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

It's very common for design students to say, "Oh! Let's tackle some of the world's most important problems!" So, off they go to India or  Africa or South America or wherever they think there's some need for clever, sophisticated designers to come in and help the poor people in whatever area of the world they wish to go.

And so, the designers spend a week, two weeks; rarely do they spend even a month. And they go around and they see real issues and they say, "Oh, we know how to work on that!" And they come back and they start to design something for their target country. The problem is that these are very clever people and they did see real problems and they did analyze the problem properly... but they really *do not understand* the people that they're designing for,

because they were there for what – a week? Two weeks? Even, at best, a month? People who live in foreign countries tell me – and I've lived in foreign countries, too, so I agree that, you know, after a year or two years or three years, you're just beginning to understand the country. In fact, in the first year, it's usually wonderful; everybody treats you well and you understand what's going on and you think, "Oh yeah, I understand the country." But, no, people are treating you well and they're being nice to you; they're not telling you the truth;

they're not letting you see what really goes on. And it's only after you've been there awhile, you discover what's really happening in the country. And awhile means *years*. So, you can't just do this, and what happens is the students, they develop these wonderful creative ideas, and quite often they give them to  the design contests in their country and they win prizes: how clever, how innovative, how wonderful. But when they get installed in the country, they *fail*. They fail for several different reasons.

Or sometimes they'll succeed but then they break. Everything breaks – that's not a crime. But when it breaks, the local people can't fix it. When you design, you have to understand what the capabilities are of the people you're designing for. But, more importantly, I believe that it is wrong to have outside experts come in and do something for other people. That's not how we get people to understand, to advance.

You know the old saying "If you're hungry, we could give you fish... but the better way is we'll *teach* you to fish." because if I teach you to fish, then  you can be self-sustaining *by yourself*. So, what I would recommend and what we do recommend here in our group in the University of California, San Diego, is we do community-based design – we go out to the world and we say, "Hey, you know, there are seven billion people in the world.

And a lot of these people are really creative and imaginative, and they understand their own problems. And they understand their capabilities and what they can do. And so, they already are starting to address  their problems, and so if we go in as designers and we learn from them, we watch them, we see what *they* are doing, and then we can help them. We only help when we're *asked* for help, but we can help. We can say, "Oh, yes, let me explain about this."

or "Here's a new technique you could try." or "You know, we discovered this in some other area where they're doing this trick, and maybe this will be useful for you." *or*: "What you're doing is wonderful – can we tell other people about it?" So, if you do a *co-design* where the community drives these things, then you're much more likely to do things that will actually be accepted and be adopted by the local people and will make a difference in the world. But it's a very, very different way of designing than we train in schools.

And so, we have to change the training that we give in schools.