Design as a Reflection of User Experience

This article presents preliminary results from a study developed at a control room of a passenger transport system, namely a subway system, as part of an ongoing doctorate research from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that designing requires the retrieval of the user experience and its recognition as an essential part of the development of work artifacts. While building their daily use experience, the user creates strategies in order to overcome the frailties of the projects. Indeed, the understanding of the subsystems of an artifact is paramount, for this is where the designer encounters the variables that need to be dealt with. The designer manipulates these subsystems both simultaneously and separately. In fact, in the face of difficulties, there is a tendency to fragment the problem and to use concepts in an attempt to help determine the requirements that will be handled separately. Such conceptual independence among variables, promoted by the designing process, leads to some mismatches. The experience of the users and designers with this artifact emerges as an alternative to provide information to the project and raise their necessities, decreasing the mismatches. To achieve that, methodologies such as the Ergonomic Work Analysis and the Post-Occupancy Evaluation offer possibilities to recover the experience, thus requalifying the designing process.