Human-centred design

Design’s attempts to address social, ethical and environmental concerns of our time have often been marred by theory generated by well-meaning scholars who have imposed hard-line definitions and models of what it means to be an ‘ethical designer’. These arguments abstract values and impose ideological and political positions that designers can find difficult to apply in their daily practices. It is not as simple as prescribing the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ values for designers to have and translate them through design. Whatever values there are, those values need to matter to people who care about them enough to translate them into action . Values are not impersonal. They cannot be detached and be subsumed under a more universal value or comparable importance. The paper opens with a critique of this prescriptive approach to highlight the reasons for why ethical design remains stuck in a rut. I then move to discuss more deeply, the close relationship between being ethical and being a human-centred practitioner in design. In doing so, I critique common notions of human-centred design that gives it an ergonomic, human-factors emphasis, or its ‘do-gooder’ side that is associated with humanitarian design. Instead, I offer an alternative framework for human-centred design based on the Japanese ethical concept woven into what it means to be human.

The Japanese term for ‘human being’ is ningen (人間), composed of two characters for ‘person’ (人), and ‘between’ (間). The Japanese understanding of human as in-betweenness, etymologised by ‘between person’, situates it as a relational being. This is the central framework for my notions of ‘self’ and being ‘human’ . This concept of human is strikingly different from major Western philosophies that emphasises ‘anthropos’ or ‘homo’, denoting the individual. Being human-centred is criticised for perpetuating an anthropocentric position , further contributing to humanity’s self-centredness and environmentally destructive behaviour. The profound ethical difference of conceiving humans as detached and in isolation, compared to the Japanese concept of human as relational in-betweennes, is argued by one of the most significant Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century, Tetsuro Watsuji . He was influenced by hermeneutics, phenomenology, Zen Buddhism and the Japanese indigenous spirituality of Shinto. In his book Rinrigaku, ethics in Japan, Watsuji is critical of Western philosophy (Heidegger and many others ) that emphasises the individual concept of self and the locus of the ethical problem pertaining to the consciousness of the individual. The paper dives deeply into Watsuji’s ethical framework in explaining the ningen ‘between person’ that is significant to my definition of being human-centred. I attempt to combine the Eastern philosophy with the West by bringing in a selection of other philosophers such as Goethe, Bortoft and Merleau-Ponty that have resonance with the argument constructed. There is nothing to be gained from East-West dualism or exoticism, as it locks down discourse. Although these Eastern and Western philosophies that I draw upon have not, until now, directly engaged with each other in the discourse of design , they have many valuable overlaps that I would like to share in this paper.

The relational association located in the betweenness, Watsuji argues, to be human is to shift and change continually – it is undergoing a process of constant transformation. The transformation of a designer to being a human-centred practitioner is achieved in relation to others. This connection between self and others (including people, animals, objects and environment) is essential in positioning and embedding oneself in the world. The transformative process is more than cognitive learning or professional development – it is in fact a process of self-awareness that comes from continually reflecting on our activity, our behaviour and how we are with others. This is reflective practice. Though in contrast to reflection and reflective practice that is grounded in critical theory , I explore this by incorporating aspects of wholeness from Goethe’s phenomenology and embodied perception by Merleau-Ponty . I argue the importance of being a reflective practitioner as the first step in being able to fully understand ourselves, our relationship and our connection to others. This pursuit of self-awareness, through reflective practice, is the central argument of this paper of being a human-centred practitioner. Through weaving together these various frameworks, I discuss the cyclical journey of transformation of the self where reflection is experienced in an immersive, affective, embodied way.

True, long-term sustainable change towards building and creating an ethical practice cannot come from being told what to design or choosing the ‘right’ values to adopt. Neither does it come from simply undertaking community-based projects, taking up a social cause or deploying participatory methods. To manifest and practise human-centredness is not a switch one can flick ‘on’ when you are in the design studio at 9am and ‘off’ when you’re leaving work. Instead, I stress the importance of human-centredness manifesting through all facets of our lives that involves engaging in the in-betweenness with others. It requires active creation and the practising of practice that is truly human-centred and aware – aware of oneself, of others and the world we live in. It is a day-to-day application and manifestation, but it is not merely a mechanical repetition. The significance of this being a practice is that it is a transformation and evolution of ourselves in bringing an awareness and embedded-ness to what we do everyday. It is a path (Tao) we each carve our ‘way of being’ in the world.

This paper discusses the articulation of humanistic psychology concepts to the principles of
human-centred design in order to improve understanding individuals for whom we design products
and services. It presents humanistic psychology as a theoretical approach within the field of
psychology, most appropriate for understanding individuals and their role in the construction of
everyday life. It introduces humanistic psychology concepts, and authors, that, applied to design,
allow understanding individual capacity, will, freedom of choice, their capacity for development and
self-organization from a theoretical framework consistent with the needs of contemporary design.

Using a field experiment and experience sampling, we found the first evidence that phone use may undermine the enjoyment people derive from real-world social interactions. In Study 1, we recruited over 300 community members and students to share a meal at a restaurant with friends or family. Participants were randomly assigned to keep their phones on the table or to put their phones away during the meal. When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family. We found consistent results using experience sampling in Study 2; during in-person interactions, participants felt more distracted and reported lower enjoyment if they used their phones than if they did not. This research suggests that despite their ability to connect us to others across the globe, phones may undermine the benefits we derive from interacting with those across the table.

"What is holding back service design from making a distinct departure from a product-centred to a socio-material human-centred framework? We have a concern for co-designing that is often discussed as a generic method to develop empathetic connections and understandings of people and their contexts. In this use, mastering the craft of co-designing had inadvertently isolated the method from the practitioner, fragmenting its process as a series of static events or a tool for deployment in staged workshops. Contributing to current debates on co-designing and design anthropology, our paper seeks to re-entangle co-designing back into its lived and enacted contexts. We see co-designing as a reflexive, embodied process of discovery and actualisation, and it is an integral, on-going activity of designing services. Co-designing can catalyse a transformative process in revealing and unlocking tacit knowledge, moving people along on a journey to ‘make real’ what proposed services might be like in the future. Co-designing plays a critical role especially when it involves the very people who are enmeshed in the realisation of the proposed services itself. As such, our case study of a weekend Ordnance Survey Geovation camp pays closer attention to how this took place and discusses the transformative process that was central to it. By taking a phenomenological perspective and building on a seminal anthropologists’ work, Tim Ingold, our paper counters the limitations in service design that tends to see its process as a contained series of fixed interactions or systemized process of methods. Through Ingold, we see ‘the social world as a tangle of threads or life-paths, ever ravelling here and unravelling there, within which the task for any being is to improvise a way through, and to keep on-going. Lives are bound up in the tangle.’ Similarly, we view co-designing as being and becoming, that is constantly transforming and connecting multiple entanglements."

We present an overview of a method of applying interactive 3D visualization techniques to support control room design activities, and summarize studies that supports it. In particular, we describe the software tools that we have developed and how these support a human-centered design (HCD) workflow. We present some lessons learnt from using our tools in control room design projects, and outline our plans for extending the scope of our approach to support concurrent design and later phases of a plant's lifecycle.

The thesis challenges the general perception that job shop scheduling is a combinatorial exercise of allocating jobs to machines and sequencing operations on each machine. In practice, human schedulers produce functional schedules bound by many constraints, both qualitative and subjective, and, quantitative and objective. A paradigm for hybrid intelligent human-computer scheduling is developed through Cognitive Work Analysis, based on a field study of a scheduler in a small job shop. Hybrid Human-Computer Intelligent Automation (HHCIA), in which human and machine 'intelligence' are combined, is related to the established models for supervisory control of continuous processes. 'Hybrid' is used to signify human and machine intelligence combining cooperatively. HHCIA applied to both continuous and discrete manufacture is shown to consist of two elements: the control of the processing of batches of work and the control of the changeover of batches. Scheduling is shown to be central to the 'hybrid' automation of discrete manufacture. Planning the changeover of batches has a predominant place in HHCIA of discrete manufacture. As the job-shop environment is perceived to be most difficult to schedule, it is used to explore a hybrid intelligent human-computer paradigm for the scheduling component of HHCIA. This leads to development of a methodology for designing a hybrid intelligent production scheduling system.

Design thinking is an alternative method of problem solving that focuses on how to achieve a human-focused goal (often in the form of a better future situation) as opposed to how to solve a discrete problem
Two predominant and seemingly paradoxical ideas, innovation and recession can there be a correlation. Design thinking is a process that the problem of the former can be addressed with.
No matter where we look we see problem that can be solved only through Innovation; unaffordable or unavailable Healthcare, billions dying of poverty, energy usage that outpace the planet ability to support it, education system that fail many students, companies who there traditional markets are disrupted by new technologies or demographic shifts, new products and services launch, military exploit and many social and business services.
They require, human centered ,creative, iterative and practical approach to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions. Design Thinking is an approach to innovation and delivering a better user experience.

Introduction
It’s the same situation every time. I’m in a bar or at a dinner party. I meet someone new and the inevitable question is posed, ‘So what is it that you do?’ I cringe, knowing from experience that this can go one of two ways, and neither is usually very much fun for anyone. And so I begin the now familiar dance of the Experience Design explanation.
Stage one, “I am a researcher and teacher in an engineering faculty.” ”Oh yes,” they reply (the initial naïve interest which leads to the next dangerous question). “So what is it you teach?” (A fatal question, because now I have to explain it.) “I teach engineers about human experience,” (they usually look at me with total bewilderment or the intelligent ones nod as if they understand and kill the conversation there; the novices tend to plough on).
“What do you mean by experience?” they usually ask. I fire back, “You know what experience is right?” “Yeah sure.” “So what is it?” I hit them with, a little aggressively. (Now is when they look like a deer caught in a car’s headlights and the beginnings of that, “I wish I hadn’t asked” look). I usually feel sorry for them by this stage and soften off the conversation by beginning to explain. “OK, so we are sitting here in this room right, talking and drinking, eating food, etc. We are in this place having an experience together, but what is that thing we call experience? And how would you explain that something to someone else? How would you begin to understand it in any kind of structured or organized way?” This is when the foolhardy push on and want to know more, and the less foolhardy say “thank you,” and suddenly need more wine or to be somewhere else, where the “normal” people are.

When groups are working on joint tasks they need to develop schedules together. The design and deployment of new technologies and the operation of multi-stage supply chains are situations where there are many joint tasks to schedule within and between participating organisations. The scheduling function demands collaboration between groups if activities are to be coordinated efficiently and effectively. Changing events and circumstances give this scheduling collaboration a strong iterative and dynamic flavour because a party responsible for a certain domain must deal with dynamic information relating to other parties' schedules, resources and limitations. Decision making in such an environment is characterised by dispersed, uncertain, incomplete, and conflicting contextual information which is difficult to represent and apply in computerised decision support systems. Therefore human decisionmaking remains central to collaborative scheduling. This paper defines a framework for understanding and modelling dynamic and collaborative scheduling processes that span parties distinguished by distinct organisational boundaries. This framework, posited within a socio-technical perspective, is intended to define the salient aspects of the human role in multi-party scheduling processes within which parties cooperate to satisfy both common and individual goals.

The world is increasingly faced with open, complex, dynamic and networked problem situations, which result from a highly connected world. Over the past decade, many have turned to design practice to address these problems, which has led to promising results, but at the same time has also revealed many challenges and constraints.
In this paper I take a social systems view of design. Traditionally, design has been described as a social process within a design team. However, the application of design in addressing complex issues has moved design beyond the boundaries of the design team, to what Manzini (2015) calls 'designing networks': a distribution of design processes among numerous actors who differ in culture, motivation, and professional development. As such, designing becomes part of a social system. A social systems view of designing could provide support for the development of successful design strategies for complex social problems. To achieve this we need a better understanding of the people and the way they relate to each other in a 'designing social system'.
In this paper I will explore the roles of the human beings that are part of a designing social system, and the way the relationships between these people can be characterised and shaped.

Manufacturing industry has not embraced scheduling software. It is argued that this is due to users not being centrally located in the decision-making process in available software. Some consequences of the users' position in the decision process are explored through comparison of scheduling software based on normative design and software designed using cognitive work analysis.

To date, both government and fire authorities in Victoria have deployed a variety of communication messages on bushfire awareness. Yet, distributing information to a wide audience is not enough to increase people’s preparedness for bushfire. These forms of communication sustain a transmission process that reinforces the power-dynamics of control, making audiences passive. It perpetuates the disempowerment felt by communities who are not engaged in a dialogic process, further broadening the gap between ‘expert’ fire authorities and ‘non-expert’ community. This paper presents co-design methods that were used to facilitate a dialogic form of communication on bushfire preparedness with community members in the Southern Otways, Victoria. The research engaged a group of 20 residents to facilitate co-creation and communication of local knowledge of the geographical environment through visualisation. These methods show potential of bridging relationships between neighbours and the importance of social interactions that can lead to better fire preparation.

In this paper in support of a keynote presentation at
MIDI 2013, I compare three major design paradigms
and their commitments to ‘centric’ design activities
through analyses of their Abstract Design Situations,
which differ in their commitment to making and
co-ordinating various types of design choices.
Combining existing design paradigms provides new
post-centric opportunities for design that are Balanced,
Integrative and Generous (BIG). To realise these
opportunities in design work in specific settings, we
need to provide support via re-usable resources, and
guidance on development and use of local resources to
realise a balanced range of integrated functions.
Abstract Design Situations and Resource Functions are
core concepts within the Working to Choose (W2C)
framework, a systematic conceptual structure that
supports analysis, assessment and improvement of
design work.

In this paper we present a way of thinking that clarifies concepts of participation not only across diverse design areas but across other disciplines, allowing clearer comparisons and cross-referencing. We see this clarification as a significant first step to remove multidisciplinary barriers to the productive building of a knowledge base around participation concepts. We suggest that design is the best field to lead this elimination of barriers, and we show specific connections to several other disciplines.

BIO Jacqueline (Jax) Wechsler is an independent design consultant, lecturer and post-graduate research student. She consults as Jax Interactive on human-centred design and innovation projects. Jax tweets at @jacwex and blogs at http://cocreatingchange.com. She is passionate about the power of design for enabling better futures.

In this chapter I explore the role that trans-subjectivity plays in
shaping Care. The interpretation of Care that I use here, draws on
Martin Heidegger's seminal text Being and Time (1962) describing
Care as those processes of human existence and living, the
everyday experiences and activities of life, that help to constitute a
person's mode of Being. In other words, I take as a central theme
that the term Care describes a human-in-the-process-of-Being.
Furthermore, this text presents an exploration of the role that
trans-subjectivity plays in shaping Care as described through a
Model of Care. The modelling of Care used here, describes four
key elements of each person's life (namely, Experience, Living, Projection and Time) that shape their mode of Being. A person's
mode of being is what makes them uniquely individual, something
that develops and evolves as their life unfolds. It is the intention of
this chapter to demonstrate how Care is a central theme in any
understanding of who human beings are and how trans-subjectivity
is vital to the processes of shaping a mode of Care that characterises
each and every human being. Understanding the dynamic
interplay between trans-subjectivity and Care will help researchers
better understand the way that human beings encounter, interact
with and impact upon the world in which they live. In other
words, each person's mode of Being (Care) while immediately as
well as historically affected by trans-subjectivity, is ultimately
determined by them (consciously or not) and thus, each person is
responsible for the end results of their actions (intended or not).

In this chapter I explore the role that trans-subjectivity plays in
shaping Care. The interpretation of Care that I use here, draws on
Martin Heidegger's seminal text Being and Time (1962) describing
Care as those processes of human existence and living, the
everyday experiences and activities of life, that help to constitute a
person's mode of Being. In other words, I take as a central theme
that the term Care describes a human-in-the-process-of-Being.
Furthermore, this text presents an exploration of the role that
trans-subjectivity plays in shaping Care as described through a
Model of Care. The modelling of Care used here, describes four
key elements of each person's life (namely, Experience, Living, Projection and Time) that shape their mode of Being. A person's mode of being is what makes them uniquely individual, something that develops and evolves as their life unfolds. It is the intention of this chapter to
demonstrate how Care is a central theme in any
understanding of who human beings are and how trans-subjectivity
is vital to the processes of shaping a mode of Care that characterises
each and every human being. Understanding the dynamic
interplay between trans-subjectivity and Care will help researchers
better understand the way that human beings encounter, interact
with and impact upon the world in which they live. In other
words, each person's mode of Being (Care) while immediately as
well as historically affected by trans-subjectivity, is ultimately
determined by them (consciously or not) and thus, each person is
responsible for the end results of their actions (intended or not).

As the Internet has grown to underpin many aspects of modern life, the challenges in understanding the network and developing new network mechanisms have changed. Recent predictions by Cisco suggest that there will be 15 Billion network devices by 2015 and more than 3 billion Internet users. Today, the network has become interwoven with human activities to the extent that broadband access has already become critical for many countries. For example, Finland made broadband access a legal right in July 2010 and has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015.

As the network is made available to an increasingly diverse set of users each exploiting the infrastructure for a broad set of activities, the need to understand what people do with the network and how they do it becomes critical. Equally important, network systems not only need to be presented to a diverse set of non-expert users, they need to be understood and often managed by users who are not skilled network operators. The need to combine human and systems understanding of the network has already been recognized by the SIGCOMM community with the establishment of dedicated workshops such as Homenets (2010, 2011) and W-MUST (2011, 2012).

As well as highlighting the importance of understanding users and engaging in interdisciplinary projects, these workshops also recognize the critical need for SIGCOMM researchers to increase their understanding of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This tutorial responds to this need by providing a synopsis of HCI targeted towards the networking community. We will provide an overview of techniques for understanding users and for designing and evaluating systems that are more user-focused. A particular emphasis will be on understanding how these approaches might be used within the context of networking, what the limits and scope of each approach are, and how researchers might select appropriate techniques for their research question. .

This paper raises questions about the designers’ agency in human centred design using a communication design project as the site for investigation. It builds on the discussion surrounding human-centred design where the designer is viewed as a key agent in the design process. What is the designer’s role? What is their agency? How is agency enabled? These questionings moves the discussion beyond the traditional boundaries of ‘form giving’ that characterises the practice of communication designers. Furthermore, the paper critically reflects upon the interactions that had occurred amongst the stakeholders in this project and explores key factors that enable agency, such as roles, value and empowerment.

This paper focuses on implementing the human-centred design in the Finnish siloes structured governmental immigrant system by adopting a service design approach to foster a human-scale view. The research adopted a customer service journey as a way to diagnose the current Finnish governmental immigration system as a part of the on-going project of developing a web-based platform. Furthermore, it attempted to establish the common language between different governmental system levels and immigrant service networks and with visualisation aimed to improve the perception of the entire immigrant system. Preliminary results reveal that is the customer service journey very valuable tool to indicate system complexity, neglection of individual’s needs and system fragmentation.

This paper is about designing financial products that illiterate and neo-literate people can use effectively and comfortably, by making the flows of information that accompany financial transactions usable for them. Here the tools required for such design are referred to ‘oral information management’ or OIM tools. This introduction to OIM tools reviews the theory behind them, including discussions of oral culture, behavioral finance, the psychology of learning and human-centred design. It includes examples from Cambodia, Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands, and proposes a set of core principles for OIM development and design.

This research develops a rationale for using provocative conceptual designs to foster the innovation of human-centred product ideas – a ‘critical artefact methodology’.

This research employed similar tactics to Action Research (Swann 2002): cycles of action (using critical artefact methods in design projects) and reflection on that action (including a contextual review of existing theories and practices), which produced action (product ideas) as well as research (a proposed critical artefact methodology).

In two projects, I used sets of workshops where stakeholders’ engaged with my critical artefacts to develop my understanding of their needs. Living Rooms (designing the home for ‘tomorrow’s older people’) suggested how my methods might be improved then taken account of in Digital Mementos (designing novel mementos for increasingly digital lifestyles), including selecting productive participants – stakeholders in-tune with the possibilities of novel situations, such as von Hippel’s “lead users” (1986).

Within participatory design and co-design I position critical artefact methods as using stakeholder participation to inform design activity rather than as co-creation. In reference to Ehn & Kyng’s mock-ups (1991) and Gaver’s cultural probes (1999) exemplars, I show that critical artefacts do not fit the description of ‘prototypes’ (suggestive of design direction or destination) and that my critical artefact methodology depends upon a progression from presenting stakeholders with critical artefacts (that provoke critical reflection) towards more ‘prototypical’ artefacts expressing relevant needs (for evaluation).

I suggest that critical design (Dunne 1999) and related design practices have similar characteristics and operation to Critical Theory: a view that the status quo (generally affirmed by design) somehow ‘oppresses’ society; that ‘enlightenment’ of the factors underlying this ‘emancipates’ society and is facilitated by a reading of critiques (alternative proposals such as critical artefacts).

In my critical artefact methodology the designer develops their understanding by designing artefacts to ‘process’ stakeholders’ engagement with previous artefacts – I use Polanyi’s notion of “indwelling” (1966) to support this method of empathic knowledge sharing. Designer’s and stakeholders’ co-reading of critical artefacts means that this understanding can be of future or latent stakeholders needs; it enables them to explore alternative needs, wants/desires, practices and products by broadening their understanding of what is possible.

The contributions of this research are a critical artefact methodology supported by critical artefact methods; a more instrumental use of critical artefacts than other critical design practices; and (in Digital Mementos‘ outputs) exemplar findings demonstrating the value of a critical artefact methodology’s application. Whilst this thesis presents a ‘point in time’ in my methodology’s development, I intend that it provide designers with insights into similar techniques within their own professional practice.

The research was funded by the Arts & Humantities Research Council’s Doctoral Award Scheme.

DUNNE, Anthony (1999). Hertzian tales – electronic products, aesthetic experience and critical design.

EHN, Pelle and Morten KYNG (1991). Cardboard computers: Mocking-it-up or hands-on the future. In: GREENBAUM, Joan and KYNG, Morten (eds.). Design at work : Cooperative design of computer systems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 169-195.

GAVER, Bill, DUNNE, Tony and PACENTI, Elena (1999). Design: Cultural probes. Interactions, 6 (1), 21-29.

POLANYI, Michael (1966). The tacit dimension. 1983 Doubleday & Company Inc. ed., Gloucester, Mass. USA, Peter Smith.

SWANN, Cal (2002). Action research and the practice of design. Design issues, 18 (1), 49-61.

VON HIPPEL, Eric (1986). Lead users: A source of novel product concepts. Management science, 32 (7), 791-805.