My design philosophy can be understood as “the ripple effect”: Design, in any form, once introduced, causes disturbance to a system. Design is not just a practice, but also a method of intervention within systems and a system itself. Hence, designers (like me) must take responsibility for the work they put out and help realize the consequences of design decisions.
We often get so ingrained in the work we do that we fail to see the wider effect we have upon a system. For instance, the curb-cut effect, though specifically applicable to universal design, illustrates the effects of a single design decision: an act of activism echoed through the world’s infrastructure as all curbs now have an extra "slab of concrete".
On the flip side, there are unintentional ramifications of design decisions. My mother is a restaurant manager who works with multiple food delivery apps. When I visited her last year, she told me about an unnamed app’s new design update—and she was absolutely furious. Having the experience that she has and being the age that she is, she did not need the constant repeated ringing notification that wouldn’t shut up unless you spent more than five seconds addressing it (something that shouldn’t take more than half a second), especially not in combination with the colored text that she cannot see under the yellow-ish restaurant lighting. She kept saying, “You office workers need to get out into the world, you know nothing when you are just sitting at the desk” (imagine this in a Chinese-mother-who-really-just-wants-you-to-succeed tone). I couldn’t agree more. Designers broke the system and I got an earful about it.
Maybe all this is to say that I believe we need to properly do our design job. Empathize, iterate, communicate, over and over and over again until we truly understand the context, conceptualize the needs, and make sure my mother doesn’t tell me about terrible design in the car ride home again.
(Also my name is Ri and Ri is in "ripple" and I hope my attempt to be witty made you smile).