The research theme for my graduation project, Collecting For User Stories, has been inspired by conversations with students at the Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), where I teach Research & Design. In these conversations, the students expressed difficulties in formulating the urgency of a design. After observing students working on several (social) design projects, it became clear this seems to be associated with a gap between the design students’ own commitment to a project, and the needs of the purported user of the project. This led to the subject of this research: how to teach user-centred design.

At the WdKA, the curriculum is built around the preferred profiles of commercial, social or autonomous designers. I am committed to finding out how this new generation of designers formulates the purpose of design in the context of the cultural diversity of a city like Rotterdam and in an age where technology is changing the way designers work.

In this research, I observe designers in relation to the future users of their work. I learned how documenting the different stages of a (multi-media) user story can help to discern and contextualise subjective information about the user. With an understanding of the relevance of user stories to the design process, I set out to experiment with and observe potential ways in which students might acquire user stories. I used the method of transformative learning to design tangible tools for experiential research into the empathic moments in what I call ‘user-centred research’. By employing the method of user stories, designers can share the urgency of a design within a team, and fuel the serendipity of ideation. A collection of user stories can potentially inform a design practice on the purpose of design in a larger social-political context.

External critic: Liesbeth Huybrechts (associate Professor, ArcK Research Group, Faculty of Architecture and Arts, University of Hasselt, Belgium)