Xue Pei (裴雪) holds a PhD in Design, is an Assistant Professor, and is a member of the Design+Strategies research group at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano.

Her research mainly focuses on applying design (thinking) approaches and methods as a strategic catalyst for fostering innovation in organisations in both private and non-profit sectors. Particularly, her research interests are design for organisational change, strategic design for responsible business, and design for systemic transition. Currently, her work addresses the development of design-driven strategies to transform the furniture sector through servitization towards sustainability and circularity.

She is experienced in working with interdisciplinary and intercultural teams. Over the past five years, she has co-led EU-funded, national, and international research projects. Additionally, she has participated in numerous strategic and service design projects for clients across various sectors. She gives lectures at design schools across Europe and Asia and publishes articles in international scientific journals and conference proceedings.

Q: What does user experience mean in your work?

XP: User experience is at the core of my work.

As designers and design researchers, we consider users at every step of our research and design processes, and every activity that we conduct has the objective of providing solutions that answer the users’ needs and are friendly to use. Therefore, user experience, for me, is highly related to a deep and comprehensive understanding of the users, which is fundamental before any design activities and decisions. It involves the entire journey of how users interact with the designed solutions. The user experience considers a complete process from how users know about the solutions (pre-use phase) to how users use and interact with the product and service systems (use phase), and finally, to the post-use phase, which addresses maintaining the relationship with the users.

There are several aspects that I would like to highlight when talking about user experience. Firstly, everything should be considered from the users’ perspective. No matter what solutions we are designing and developing, we need to guarantee that we really put ourselves in the users’ “shoes” to understand the problem and thinking solutions. Secondly, as designers and design researchers, we look not only at what and how users behave in a certain way, but more importantly, we often work on “why” users behave that way. This is the key to understanding users’ deep wants and desires.

Q: From your perspective, what are the potentials and challenges of UX design in urban and transport planning?

XP: Throughout the service design research project, we prioritize the UX principles across all phases—research, design, and implementation.

In the research phase, our focus begins with a comprehensive understanding of the users: what they say, how they act, their behaviors, and the underlying reasons for those behaviors. This deep dive into user understanding also includes analyzing their physical and digital contexts.

Considering the use and post-use phases in the service design and development phases is crucial. The design of a good user experience begins with how users first learn about and engage with the service. This includes carefully designing the communication strategy and selecting the most effective communication channels.

To apply the UX principles in the whole design process, especially in the research phase, I often use the very practical toolkit Design Kit developed by IDEO. Regarding service design tools, I would suggest these two: Service Design Tools and  Service Design Toolkit.

Q: Can you describe your research project on urban walkability assessment with Generation Alpha?

XP: This research project “Walkability: la prospettiva della generazione Alpha” is part of Politecnico di Milano’s annual event – Festival dello sviluppo sostenibile in the year of 2022, and it is a continuum of a previous research project Longevicity, funded by Fondazione Cariplo.

My colleagues from Design+Strategies and I have engaged Generation Alpha in co-assessing neighborhood walkability. This research project takes a unique approach that gives users an active role in both the research and design phases. Rather than providing users with predefined parameters to evaluate walkability, we design simple tools that empower Generation Alpha to learn what walkability means and how they can contribute to the assessment activities, including collecting different types of data about walkability.

Here is a paper that we have published on presenting the research project.

“Pei, X., D’Ambrosio, S., & Sedini, C. (2023). The city of care through walkability and proximity. Researching on and with Generation Alpha on urban walkability assessment. Cumulus Conference Proceedings Antwerp 2023, Antwerp, Belgium.”