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Community-based, human-centered design

jnd.org

45 pointsicc979 comments

This is just design thinking reformulated. The problem with most of these principles is that they are extremely vague and are what good designers who design do anyway as a function of what they are buildning. Its very hard to do the not-test without ending with almost 100% score.

This offers no solution with regards to the transendence between the principles and the output. And reads to me just like marketing material for a process which will cost you way more than it will ever solve.

What would you offer as a solution?

My solution is that we stop applying these frameworks thinking we can generalize what is fundamentally a very talent based process.

If one want to introduce a new framework you prove it you dont propose it, it has to be based on some skin in the game. Dons like IDEOs design thinking is a way to make money first and formost.

To understand where I am coming from i wrote this a while back

http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you...

This is the announcement of a new paradigm that Don has been thinking about recently, it is not meant to be practical advice for implementation. It imagines a world where a designer is not needed to create a product; a designer can help refine, share, or scale it. In tech it would be something like those non-programming work flows for the marketing departments, which are typically looked down upon by the technically knowledgable, but imagine if they instead took that as the inputs to design a better system.

(Disclosure: Don is a relative.)

Your post addresses my biggest problem with the article: It reads more like a wishlist than a guide.

I would like to these issues addressed going forward: (And please don't take this as a list of reasons why this won't work; these are all things that I think can and eventually will be addressed.)

1. How do the stakeholders learn what is or isn't technically feasible? (I've seen stakeholders propose cumbersome solutions because they had no idea that the technology existed to make something better.)

2. How do the stakeholders learn about the non-obvious trade-offs between different design options? (As a trivial example: Lots of first-time product designers learn the hard way not to use white for the plastic exteriors of electronics. Why? It's extremely difficult to get white plastic to have a consistent color, and the two halves of the shell won't match. Even Apple, with their massive budget, struggles with this.)

3. How do stakeholders learn about prior art in the field? There's rarely a good reason to reinvent the wheel, and there's even more rarely a good reason to repeat other people's mistakes.

4. How do the stakeholders communicate their design to the engineers accurately and unambiguously?

5. How do you accomplish all of the above without constraining the stakeholders to design by multiple choice (which is still inherently limited by an outside expert's idea of what is and isn't going to be useful to the stakeholders) or forcing them to become domain experts themselves?

If I have a suggestion off the cuff to address (some of) these issues, it would be to make a tiered set of design tools available. Level 1 would be straightforward multiple-choice, level 2 would be a mix of fill-in-the-blank and click-and-drag, up to level N using the same tools as the professionals. Community stakeholders could then decide for themselves what is the appropriate trade-off between flexibility and time investment.

Its not a new paradigm,its a framework and its more or less just design thinking reformulated regardles of his intentions. Move fast and break things was a new paradigm. Design thinking sounds great on paper but is only as good as the cogs in the wheel and therin lies the problem. It doesent offer any transcendence between insights and application. It doesent pass the no-test.

To the extent that a designer isnt needed neither is the non designer who should be doing to design instead.

> Although traditional methods are effective for traditional mass-produced items, they are unable to take account of the local needs, cultures, and history of individual people and communities. The literature on the world-wide aid community is filled with examples of well-intentioned “solutions” failing to work when introduced into developing nations (see (Easterly, 2013; Ramalingam, 2013). And if they do work at first, they are often so difficult to maintain and service, that they soon fall into disuse. Finally, in some cases the unintended negative consequences outweigh any good that has resulted. We believe that the people best equipped to address these issues are the people who live there: This article shows one approach.

> The principles of human-centered design have proven to be effective and productive

Perhaps this assertion is patently obvious within the field, and doesn't need a reference, but for those of us less familiar with human-centred design are there any well known instances of human-centered design being "effective and[/or] productive"?

Yes but not in the way it's used today.

I wrote about it several years ago

http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you...

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