of design. Stefanie’s (she/her) design education stemmed from her second major in Innovation and Design (iDP), which focused on innovating new products and services in response to real-world problems. In contrast, Eila’s (they/them) major in Communications and New Media (CNM) meant that their design journey centred on digital design, particularly in user interface and experience (UI/UX) design for websites and applications. In the writing of this reflection, we discovered that despite our different backgrounds in iDP and CNM, we were both taught to view the design-thinking process (Figure 1) as a foundational approach to design.

As illustrated in Figure 1, the process is procedural and iterative, with each new step depending on and affected by the previous. If a design encounters a roadblock, the designer can return to an earlier stage to make adjustments; for example, if the obstacle occurs in the “prototype” phase, the designer is recommended to return to either the “empathise” or “ideate” phase to come up with possible solutions. The design-thinking process forms the core concept anchoring this reflection piece, wherein we will each explore an avenue by which the process led us both to making certain assumptions, which were inevitably challenged when faced with our real-life internship experiences. Stefanie’s experience at her UX internship challenged her understanding of the “empathise” stage of the design-thinking process while Eila’s production internship made them rethink whether designers needed to claim “ownership” over the design-thinking process. Ultimately for us both, these experiences have revealed that our initial approach to the design-thinking process was too rigid, and through this realization we have both grown in our capacity as designers to adapt to various needs, constraints and realities of every unique context.

Starting with Stefanie’s experience, the iDP curriculum showcased the stages of the design-thinking process best in EG2201A User-Centred Collaborative Design, which emphasised framing design problems from a user-centred perspective and defining testable hypotheses, and EG3301R Ideas to Proof-of-Concept, a year-long module where Stefanie’s team developed and implemented a product solution (Figure 2).

As the first iDP module she took, EG2201A – with its plethora of techniques like “how-might-we” and user journey maps – impressed upon Stefanie that understanding user needs is the crucial starting point of any design process. This emphasis deepened in EG3301R, the most substantial design project she undertook, where the client’s needs, as the user, played a central role in guiding decision-making. Figure 3 is a diagram that maps key user insights from the initial client meeting and illustrates how they shaped both the project’s methodology and its final prototype. For example, "CO₂/kg in production" (Figure 3a, yellow highlight) and "density" (Figure 3a, green highlight) were metrics the client prioritised, which the team later used to evaluate material options (Figure 3b). The client’s suggestion to begin with the "top and bottom support" (Figure 3a, blue highlight) also helped narrow the scope of initial prototypes (Figure 3c). Seeing how early stage “empathising” with the user shaped so many critical design decisions, Stefanie came to recognise that understanding user needs at the outset is crucial for laying the groundwork for all subsequent stages of the design process.

However, Stefanie’s UX internship in Year 1 did not place the same emphasis on user research. While she still engaged with the “empathise” stage, it unfolded in a non-linear and fragmented way, diverging from the structured, step-by-step model shaped by her iDP coursework. Joining an autonomous cleaning robot company for her first UX role, she encountered a more fluid and ad-hoc arrangement of design stages. Instead of beginning with understanding the users, Stefanie was immediately tasked with creating a high-fidelity “easy onboarding” user flow – effectively jumping straight into the “prototype” stage.

Without a solid understanding of user needs or the company’s branding, she struggled to see how meaningful design could take place. Confronted with this gap, she instinctively revisited the “empathise” stage by seeking clarification from her supervisor on the different user levels (eg. cleaners, supervisors, and administrators) who would interact with the robot at various stages. As shown in the notes she prepared for the discussion in Figure 4, her initial confusion about different user types (e.g. cleaner vs. non-cleaner) led her to question the purpose and structure of differentiated onboarding flows, highlighting the difficulty of entering later stages of design without a firm foundation in user research. Although her supervisor gave positive feedback, her designs were never implemented during her internship.

In a later task, Stefanie was asked to craft UX messages for the robot’s “Operation Failed” screens. Though more contained than her previous onboarding task, it still drew heavily on her understanding of users, which at that point had been built informally through earlier tasks, team discussions, and repeated product exposure. Unlike the structured user research in her iDP modules, this ongoing, ad hoc form of “empathising” proved just as valuable. Drawing on this accumulated context, she adopted a light-hearted tone aligned with the brand, and her work was implemented (Figure 5). Without that understanding, she likely would have defaulted to generic phrasing (e.g. Cleaning process failed), missing the chance to reflect the brand’s personality.

With this, Stefanie came to see the “empathise” stage not as a fixed starting point, but as a continuous and adaptive process that can take on many forms, ranging from direct conversations with users to insights built informally through earlier tasks and team discussions. Yet, regardless of how it unfolds, grounding design in user needs remained essential in every design project.

Moving onto Eila’s experience, they also learned the design-thinking process across various modules, as seen in Figure 6. NM2103 Quantitative Research Methods focused on methods for discovering, defining, and analysing problems, while NM3243 User Experience Design taught them user testing and testing skills, as well as how to translate data into designs. Finally, CS3240 Interaction Design focused on techniques to visualise designs via different stages of wireframing and prototyping using both traditional techniques and software.

In taking these modules across their undergraduate candidature, Eila came to believe that since each stage of the design-thinking process had to be conducted by designers in order to most effectively inform the next, the design-thinking process “belonged” to designers. One reason contributing to their belief that the process ownership went to designers is evident in the planning of their user interviews for NM3243. In this module, Eila’s team designed a video conferencing system to help software engineers prepare for technical coding interviews. As the interview’s purpose was to inform the design of the final product, each of the questions had to directly inform various aspects of the design. For example, the initial interview question about the accuracy of preparation platforms to real-world scenarios had to be further researched to validate that the datapoint would be useful for their design. This is seen in Figure 7, an excerpt from the interview question document and the team's notes based on the professor's verbal feedback.

This level of rigour in ensuring each interview question was directly linked to the design was applied to every proposed question, and those that were deemed inapplicable were removed. For example, the frequency of a user’s interview practice could not be adequately validated as something that would affect the design, so the question was removed (Figure 8).

Evidently, each stage of the design-thinking process was intrinsically intertwined with the others. This is why Eila came to believe that designers necessarily had to help the entirety of the design-thinking process; if a non-designer conducted interviews, then the questions asked may not be useful for the design. If it was necessary to involve non-designers, then they would have to be guided by designers who knew the entirety of the process and understood how each stage affected the next. This logic extends through all the design-thinking stages, and in this way, designers “owned” the design-thinking process.

However, this assumption was challenged when Eila undertook a semester-long internship as a Production Intern at a public relations agency. As a producer, their role was not directly related to design, but they were able to work closely with the Creative team, who were in-charge of all design-related tasks. This included pitching video ideas for various brand campaigns, developing them and ultimately turning user research into complete designs. In other words, they should have been the team overseeing the comprehensive design-thinking process for any given project. Yet, to Eila’s surprise, this was not the case.

Instead, each stage of the process was undertaken by separate teams, some of which had no design background, without the guidance of the Creative team who would ultimately design the final product. For example, user research would be conducted by the Market team while the Client team facilitated iterative approvals and communications with the client. These map to the “empathise” and “test” stages of the design-thinking process respectively, but the Creative team would be entirely uninvolved in both. Despite this, projects were completed smoothly, with Eila even describing the workflow like “a well-oiled machine” in their final internship report submission for NM3550C CNM Internship Programme (Figure 9).

Through this, Eila realised that their belief about process ownership was misguided, though the intention was fair. While having a single party of designers overseeing the process would ensure each stage was relevant, their internship experience revealed that the same effect could be achieved if the team responsible for each stage was able to have open inter-team communication. Furthermore, they came to realise that in real-world scenarios, there was no need for perfect translations between each stage of the design-thinking process; larger corporate bodies could afford to ask interview questions that were “irrelevant” or “adjacent” to the final design. Unlike in school, where the focus was on theoretical performance, the working world emphasised the final product – as long as this was achieved, the means of getting there could be as inefficient as it needed to be.

To conclude, our experiences revealed how we carried forward assumptions from school – shaped by the rigour and structure imposed on the design-thinking process within the academic setting. These beliefs, while valid in theory, were challenged by the more business-oriented and outcome-driven realities of our internships. We both needed to take more relaxed, less rigorous approaches to the design-thinking process – Stefanie had to reframe her understanding of the “empathise” stage as something that could be continuous and informal rather than front-loaded and structured, while Eila had to reconsider the necessity of having designers “own” the entire process. Most notably, since our real-world experiences challenged our assumptions and not our theoretical foundations as designers, these internship experiences actively contributed to our education, not upended it. Ultimately, this has allowed us both to become better designers, with strong theoretical and technical foundations, and also with the ability to adapt to real-world requirements and expectations.