Human-Centered Design (HCD)
“Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving; it’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.” –IDEO.org
Why do a lab on human-centered design?
All innovation labs, accelerators, and incubators have “user-centered” or “human-centered” approaches as a core element. They also embrace a mindset of rapid prototyping, testing, and iteration. You’ll often hear the popular phrase, “failing fast” or “failing forward, faster.” You’ll find those same threads in virtually all programs worldwide.
For the first lab session, teams are going to be introduced to these mindsets and also provided with practical tools to give them exposure to the full human-centered design process so they can immediately start doing something with it . Experts from GRID Impact will be presenting this lab. More on them in another post!
Want to learn more?
Check out this Devex article on human-centered design for development.
Watch this video where PSI staff talk about embracing the methods of HCD as part of their way of working: