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Why psychology needs to be taught at design school
Working as designers, we create products and services that are strategically curated to help humans and their needs. But I identified a gap between what we design and how the user ultimately behaves when using the product.
We design products according to how we think people might respond, only to have them engage with it in a totally unexpected manner.
This gap partially comes from the fact that our design schools completely overlook the human psychology aspect of it, and that these conflicts could easily be mitigated by having a coherent knowledge of the field.
Designing skills + A comprehensible understanding of human psychology= A good, serviceable design
While we invest years cultivating our design skills by sketching, learning new softwares,practicing visualisation etc, we somehow end up completely ignoring the other important element of the equation that makes a good design–human psychology.
Most designers I know see psychology as this complicated approach to improving the design and for that reason neglect this part of research and analysis. However, you don’t need to be a Ph.D. in psychology to use it at your work effectively.
No one is asking you to get into details of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories or understand Skinner’s radical behaviorism approaches, but you can at least extract from these, what you, as a designer should know and eventually apply in your design thinking process.
This realization made me read intensively about basic psychological theories (Coursera’s Introduction to Psychology by Yale University is a good place to start), making me recognize the value of it.
