What is this thing called Human Centred Design

Most people I talk to have heard of it (maybe their friend/cousin/colleague mentioned it at a BBQ/birthday/tea room), but most people don’t understand what it actually means, let alone how they can use it in their everyday work. Never fear, that’s what we’re here for! 

Human Centred Design (HCD) or Design Thinking (DT) (at Hive Collective we use the terms interchangeably) is a mindset, a skillset and a toolkit. It’s a creative approach to problem solving, that (you guessed it!) puts the humans that you’re designing for at the centre of the design process. 

What this means is that instead of taking the traditional “expert driven” approach to solving problems, we take a step back and start by walking in the shoes of our customer/client /consumer /user; deeply understanding their needs before determining the problem that we’re trying to solve.  

“Design Thinking is a Human Centred approach to innovation that draws from the designers toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the requirements for business success.”  

-      Tim Brown, President and CEO at Ideo

Companies like Apple and Google have been using this methodology (among others) for years to develop innovative, customer centric solutions in a very fast paced and changing environment. Of more recent times, HCD has evolved to be applied to solving a broader range of problems, including the big wicked problems that we face as a society, as well as within organisations to provide improved employee experiences. HCD can be used to solve all sorts of problems, and that’s where we come in. We love to work with people who want to do things differently; who are ready to uncover the needs of their customers (external or internal) and work with them to discover new ways of doing things to make change and create impact.

There are many HCD/DT models that exist, and at Hive Collective we predominantly use the Stanford University Hasso Plattner School of Design (d.school) model to guide our work. The d.school was co-founded in 2005 by David Kelly (also the Founder of Ideo) and is recognised as a thought leader in the world of Design Thinking. As a student of the d.school and having seen the model utilised successfully time and time again, it might seem like a pretty obvious decision for us to use their model, however the main reason we do is really more about our clients. We hope to ignite a spark about this way of working, and by using the d.school model, everyone can continue to access their open source information and resources long after we leave. In our view, the more people who know and utilise this way of working, the better the world will be! 

Let’s take a quick look at the Stanford model.  It’s a five step process that starts with building deep empathy with the people we’re designing for.  Although empathy sits at the beginning of the process, it is something that we continually check in with to ensure that we’re designing with, and for our users all the way through. Once we have developed an understanding of our users needs, we define the problem we’re looking to solve, we generate lots of ideas (often with our users), build low fidelity prototypes to share what we’ve made with the people we’re designing for and then we test and learn (often in many cycles) in order to refine our concept.

It is important to note that this process is not linear and depending on what emerges in each step, you may find yourself looping back through the stages continuing to test, learn and iterate until you reach the right outcome. 

Intuitively it just kind of makes sense right? Well, we think so! It is, however a different way of thinking and working and the process can take a little bit of time to get used to. In our experience, when people first start experimenting with this process it’s exciting, challenging, overwhelming and energising all at once! 

It’s likely that every person will be challenged by different parts of the process; some parts may feel comfortable, good or even quite natural, whereas others will challenge you and really push you outside of your comfort zone. That’s ok, in fact that means it’s working and even better, it also means that you’re learning! One of the most important attributes of a “designer” is being aware of which parts of the process you are challenged by to ensure you’re truly representing the needs of your user, rather than reacting to your own wants, needs, experiences and biases.

The other thing that we like to call out is that, at times the process feels messy, even chaotic and sometimes when you’re in the middle of it, like we’re not going to get there! But we promise…be open, be curious, trust the process and you will end up exactly where you need to be. 

So, that’s Human Centred Design in a nutshell. We truly believe in this way of working and hope that you can see its potential too. Please reach out if you would like more information, we love to talk about it any chance we get!