There are almost no limits to how human centred design can be applied. While many of us are familiar with high-profile organisations where the focus is firmly on customer experience – from Apple to Amazon – there are countless other innovations around the globe where this creative approach to problem solving is being applied in unconventional ways.
Speaking at a TED talk about human centred design, David Kelley, founder of global design company IDEO and a pioneer of human centred design, pointed to a couple of interesting examples: a ‘smart’ dressing room with interactive mirror at Prada’s New York store, where customers could access information on garments in the form of design sketches, catwalk video clips, and colour and fabric swatches at the touch of a button, and Spyfish, a submarine television vehicle that can provide users with an underwater diving experience that doesn’t require them getting wet.
From high-tech retail and adventure to innovative healthcare solutions, IDEO has also used human centred design to create patient-centred experiences for Planned Parenthood in the US. In a shifting healthcare landscape, Planned Parenthood teamed up with IDEO to evolve and rethink and design a number of initiatives: a comprehensive patient and employee experience, including waiting and recovery areas, a digital patient-provider counselling tool, easy-to-use online forms, and a unifying vision for Planned Parenthood staff.
Closer to home, human centred design is also being embraced by the banking industry to improve people’s everyday needs. Leandro Pinter, delivery lead and agile practice lead at ING DIRECT Australia, says that human centred design is changing the way ING does business.
“Human centred design brings purpose and customer value back to the heart of the organisation – empathy is the key,” Pinter says. “Our people are motivated by purpose – what I am doing can actually impact someone’s life.
“The aim is for everyone at ING to think about human centred design and innovation in everything that they do – keeping the customer at the centre. We try to take the approach that everyone in the organisation is an innovator, not just a select few.
“It’s about bringing teams together and closer to the customer, and bringing customers into the business at the ‘thinking’ stage of product development. It’s about bringing customers to us, and also observing them in their homes and environment.
“The world is changing and we need to change how we deliver – digital-based organisations like ING DIRECT are leading the way. The future is about solving real social problems to create and deliver value.”
Clearly, innovation driven by human centred design can improve the customer experience in all manner of ways, however its impact is perhaps being felt most strongly in the humanitarian sector.
UNICEF has had a number of success stories to date. One of these was working with local government officials in the Nicaraguan village of Orinoco and applying human centred design principles to prototype a strategy aimed at improving birth registration rates of children.
UNICEF’s research found that many of the parents in the village regarded birth registration as a difficult and bureaucratic process – often involving costly travel – with little direct benefit. As a result, many children lack birth registration, which is vital to accessing basic rights.
After 15 months of planning and feedback clinics, including a co-creation workshop, a number of solutions were found, including an SMS-based system to improve the real-time information gathering of communal health workers who support pregnant women.
IDEO is also working in the humanitarian sector, with its non-profit arm, IDEO.org, which was established to apply human centred design to help tackle poverty-related challenges around the world. It has been successful in a number of innovative initiatives that have made a real impact and improvement to people’s lives, including:
- Clean Team, a sanitation system that delivers and maintains toilets to thousands of people in Ghana who don’t have in-home toilets.
- Vroom, a human centred take on early childhood development aimed at engaging low-income parents through tools and messages on the importance of positive engagement with their children in the first five years of life. After years of refinement and design work, the pilot program was launched in Washington, US, in 2014.
- Asili, a sustainable community-owned health, agricultural and water business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which provides health care and agricultural services (including seeds) as well as clean drinking water.
And it’s not just larger organisations that have found human centred design to be a creative and effective practice. As a class project, a group of graduate students at Stanford University was challenged to design a low-cost infant incubator for neonatal hypothermia, one of the leading causes of infant death in developing nations.
After visiting health centres in Nepal, including interviewing doctors, nurses and parents, the group tested dozens of designs, culminating in the Embrace Warmer – a reusable, portable and cost-effective design that doesn’t require constant electricity, and which is now being used in a number of developing countries.
The scope for innovating using the human centred design framework has no boundaries. With more unique solutions and products being developed every day and being applied across the globe, it is clearly the means to successful design in the future. Only time will tell how much further it will take us.
