Design for a better world

I've been dabbling in design and related disciplines as part of my work over the past 5 years. This has been across areas such as Information Design, UI-UX and Dashboarding, primarily for solving the problem of data consumption. The focus has been on practical application of these disciplines across several domains, variety of user groups, different devices and form factors. 

Quite recently, I've renewed my focus in this area and have been trying to delve deeper in the discipline to understand what makes anything functionally better, easier to use, while also driving up the emotional connect. There a lot of questions bubbling up at several levels in my mind that I'm struggling for answers. Here is a sample: 

• How do you bypass the clutter and engage directly with your target audience? Why do things have to be unpleasant 
• Why do you have to teach anyone to use a computer, while most people don't need instructions to use basic functions of a mobile phone?
• How do you make new technologies seem undaunting, or rather more inviting for the majority of people?
• Why should we live with daily irritants, for instance, struggling to identify the right switch when you want to turn on lights in a room?

I will keep sharing more thoughts on these and also a profiling of good and bad designs that I bump into.

A world without user manuals, sign boards or loud announcements, one where thoughts can directly translate into actions, is perhaps a better designed world.