O’Haire, Wes. “Mental Models for Designers.” Dropbox Design, https://dropbox.design/article/mental-models-for-designers. Accessed 19 Feb. 2020.
In O’Haire’s article she discusses seven mental models that she uses to help her and other designers solve problems, make decisions, and communicate more effectively and efficiently. She has three models for problem solving which are “First principles”, “Inversion”, and “Abstraction laddering”. In first principle, you focus on creating a problem statement and then break everything down into fundamental parts so that you can analysis those parts in hopes of creating a solution. With inverse, designers should focus on coming up with not only good solutions, but bad solutions as well. This way they can understand how to avoid those bad outcomes. And with abstraction laddering the designer will start with the initial problem statement, then ask a “how” question to create concrete statement, and then a “why” question to create an abstract statement. They can get the designer to think about the problem in different ways, therefore coming up with different solutions. O’Hiare’s models for decision making are the “Hard decision” model and “Confidence decides speed vs. quality”. She uses these models to compare her possible decisions and then to decide if she needs to focus on speed or quality. And lastly, her two models for communicating are the “What, so what, now what?” model and the “Diamond” model. With “What, so what, now what?” designers communicate to their team the “what” as in what will be done, the “so what” as in the why it should be done, and the “now what” explaining the next steps of the process. The Diamond model is a way to more elaborately explain you information and creates a format of how you should communicate it. Overall, these models help designers better organize their thoughts and ideas, evaluate their solutions, pick the best one, and communicate everything more clearly.
I found the quality of this information reliable and helpful. Each model was explained in an efficient way and the importance of each model was known. Not only that, but by giving multiple models, designers can choose the model that would be most efficient in that moment. While this article gave a general overview of each model, O’Haire also provided links to other pages that went into more detail of each of the seven models. However, for me the overview was detailed enough for me to get the big picture of it and how it can be helpful.
I picked this article because I have never done a project like this, so for me I didn’t even know where to begin, or where I will begin. I saw the title and thought maybe this could help me organize my thoughts better when the time comes, and it most certainly did. This article gave me a good idea of where I should start when it comes time to redesign the Greenspring Review. I can first identify the problem with it, brain storms solutions, good and bad, and then communicate this with my teacher and classmates. Maybe once that is figured out I will feel like I have a plan in designing it, rather than just going in and doing it on a whim. I feel with any project it is always important to start with the “why” of it, the reason we are here, and the discover the problems that exist.