The call for human-centredness isn't just about opening up deep and critical knowledge about human thinking, languages, cultures, and artefacts, but also about how humanities students and scholars will learn to design and make. We will look into how such approaches can impact the ways technology is embedded in our everyday practices, our cultural interactions and identities, and our institutional behaviour.

The overall call for human-centred design is a call for 'us' to go from being agile change adapters to becoming critical and creative change makers: contributors who will make sense of and bridge new rifts and gaps in digital/human domains.

In his TEDX Talk Evan Fried, who at the time was a recently-graduated student from Michigan State University, talks about a community-based design project for more playful and engaging learning in schools and how he engaged with various communities, users and makers in deploying a human-centred design process.

Impacting through human centered design | Evan Fried | TEDxMSU

Design thinking is not by definition human-centred, but offers pathways for engaging human-centredness through empathizing–getting to know people (audiences, users, citizens) as a prerequisite for understanding a challenge and the possible ways of defining the problems posed by a challenge. Design thinking relies on empathizing to get to know users or audiences; e.g. by doing participatory audience studies and imagining new users through the creation of personas – or as we have seen on the last pages, also about emphazing with past and untold histories. (See also 1.1.3: User Centred Design and  5.1.3: Working with Personas). 

Embracing human-centred design means believing that the people who face challenging problems are the ones who hold the key to defining and solving these problems. Human-centred design combines criticality and creativity, to respect the contexts and conditions of a problem field and to analyse it critically. It also provides opportunities to look for inspiration in serendipity, the unexpected and untold, while being able to interpret and engage in multi-perspectives.Human-centred design offers problem solvers take an empathetic approach in designing with (not only for) communities, to take the time in open, yet structured ways to deeply understand the people we're looking to serve, to participate in imagining and dreaming ideas for future states, to stay grounded in what you learn from communities, to create innovative new solutions rooted in actual needs and desires, and in doing so to contribute to unlock real impact and change.

Exercise: Complete the following tasks about Evan Fried's TedTalk


After completing the exercises above, try doing your own version of Evan's design process involving stakeholders. Use the Stakeholders Map and the Actors Map made by the Digital Society School from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, to create your plan of action. This will help you visualise and envision the design process better, preparing you for Unit 3: Design Thinking Lifecycle.
                    



References

• Kester, G. (2011) Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art. Variant Supplement
• Rosner, Daniela K., Critical Fabulations. Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018. Series: Design thinking, design theory.