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Human-Centered Design

Human-Centered Design is design that is based on making life easier for the people that use the product or service. IDEO.org is an organization that designs products, experiences, as well as services that improve life for people in poor and vulnerable communities. They have 4 areas of focus for design that improve the quality of life for others. Their programs are global health, prosperity, amplify, and transformation.

Their global health program focuses on things such as sexual reproductive health solutions to educate teens in developing countries the complications of pregnancy and how to practice healthy safe sex. Although IDEO is not the ones visiting these countries teaching the teens, they do all the design work to “create services, brands, and businesses, that do directly speak to the teens and support the girls in making the best decisions they can. Since most reproductive health services are targeted at adults, IDEO focuses on educating teens so that they can also have healthy experiences.

Prosperity programs focus on “empowering everyone everywhere to build strong financial futures” so that everyone can have a stable life. The formal financial sector designs most of their services and products without thinking about the needs of the poor. IDEO works to create designs specifically for low-income communities. They believe that a mix of empathy, technology, and innovation along with better information and tools is the way to help low-income communities get through unexpected financial shocks, ease debt, increase savings, and remove many of the barriers of credit. IDEO saw the cycle of poverty and is doing as much as they can to try to break that cycle by providing people with programs that help low-income families get loans, start small businesses and save for school.

Amplify is a series of innovation challenges that allows IDEO to invest in “early-stage solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems”, providing each organization with funding and design support to bring its solution to life. These range anywhere from youth empowerment, disability inclusion, urban resilience, women’s safety, early childhood development, to refugee education. This program is mainly centered in developing countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. These programs are intended to give everyone a common base to live their lives off of. When everyone in a community feels like they have something that looks after them, such as one of these organizations, they can all band together and live their lives in the most productive way.

Innovation is IDEO designing for the future. These designs push the boundaries of what they can do next. This is where they experiment and try to figure out what is going to happen next and what product they will need to answer whatever does arise next. They try to find designs that will make the biggest impact on the future of other’s lives, attempting to anticipate needs and problems that they might have to face in the other programs. This is “where we should be placing big bets” meaning that this is where all their ideas are generated and therefor is the most valuable to them in order to execute their other areas of focus successfully. 

Do you agree that the Innovation focus is the most valuable to IDEO? What do you think the most important of these 4 programs is and why?

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Stages of Design Thinking

Design Thinking is defined as the cognitive process from which design concepts emerge. It’s a design methodology that solves problems through solution-based approaches. Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers - all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. What is special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way - in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, in our lives.

There are 5 stages in the Design Thinking process. This model of thinking was first introduced in Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon’s “The Sciences of the Artificial” text from 1969. However, Simon’s version had 7 major stage, but nonetheless created a solid basis for this 5-stage process that we recognize today.

The first stage of Design Thinking is empathizing. This is the stage where you gain an understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This includes observing, consulting experts, engaging, and empathizing with people to get a deeper understanding of the problem.

The second stage is defining the problem. This is when you put together all the information you collected in the first stage and begin analyzing and synthesizing to define the core problem. This stage helps designers gather ideas to establish features, functions, and any other elements that will allow them to solve the problem. For us as students, stages one and two are fulfilled for us in the brief we get for each project.

The third stage in this process is ideate. This is when you begin generating ides. This is essentially the breainstorming part of the process when you just write down any ideas so that the best solution can be found. It’s important to get a wide variety of ideas because this allows you to find the best way to solve the problem. For us, this is the process or word listing and our Pinterest searches.

Protyping is the fourth stage. This is when prototypes are created so that you can investigate the problem solutions that you generate in the third stage. This allows you to see which ideas work and which do not so that you can narrow down until you find the best solution. For us, this would be the equivalent of our thumbnails process. 

The last stage is the test. The results generated from this stage are often used to redefine one or more of the problems and inform the understanding of the users. This is when you have found the best solution are you are just tweaking it a little to fit the problem. For us, this is when we start making our project in Illustrator, doing little tweaks to perfect the final image.

It is important to note that the five stages are not always sequential - they do not have to follow any specific order and they often occur in parallel and are repeated. However, all the steps are needed in order for a project to be successful. For example, we do not just make one set of thumbnails and then start the final, we repeat making thumbnails until the thumbnails reflect a finished product so that the final print is as close to perfect as possible.