Human-Centered Design (HCD)

I've been talking a lot about what I call 21st Century Design and the need for designers to attack the important societal issues of our age. Well, suppose I convinced you; what do you *do*? You're a lone designer. What is it that you can do to actually do these issues? Because no single person can tackle these problems. It's going to take a *group* of people.

So, let me, though, talk about the different kinds of *you* that we might be talking about. You might be somebody just graduated from design school trying to understand where to start in order to do what you consider to be something that really helps the world. Or you might be an experienced designer. Or you might be working in a company, and so you enjoy the company, but you'd like to change the company and move it – going into

doing much more important work for the world. And also stop doing detrimental work. Stop designing things that destroy the environment in bringing together the materials and destroy the environment in disposing of the items. How would you do that? Or you might be in a design  consultancy and you want to change the kinds of businesses you're doing towards ones that are more societal – you know – more benefit to society.

These are hard questions, and there are no  really easy answers. And the answer will vary a lot depending upon *you*: What you are interested in, what your skills are and what you're able to do. I was recently talking to a woman who was educated in design at the Institute of Design in India and then moved to the United  States and got a master's degree from one of the major design schools in  the United States and then got another degree 

– actually – from Yale University in graphic design but was unhappy with the kinds of tasks and jobs she was trying to do. She didn't think that they were really going to make a difference in the world. Yeah, she could find a good-paying job, but that isn't what she really cared about. She cared about making a difference. What she did was she found the organizations in the larger cities that were actually already  working on these societal issues.

They were trying to take care of the homeless, trying to bring food to the people who were hungry, trying to improve the educational system or trying to teach people who were unable to go to schools. And these jobs were very close to what she cared about. And so, she came in, she volunteered to work with them; eventually, she was hired by them, and that is how she actually changed her job,

by searching out the groups in the world that  were doing the things that she cared about. Now, let me tell you – you don't make as much money when you're working in the non-government organizations or you're working with the  small groups in the cities. But you have much more satisfaction because you can see that you are  helping change the world. So, that's one way. Another way is to try to, yes, find the big organizations  that are *already* doing this and join them.

That's how you learn; that's how you get a lot of experience. You might find that's your permanent career, or you might find that after a while you've learned a lot and you can now go off on your own or in working with some other group that maybe  is more aligned to what you care to do, but you get a start by educating yourself, by being part of this larger team already addressing the issues. And if you're in a company and you'd like  to see if you could move the company, now, that's a different path,

because you have to be in a position of – first of all – some authority to make changes in the company, and that  means you have to move up in the ranks. And the way to move up in the ranks is to learn more about the company, and how the company runs and what the different areas of the company are. And you have to understand the financial side, and you have to understand the sales side and the service side and the product marketing side; and you have to understand the customer base, and you have to understand, well, basically a tremendous amount about this complex system

that we call a company. And as you learn more and more about the company, you're able to give more and more advice to the people, the administration of the company – things that "Hey, you know, I've noticed that there's this problem here or there's this opportunity here or we can do new things here." And that's how you get promoted; and when you get promoted, you have a bit more authority. Now, you have to remember the companies are not out to

save the world at great costs, because they need *money* to do this; they have to be successful. If a company isn't successful, if it isn't always earning a profit, then it no longer will exist, because it needs money in order to pay the salaries of people, in order to buy the equipment and do the new kinds of things that you wish they would do. So, a company has to be profitable; so, you have to figure out how to convince the management to change the direction,

but also you have to figure out how they will continue to make money while doing this. It is possible, but it's not easy. And companies are often not used to venturing out into new areas where they'll be doing noble, good things. But some companies are. And maybe you need to change your company. Look at a company that's actually  trying to do good in the world. There are many kinds of companies, by the way, so the companies are incorporated.

In the United States, there's something that's called a B Corp. We have different kinds of corps. There's a C Corp and there's an S Corp, but there's a B Corp. And the B Corp is one that says: "In our basic foundation, the bylaws of the company, we say we owe our responsibility to the citizens of the world, to the environment, to our customers and to our employees.

Now, you might ask, "Well, isn't that what all companies do?" And the answer is *no*. Most companies say, "We owe our allegiance to our *shareholders*, the people who own the company, the people who own stock in our company. And so, our job is to return money to them, return profits to them because they give us money so that we can do things, and part of what they expect is that we return profits to them, and so our allegiance is to them,

not to our customers, not to our employees, not to the communities in which we live." Now, I happen to think that's *wrong*. In fact, I think it's *immoral*. But that is a fairly common business  philosophy that's accepted throughout the world. The B Corp attempts to change that by  saying, "We're a company that's going to look out for the good of the world, for the community in which we are, for the environment, for our customers and for our employees – all of whom must be treated well."

So, find those companies. They know – they already have made the first major step to doing good. So, yes, if you want to work on the major societal issues, those are very difficult; there's no easy step to doing that. But it's one of the most important things that designers can do.

In order to really understand Agile,  it's important to know what Agile *isn't*. Agile didn't just appear from a vacuum; it was a  reaction to the way software was being written in the '80s and '90s. Back then, most of us did  something called Waterfall. I mean, Waterfall was really the best-case scenario because sometimes  there was absolutely no process at all. But when there *was* a process, it was often Waterfall. And even Waterfall had a lot of different versions, but we're going to look at the most optimistic  one that actually... included some design.

When you look at Waterfall, it makes some  sense. Somebody, probably a product manager, comes up with an idea for what  needs to be built and presents some requirements. These could take a lot of different  forms, but frequently they were in something called a product requirements document, or a PRD, or  sometimes a marketing requirements document (MRD). These were frequently *extremely long* documents  with a *lot of detail* about what a product should do. In the best-case scenario, that detail was drawn  from research and an understanding of the needs of 

both the user and the business ... and in reality, maybe not quite so much. Once the product managers were done, then we entered the design phase. Now, design was often its own little sort of mini Waterfall, but again, in the best cases, it was a good, solid user-centered design process – one that you're hopefully familiar with. It involved lots of user research to understand users in their context and lots of ideating and iterating and  prototype testing and all of that good stuff. In the worst cases, well, we drew a lot of pictures  of things that would never get built, to be honest.

The thing is that with these long cycles, the  requirements gathering and design process could last *a while* – almost always months, sometimes a  year; it depended on how big the product was. And a lot of times this was all before a single  line of code got written. That's because when you look at Waterfall, each little drop-off  is really what's called a *staged gate*. What that means is that after the process happened, the  requirements document or the design or whatever,

there would be a review process of the output  before it moved through the gate to the next step. Development couldn't happen before design ended, because the design had to be fully vetted before resources were committed to building. After all, you wouldn't want to spend a lot of money writing code if everything was just going to change, right? Again, this all sounds really reasonable – everybody agrees what we're building before we start building it. Who could be against this? Well, we're not done yet! Since requirements gathering was done *before* the design process, often things would show up in the design phase that invalidated  something from the requirements doc.

Maybe something changed in the six months that  product management took to write up 300 pages. Maybe we learned new information in  user research... who can say? Things change – which meant going back to redo the requirement ... and then back again once the requirements were fixed. Also, since design worked *independently* of  engineering most of the time, even after the design phase was "over", it was not  unusual for engineers to send the "finished" designs back with a nasty note saying, "This is a  pipe dream and will take us 400 years to build." or

something like that. That's always what it sounded  like to me, anyway. The same thing happened with quality assurance team at the testing step, except they would just file bugs for the engineers to fix. Anyway, what all of this means is that the  diagram often looked more like this. And it took a really, *really* long time. In a lot of cases, there wasn't any way to get around this process since at the end of the waterfall, we'd be printing a  bunch of CD-ROMs or even putting things directly into hardware, so there was really no going back and fixing stuff later like you can with internet-connected software.

The real problem, though, lay  in the *complete separation of the departments*. Engineering often didn't get much input into  the process until requirements were already set, despite the fact that requirements could be  drastically affected by engineering decisions and requirements sometimes changed, even from  the time that the 300-page document was written and approved to when the engineers  finished working on it. In other words, market forces could change or we could learn  things from the users or the engineers would find some really hard problem that couldn't be solved,  and then *everything* had to be changed

because it was incredibly hard to change one thing in that  300-page document without everything cascading ... because of *the waterfall* – get it? If something on page 28 changed, it meant that everything from page 29 to 300 *also* needed to change, and that was what we liked to call an enormous nightmare. Let's not even talk about feature creep, which happened  when people from step one realized that they'd forgotten a whole bunch of stuff and tried to  squeeze it in around step three or four, causing

the requirements to balloon out of control, and  all of the deadlines – which were ridiculous in the first place – would just get missed. Anyway, is there really any wonder why the engineers of the time might be interested in something a little bit more flexible – something where maybe every single decision didn't get made up front and then changed later; something where we *admit that we don't know everything*, so we're not going to bother trying to specify everything out to the last bit and byte, and we're going to build  some stuff and get *feedback and adjust as we go*. Throw in the fact that around this time websites  and web applications were really starting to take off;

and it was getting a lot easier to  get feedback directly from customers and make *continuous changes* rather than having  to chisel everything into stone before packaging it all up and sending it to the store  to sit on shelves – which is how people used to buy software; I mean, not the stone part, but the store part. Obviously, this wasn't everybody's experience of Waterfall. Between you and me, a lot of really good stuff has been built Waterfall-fashion – it's not a horrible system. In fact, most physical products and large civic projects like bridges and skyscrapers are built in a *mostly* Waterfall fashion.

But it's also not surprising that a lot of high-level engineers were not huge fans of it and they'd come up with something that was significantly less frustrating for them. And it's *really* not surprising that it would catch on.

I want to talk about 21st Century Design. So, what do I mean by that? I mean it's a different kind of design. It's not the traditional design where we make beautiful,  wonderful objects and wonderful experiences. It's about thinking about design as *a way of thinking*, a way of addressing the major problems of the world, because designers have a special way of addressing issues.

We call it Design Thinking – it comes under many other different names – but it's what designers have been doing for... well, since the beginning of designers! And in other words, it's not new. It's been around for 80... 100 years. So, what is design as a way of thinking? Well, here's how *I* like to talk about it. And I call this *human-centered design*, and we'll come back to describe that term later.

But it has four important components. First of all, well, it's *human-centered*. So, we always focus upon the people. And that's very important because it's the only discipline where the major focus is about making things that are appropriate for people. Second, we solve the right problem. You know, there are lots of really good problem-solvers in the world: The economists, the political scientists and especially the engineers

– they're trained to solve problems. But engineers, they never stop and say, "Is this the right problem?" They give you a *solution*. But, you know, I have a rule when I do my consulting work, which is: Do not solve the problem that I am asked to solve. That's because usually we discuss a problem by the *symptoms*. And if you solve the symptoms, well, that's all very good... but the problem *comes back*. What you have to do is figure out: "What's the real cause?"

So, we have epidemics, especially in cities – not the current epidemic – but just, say, cholera epidemics. And we say, "Well, we should go in and treat them and cure the people!" Yes... but *why* did you have epidemics? Well, it's usually carried by poor sanitation. All right, so let's improve the sanitation. *Why* is there poor sanitation? Well, because the people aren't using appropriate toilets.

Well, OK, but why not? Well, because they're homeless. If you want to stop cholera epidemics, you have to solve the homeless problem; the point being: You have to look at what the *fundamental issues* are and address them. And those fundamental issues are much more *difficult* than solving the symptoms. But unless you address them, the symptoms keep coming back and back and back. Well, what can designers do to solve the homeless problem?

Well, let's go back. What do we do? We focus on the people. We focus on answering the right problem – the deep underlying causes. Third, we recognize that everything is a *system*. You can't solve one little piece, because everything is *interconnected*. So, you have to really look at the nature of the system. And, finally – and this is *extremely* important – we *don't rush* to a solution.

We know that when we're dealing with human beings and societies and different cultures and political forces and economic factors that whatever we do is probably *not* going to be right. So, what we do is we try a *simple, small intervention*. We see what the *results* are. Then we modify it, and we continually experiment, do an intervention, learn from it, change what we're doing,

and slowly we'll get bigger and bigger because each one allows us to do even more the next time; and we'll get better and better. So, that's the secret, but it's a *hard secret* because for a problem like the cholera epidemics I mentioned it could take 10 years to solve. But these are big, major problems – they will not be solved overnight. And that's what designers, though, are really well trained to do.

Design is an interesting discipline. Designers don't really have any content. The content that designers have and what they learn when they go to a design school and get design degrees they learn the techniques; they learn the problem-solving and problem-defining methods. They have a whole bunch of powerful tools. And then, because we don't know the details of healthcare or even housing, we have to *bring in the experts*.

So, we have to have a multidisciplinary team where we work together with people from all types of skills. And we have to learn how to work with them and bring together a solution that is most appropriate for the people. And the most important thing – which I'll come back to in a short time – this has to come *from the people*. If designers come in and look over a problem and say, "Ah! I  understand the problem; here's what you should do...", it doesn't even matter if that's the correct answer. It will *not* work,

because unless the people who are being affected understand and believe and accept it, it will not work. So, the people themselves have to be part of the solution. And you know what? Quite often, they've already started. We have seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are really creative and wonderful. And those people understand the problems they're facing. And a number of those seven billion have already started creative, wonderful solutions.

So, instead of trying to come in and say, "Here's what we say, us experts, foreigners (who don't understand your culture and don't understand your resources and don't understand what you're able to do and what you need)," why not let the *people* lead the way? We see what they're doing; we say, "That's really clever! Ah! I wonder... if you need assistance, we can mentor, we can facilitate, we can bring in other resources. You have difficulty – *individuals* have difficulty tackling the whole system

or tackling the political issues, but that's where we can come in and help." So, we call that *community-driven design*, which is a subset of human-centered design; which, as far as I am concerned, is really about *designing for humanity*. So, human-centered design is a subset of *humanity-driven design*, *humanity-centered design* – because we're trying to save – well, the planet.

Hi, I'm Don Norman, and over the many, many decades  that I've been alive, I've transformed myself from – well, in the beginning, a technology nerd, and all I cared about was the latest circuit design and the latest new device or the latest new technology. And I've changed to now where I'm worried more and more and more about the state of the world,

about the many societal issues that we are facing. Some of them are political. Some of them are economic. Some of them have to do with education, hunger, food, pure water, sanitation – major issues. How do we address them? Design is a mechanism because designers do things. They go out and they change the world. But we have to move design from designing small, simple things to designing systems, to designing political systems,

to designing solutions  to clean water and education and healthcare. How do we do that? Well, over the years I've come to develop something which is now called *human-centered design*. But we're talking about these big problems. It goes beyond individual people. So, is it really human-centered? Well, I could argue that, yeah, it's  human-centered because suppose we say we focus

on the tasks or the activities or the community or the full needs, it's still all about people in the end but it's bigger than human-centered. So, lately, I've been entertaining the idea of letting HCD stand, not for human-centered design,  but maybe *humanity-centered design*. Now, some people even criticize that, saying, "Well, shouldn't you be designing for the environment?

And that's not part of humanity." You could kind of argue it is because the reason we have to worry about the environment is because humanity – humans have destroyed the environment. But, I don't know. We have to find a way that  really tackles the most important problems, but it has to be small enough that we can manage to do something. There are other issues. One is, I'm concerned about the way that  we do design where experts come in and study. And send out the anthropologists. Understand what's going on.

And come back with proposals that we present to the people who live there. And I think that's the wrong way; that's a dictatorship. That's the privileged people coming  in and helping the poor underprivileged people. On top of that, most of us, we live in a *monoculture*. We live in a highly educated, usually a Western technology, Western-based philosophy. And the "Western" includes, though, the developing nations in the East – in Asia, for example.

But because we're all learning from the same universities and we're reading the same books and we're going to the  same conferences and we're talking to each other, so we all tend to be a *monoculture*. We all think the same way, and that can be a *danger*. *Any* monoculture is bad. Planting the same plants all over is very efficient until a disease comes and wipes them all out at once; whereas if we had many, many different plants, one disease couldn't wipe them all out;  monocultures are dangerous.

If we all tend to think the same way, it's not working well. Or it's not very robust and resilient when something happens. Now, there are other problems, too. The economic systems of the world, I think, are in bad shape. Adam Smith wrote this wonderful book called  "The Wealth of Nations", in which he talked about the invisible hand of the market that can  lead to wonderful results, and just like when ants are all doing their little things, no ant is intelligent,

but the combination of millions of ants are incredibly intelligent. And that's what Smith was talking about; except that gets corrupted, and, in fact, in his book he talked about the different ways that this could be corrupted by people colluding, trying to work the system to their own private benefit. And that's happened in the world now. Too much of our economic system is being diverted from the rich and wealthy

*to* the rich and wealthy,  as opposed to everybody else. And so, we have huge discrepancies in availability of resources between the very wealthy and the very deprived. The political systems are also damaged. And, you know, the internet today has become the internet of lies. How do we know what's true and what's not true? How do we do evidence-based thinking? Evidence-based decision-making?

Too much of what we do is based on hearsay, anecdotes, folk tales, rumors, and downright lies where people are deliberately trying to misinform us so we might do something that  is harmful for us and perhaps good for them. So, there are many, many different issues in this world, and I am concerned about all of them. But I obviously can't address all of them. But what I can do is to try to band together with other people who might be addressing these similar issues,

because I believe that we must change many things in this world. We must change the economic model we're following. We must change the dependence upon a monoculture where we all tend to think similar  ways and similar thoughts and we're ignoring a lot of the cultures that come from the non-Western technological traditions – cultures that are very valuable and could teach us a tremendous amount of things. So, that's what I worry about, that's what I lose sleep over, and that's what I hope to work on for the few decades remaining in my life.

As designers move into  these very large societal problems, why do we need designers? What is the role of designers? First of all, we know that current-day designers are not appropriate for these large projects. I mean, yes, their talents are badly needed, but they need to add to their talents to have ways of management because the biggest problems are going to be that

of management, of synchronizing the work of all of the different disciplines that have to come together. There are many other  disciplines that also say that they do designs. For example, engineering – engineers do design as civil engineers, mechanical engineers. They, in fact, have design courses; they train people to do design. Computer science – they say that we do design. And they're right. And we actually need these disciplines because they do a different kind of design; they do what I call *engineering design*.

We need that. We need to have things that work well, that don't collapse, that are safe to use, but we have a different emphasis. Our emphasis is *designing for people*. So, we understand people, and we make sure that things are appropriate for people, and that's what's unique. If we now look at the large societal projects, well, there are other areas too that work in that. So, project management is really good at making sure that everything is synchronized and done in time. There's a huge number of issues that have to be solved, and they are experts at this.

We need to partner with them. There are other disciplines, too, like public health. That's a very important discipline. All sorts of other disciplines are going to be necessary for these projects, and why design again? Because design focuses upon the needs and experiences of the people for whom this is being designed and moreover  will insist that we are designing *by the people*, not by us experts trying to tell the people  what they need,

but making sure that the people have significant and major say in how this is being done. That's not easy – very, very difficult. But that's the role that we can play.

Design is hot. I think good designers are  going to be in demand. Now, a lot of the people who do UX design – they're designing websites; they're designing simple things. And – yeah – they're going to be in demand, but that's where almost everybody is  going because if you don't get much, if you don't get a deep training, that's all you're good at. So, that's not going to be the best place to get a new job, or at least a well-paying job. To get a  well-paying job, you have to have superior skills

and you have to go to a better design school or – it doesn't have to be a university, by the way; there's a lot of non-degree programs that are quite good. The IxDF – Interaction Design Foundation – has some really excellent courses  and excellent materials – one of the best locations I know of to get really good material. I've been with this foundation and helping the foundation since it was started in the early days. So, I really am a big believer in it. But it's not enough,

because reading is not the way you  become an expert; you become an expert by *doing*. But I think at the higher levels of design, we're going to need more and more of them. And as I answered earlier, because of the new tools that are starting to develop, it's called generative design tools – generative artificial intelligence, designers can use those to be even better. Not yet, but they're getting there.

Actually, Autodesk has tools in generative AI, generative design that already are very effective and that can make you into a better designer.

How do we convince a company to  change from making products to doing services? They're going to need different kinds of  people. They're going to need a different manufacturing process. They'll need to have a big section that maintains and upgrades the things that they are selling. They'll need to have service people. That's one problem.

Second problem – it might cost a lot more money to change the way we make things so we don't take the materials and make them so nice and wonderful and thin and mix them together to be a good feel. No, we might have to make our equipment slightly thicker. You know, if we had a slightly thicker phone, we could make it easy to repair the battery. Just open it up and put in a new battery. Is that a big price to pay? Not necessarily.

In fact, people often complain about the relatively short life of the battery in a mobile – it may not even last the whole day. Well, if the mobile was slightly thicker, we  could put in a slightly bigger battery   and the phone would last longer; the battery would last longer every day. Why don't we do that? Well, because we put aesthetics over usability. Well, we're going to have to change that model too. Now, some companies may complain that, yes,

they will say what you're trying to propose is very good but it will cost us more money to make the change, and it would cost us more money – we have to charge more money for our products or our services, and that makes it uncompetitive. And they're right. So, if you are a designer  and you just say, "What we are doing in the company is bad for the environment; we should change," you can't go to your superior executives and say, "Hey, Executives, what we're  doing is bad for the economy,

bad for the world. We have to change the way we're doing things!" They're not going to be happy to hear that, not if you tell them it's going to cost more money; it may completely change their line of business. So, we have to therefore understand the nature of business before we make this change. We have to say, "Here is a proposal that will help us make this change in a way that actually keeps us still alive, robust, performing as a company; if you like,

we have to take the principles of sustainability and robustness and resilience and apply it to the very company that we work in so it can have these properties and do good for the world." But that means you have to speak the language of business. Now, design has a very important philosophy in it which means: *Understand the people you are designing for. Speak their language. Make sure it fits their needs.* Well, if you work in a company,

one of the people you're designing for is  the executives of the company because you're designing for the company in order for the company to *succeed*, because if a company can't succeed, if a company can no longer produce stuff that is useful or inexpensive enough for people, it goes out of business and then you're out of a job; so, it doesn't do any good to recommend something that makes the company fail.

But in order to understand that, you have to understand how a business works. So, *design has to change*. For the first time, you have to understand the politics of a company, the business model of a company; you have to understand the world; you have to understand the impact your products have upon the ecosystem of the world and the complex socio-technical system. Remember that word – the *complex socio-technical system* in which the company is involved. So, designers, you have an important role to play.

In order to play that role, you're going to  have to change the way that you behave.

This course, Design for a Better World, is based on this book, *Design for a Better World*. The book and the course present a unique view of the problems that we have today, a view that focuses primarily upon human behavior and the history of human behavior and the history of how we came to the philosophy that's called *modernity* – we emphasize that, where all the new, bright technology was wonderful, changing the world for the better

and everybody wanted exciting new things. It was the age of consumerism. It was the age of commodities. It was the age of large companies building across the world. Well, that has led to many advances in our lives, absolutely, but it has also  led to many inequities and the destruction of the ecosystem, destruction of the environment. So, what can we do about it?

In this book, I don't give approaches to every problem; I don't give solutions to all the problems I talk about the ones that are *uniquely fundamental for designers* because at the heart of these problems is human behavior, and design is uniquely  qualified to approach these issues because design is the interface – the interface between  technology and human behavior.