What is Human-centered Design?

[This transcript is currently a work in progress.]

Human centered design is a creative approach to problem solving, one that starts with people and ends with innovative solutions tailored to meet their needs. When you understand the people you're trying to reach and then design from their perspective, not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but you'll come up with ideas that they'll embrace. Human centered design is both how you think and what you do with it. It's a process that consists of three phases, inspiration, ideation and implementation. The inspiration phase is about learning on the fly, opening yourself up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as long as you remain grounded in the desires of the people you're designing for, your ideas will evolve into the right solution. In the ideation phase, you'll come up with lots of ideas. Some too crazy to work, some too crazy not to try and you'll refine them, tossing out the bad and improving the good. Making things helps you learn, grow, and test your ideas. Building a simple prototype gets your idea tangible and gives you something to put right back into the hands of the folks you're designing for. Without their input, you won't know if your solution is on target or how to evolve your idea. Keep iterating, testing, and integrating feedback until you've got everything just right. During the implementation phase, you'll build partnerships, shore up your business model and get your idea out into the world, which was always the goal in the first place. Anyone can practice human centered design and everyone benefits because it gets us all to solutions that are adapted and embraced.

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