Human-Centered Design: How to Focus on People When You Solve Complex Global Challenges

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- 2 years ago
Human-centered design is vital because it ensures that we create solutions tailored to human needs, cultures, and societies. It is a discipline that emphasizes a people-centric approach, solving the right problems, recognizing the interconnectedness of everything, and not rushing to solutions. It involves working with multidisciplinary teams and experts, and most importantly, it has to come from the people, embracing a community-driven design approach. This approach is a subset of humanity-driven design, which aims to address the major challenges humanity faces and, ultimately, save the planet.
Human-centered design (HCD) is a methodology that places the user at the heart of the design process. It seeks to deeply understand users' needs, behaviors and experiences to create effective solutions catering to their unique challenges and desires. HCD emphasizes empathy, extensive user research, and iterative testing to ensure that the final product or solution genuinely benefits its end-users and addresses broader societal issues.
Agile is primarily a project management and product development approach that values delivering workable solutions and iterating based on customer feedback. Agile teams break projects into small, manageable chunks and work in short bursts, called "sprints," which allows for frequent reassessment and course corrections.
While there's some overlap in their collaborative and iterative natures, the core difference lies in their objectives: HCD is about understanding and solving for the human experience, while agile is about efficiently managing and adapting work processes to changing requirements.
Design thinking is a broader concept that includes human-centered design to solve major problems on a global and local scale. Human Centered Design is narrower in scope and aims to make interactive systems usable and useful.
For a more thorough understanding of these design approaches, please watch this informative video.
Video copyright info
IBM 701 by Dan (CC BY-SA 2.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/94366076@N00/3432301223
Dual Colors by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/8399025@N07/2289491442
USAF/IBM SAGE by Joi Ito (CC BY 2.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/35034362831@N01/494395374/
Human-centered design, as explained by Don Norman in the video above, focuses on people and their needs, even when addressing broad societal issues. It emphasizes creating solutions that cater to individuals, communities, and larger groups. Although it tackles significant challenges, its essence remains rooted in understanding and designing for humanity.
Human-centered design is used to design efficient and usable products. However, Don Norman encourages designers to apply the principles of human-centered design to address large societal problems to ensure solutions meet the needs and experiences of people.
As highlighted in the video above, human-centered designers collaborate with professionals from other fields like engineering, computer science, and public health. HCD’s uniqueness lies in emphasizing design by the people and for the people.
While both prioritize the user, human-centered design is broader than UX design. UX often focuses on websites and digital interfaces, as mentioned in this video.
In contrast, human-centered design encompasses all types of products and indeed even larger societal challenges to ensure solutions cater to people's needs and experiences.
Human-centered design prioritizes understanding and addressing the needs of people. Unlike designs that emphasize aesthetics over usability, human-centered design values function and user well-being, as highlighted in this video.
It considers the broader socio-technical system, ensuring sustainable and user-centric solutions.
Discover the principles of human-centered design through Interaction Design Foundation's in-depth courses: Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman offers a contemporary perspective on design thinking, while Design for a Better World with Don Norman emphasizes designing for positive global impact. To deepen your understanding, Don Norman's seminal book, "Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered," from MIT Press, is an invaluable resource.
Here’s the entire UX literature on Human-Centered Design by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place: