Where are the humans in Human-Centred Design? Well, they are rarely in the design drawings. So what would happen if designers were asked to put drawings of people in their designs? That’s what an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Michigan wanted to find out.
“The simple intention to include representations of people interacting with design ideas can assist designers in centring humans in design processes.”
Human centred design approaches aim to generate better solutions through understanding people’s social, emotional, and physical needs.
All designs begin with basic line drawings and idea sketches. This study showed that if you include people in those drawings, the designs change. This simple change made designers think more about users. Such a simple technique could make a significant difference to creating more inclusive designs.
The image below is from the research paper and shows that designers don’t have to be good a drawing people – stick figures will do. It’s about making designers think beyond their design to the impact it has on people.
Image from the research paper
Just add people
The advantage of the simple instruction of ‘represent people’ avoids specifying how the process of mental visualisation is to take place. This simple instruction produced design outcomes with a deeper consideration of putting people at the centre.
The researchers found that with the instruction to draw people, students focused more on people’s social and physical context of use as well as their personal preferences and values. They also found that depicting people decreased students’ claims that their designs worked for ‘everyone’. This indicates a better understanding of the ways design decisions impact different people differently.
While the researchers did not measure the diversity of people students considered, they saw a shift to recognise justice, and other social practices. Physical and emotional contexts, and a wider variety of stakeholders also became more apparent.
The title of the article is, Where are the humans in human centred design? Intentionally representing people during idea generation deepens consideration of needs.
Although this paper does not explicitly mention diversity or disability, the process shows that this is both possible and essential.
From the abstract
How can designers ‘centre humans’ in their design thinking? Creating design ideas and sketches explicitly representing people can help designers think about how their designs impact people. Using a think-aloud protocol, student designers generated ideas without instructions and then with an instruction to depict people in sketches.
When people were represented in sketches, student designers reflected more about how people were impacted by their designs. Results showed that representing people within design ideas led to considering more physical interactions, emotions, contexts, and stakeholder roles.