Designing Delight for Undelightful Experiences

Designing to make a difference in a user’s life often means wrestling with the idea of designing delight in undelightful experiences. What do designers do when faced with patients with cancer? Or a student who can’t pay back their loans? We as designers cannot fix every problem that these users face, and many of their pain points we discover have severe consequences. Identifying small, but meaningful, opportunities is how we can design to make a difference. This talk will include case examples of research and projects from healthcare and higher education as well as overarching principles I’ve developed to help identify areas of opportunity for social impact fields.