Task 5: Paul Bennett: Designing Details

I think that the take home message from Paul Bennetts "Designing Details" is that to have a product that satisfies the need of the target market the designer himself must fully and completely understand and see from the target markets point of view.

what he is trying to say is that you cannot design a product for what you think the target market wants, or what your idea of what would look good for the target market is.
this is shown in the example of the nurses and the device they use during surgery. the original idea may have been to have a sexy machine that looks really slick and shiny, but when they actually looked at the interaction that occurs during surgery they discovered that infact the nurse used one of her hands to comfort the patient and this infact was much much much more important then a sexy machine. They then designed around this concept.

He also points out that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones that are right infont of us but we dont see them because we are concentrating so hard on designing cool things, but if you "unlearn" something and try to look at it afresh, relearn something you do all the time, a better solution will probably occur to you, a simpler one thatwas there all along.

i think paul bennett is trying to say that when designing a product "small is the new big", look at the true needs of the target market, observe the surrounding and design for them.