Who will benefit from your design? This is a question that you need to ask yourself whenever you work on any project. The answer can be , "It's for me." But you won ' t get away with that one very often. If it ' s an exploration of new tech or a design project done as research, then th ese reason s might work. But in the long run there must be an audience for, or beneficiary of, your work.
An audience can be a very small , or very large group or even an individual. So you could design for a friend with special interests or abilities, but always consider they might just be the starting point and the design might have further implications. The design could be just for children aged 3-5. It might be for one religious group, for the people of a mountain village, for an art audience, for people with different abilities or for everyone. The important thing is that you think about this and state who the intended users/consumers are.
Obviously if you start with user research this will help define the group but as I've mentioned you must consider that the end result might have other possible audiences. My student who studied Goths ended up creating wearable technology to reveal their tattoos. She then recognised that this technology has more widespread uses in less niche fashion areas. So you should always keep your eyes open for potential spin-off audiences.
Explaining who it's for helps you to explain your work . I t stops your work from floating in an abstract design space and lets others get a handle on it. If it's a commercially angled project (consumer electronics, web service) you might even go as far as saying what shops would sell it or how it would be advertised. Making fake adverts or magazine articles about your project can sometimes help in its explanation and development or just clear up who it's for.
This applies to any design work, screen, product, even artworks. In the real world this will become more important when you deal with clients. They might be basing the whole project on one potential user group.
Say who it's for but don't go around saying "It's for everyone." It's clearly not.
"Who is it for?" was suggested by Andy Bardill from Product Design and Engineering Dept of Middlesex University, UK.
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/subjects/ad/pde/index.htm
Rory Hamilton 2005
