People-Centered Design

People-centered design is a practice where designers focus on specific people’s needs, taking the time to learn from particular populations. “People-centered” is a human-centered design principle. Designers can co-create proper solutions when they live among their target groups, tap their insights and find real issues.

“When you design, you have to understand what the capabilities are of the people you're designing for.”
— Don Norman, “Grand Old Man of User Experience”

See why people-centered design is vital to finding the best solution to a certain group’s problem.

Airplane Cockpit by Riik@mctr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Cognitive Science building at UC San Diego. by AndyrooP (CC-BY-SA-4.0)
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Pseudo-commands to illustrate how line-by-line text editing works. by Charlie42 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Peoples of the World Need Solutions That They Help Customize

Cognitive science and usability engineering expert Don Norman saw the need to evolve away from user-centered design to give designers a more humanized view of their responsibilities to the people they design for. Human-centered design represents the shift towards that, on the road to humanity-centered design, which is the ultimate challenge for us as designers in helping the people we design for improve their lives. People-centered design is a refined term for human-centered design, comprising of four principles: People-centered, Solve the right problem, Everything is a system and Small & simple interventions.   

People-centeredness is a way to design for people in unfamiliar settings. The traditional approach to designing for “foreign” groups is a Western-centric one. Indeed, the West has access to the most advanced technologies and possesses vast economic resources to deliver intricately grand solutions. However, with that comes a problem. Western-based (or -oriented) designers tend not to understand the people they want to help, since they rarely spend longer than several weeks with them in their location. And because design teams tend to rush to a solution with only a Western perspective on problems, they run into difficulties by failing to do one or more of the following:

●      Appreciate that the people in the areas they have entered often already have a solid understanding of what they need.

●      Understand what these people really need and strive for, and what their environment lets them do.

●      See past the illusion of big fixes that “should work” on paper (but fail when implemented). Large-scale interventions can prove disastrous because:

• The people and their governing entities get frustrated at not having effective results fast enough, and politics get in the way.

• The sheer expense of large-scale projects causes problems, particularly through the waste from a failed solution.

• The local populations can’t understand or maintain the solution. For example, there’s no point in installing sophisticated infrastructures if the local people don’t have the resources to repair them.

• The time a large-scale intervention takes means that the problem itself can change, or newer problems arise.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that local populations very often know the nature of their issues. The old way of sending anthropologists to “understand” local people often blinds designers to this fact. While people who are experiencing problems may not be able to dig their way out on their own, very often this is not due to a lack of knowledge or even ideas about good solutions.

How to Apply People-Centered Design

Here’s how to work your way towards real solutions for real people around the world:

●      Spend years in the location. It’s the only way to discover the true nature of the problems in an area and gather invaluable insights.

●      Collaborate closely with the local populations. Earn their trust, learn their language and closely study what they show you about the world through their eyes. Many are creative and imaginative, and understand their problems as well as their own capabilities and limitations.

●      See everything as a system. Even the most simple-looking problems are usually intricately intertwined. So, aim past the symptoms (although symptoms still need treatment) to get at the root causes in the “big picture.”

●      Co-design with your population. Where the community drives things, you’re more likely to do things that the local people accept, and achieve real change. Get these people on board; let them contribute to the research, ideation, prototyping and production processes the solution involves. If they’re invested in the solution like this, they’ll feel ownership and be able to step in to fix things if the solution breaks or fails; or even improve it. Also, small and simple interventions work far better than grandiose, expensive big fixes (which often fail disastrously).

●      Keep an open eye on the solutions the population has attempted themselves. Understand what the people intended to do. If these were abandoned, learn why they failed. For example, was it the wrong technology? Did a natural disaster render them useless?

●      Remember that “foreign” can mean within your own country, province/state or even city. Regional disparity can mean huge differences in quality of life over just a matter of a few miles.

Overall, an approach to helping other populations achieve better lives and self-sustainability means involving them as co-creators and respecting their dignity and what they have to offer.

Learn More about People-Centered Design

Take our 21st Century Design course.

Read this JND article for additional insights about people-centered design.

Read this thought-provoking piece showing many considerations about community-driven design.