Activity-centered design focuses on the behavior surrounding particular tasks. Users still play a significant role, but it is their behavior rather than their goals and needs that is important.

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Various types of design and design approaches include:
- Activity-Centered Design
- Designing for Autistic People
- Emotional Design
- Ethical Design
- Genius Design
- Inclusive Design
- Industrial Design
- Product Design
- Systems Design

Types of Design

Saffer, D. (2010) Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (2nd edn). New Riders Press, Indianapolis, IN.

Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer

Helen Sharp, Yvonne Rogers, and Jenny Preece. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2019.

Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (Sharp et al., 2019)

Activity-Centered Design

Inclusive design "empowers designers to create products whose experiences serve as many people as possible."  It is a design process that seeks to create products that are accessible to all, no matter their background.

Inclusive Design

Designs can affect a wide range of people, so it's important to follow principles of ethical design:

-Usability

-Accessibility

-Privacy

-Transparency & Persuasion

-User Involvement

-Focus

-Sustainability

Ethical Design

According to World Health Organization, "one in 160 children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)."(WHO, 2019). ASD affects people’s ability in communication and behavior, and an autistic designer, Irina Rusakova comments that “they feel most comfortable online — learning, communicating, shopping, and gaming” (Rusakova, 2020). She also mentions that products designed for autistic users should accommodate their needs instead of trying to fix or change their habits and emphasizes the importance of “clear visual structure and consistent layout for similar types of information” in the UI design for autistic people (Rusakova, 2020).

Designing for Autistic People

Industrial design(ID) is the practice of designing and developing ideas for product optimization, such as value, function, system, and appearance, to benefit both users and manufacturers. The focuses of ID include intuitive creativity and the scientific decision-making process. Some examples of ID are iPod and Chair by Charles Eames. It aims to identify the strengths and weaknesses of competitors and helps to discover the competitive edges and shortcomings of a given product.

Industrial design(ID)

Product design is the process that is utilized to combine the needs of both users and business goals to create successful products. Product designers use their work to ensure that products are suitable for the company’s long-term business needs. They work to define product goals, create product roadmaps, and ultimately help release a successful product. The main difference between product design and UX design is that product designers are focused on the brand’s product in the market over time. 

Product Design

To create a successful product, there are three levels of emotional design:
1. Visceral design: an immediate, deep-level gut reaction to the product. It’s the first impression.
2. Behavioral design: the product has to feel good, look good, and perform well. It’s about how the product, structure, or system, as viewed by the users, meets their needs and requirements.
3. Reflective design: it’s about self-image, personal satisfaction, memories, reflecting back on the experience.

Emotional Design

Systems design is a structured, rigorous, and holistic design approach that focuses on context and is particularly appropriate for complex problems. In systems design, it is the system (that is, the people, computers, objects, devices, and so on) that the center of attention, while the users' role is to set the goals of the system.

Systems Design

Genius Design relies largely on the experience and creative flair of a designer. Jim Leftwich, an experienced interaction designer interviewed by Dan Saffer (2010, pp. 44–45), prefers the term "rapid expert design." In this approach, the users' role is to validate ideas generated by the designer, and users are not involved during the design process itself.

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