
Community-based, human-centered design - icc97
https://jnd.org/community-based-human-centered-design/
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ThomPete
This is just design thinking reformulated. The problem with most of these
principles is that they are extremely vague and are what good designers who
design do anyway as a function of what they are buildning. Its very hard to do
the not-test without ending with almost 100% score.

This offers no solution with regards to the transendence between the
principles and the output. And reads to me just like marketing material for a
process which will cost you way more than it will ever solve.

~~~
lifekaizen
This is the announcement of a new paradigm that Don has been thinking about
recently, it is not meant to be practical advice for implementation. It
imagines a world where a designer is not needed to create a product; a
designer can help refine, share, or scale it. In tech it would be something
like those non-programming work flows for the marketing departments, which are
typically looked down upon by the technically knowledgable, but imagine if
they instead took that as the inputs to design a better system.

(Disclosure: Don is a relative.)

~~~
wtracy
Your post addresses my biggest problem with the article: It reads more like a
wishlist than a guide.

I would like to these issues addressed going forward: (And please don't take
this as a list of reasons why this won't work; these are all things that I
think can and eventually will be addressed.)

1\. How do the stakeholders learn what is or isn't technically feasible? (I've
seen stakeholders propose cumbersome solutions because they had no idea that
the technology existed to make something better.)

2\. How do the stakeholders learn about the non-obvious trade-offs between
different design options? (As a trivial example: Lots of first-time product
designers learn the hard way not to use white for the plastic exteriors of
electronics. Why? It's extremely difficult to get white plastic to have a
consistent color, and the two halves of the shell won't match. Even Apple,
with their massive budget, struggles with this.)

3\. How do stakeholders learn about prior art in the field? There's rarely a
good reason to reinvent the wheel, and there's even more rarely a good reason
to repeat other people's mistakes.

4\. How do the stakeholders communicate their design to the engineers
accurately and unambiguously?

5\. How do you accomplish all of the above without constraining the
stakeholders to design by multiple choice (which is still inherently limited
by an outside expert's idea of what is and isn't going to be useful to the
stakeholders) or forcing them to become domain experts themselves?

If I have a suggestion off the cuff to address (some of) these issues, it
would be to make a tiered set of design tools available. Level 1 would be
straightforward multiple-choice, level 2 would be a mix of fill-in-the-blank
and click-and-drag, up to level N using the same tools as the professionals.
Community stakeholders could then decide for themselves what is the
appropriate trade-off between flexibility and time investment.

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jt2190
> Although traditional methods are effective for traditional mass-produced
> items, they are unable to take account of the local needs, cultures, and
> history of individual people and communities. The literature on the world-
> wide aid community is filled with examples of well-intentioned “solutions”
> failing to work when introduced into developing nations (see (Easterly,
> 2013; Ramalingam, 2013). And if they do work at first, they are often so
> difficult to maintain and service, that they soon fall into disuse. Finally,
> in some cases the unintended negative consequences outweigh any good that
> has resulted. We believe that the people best equipped to address these
> issues are the people who live there: This article shows one approach.

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hydrox24
> The principles of human-centered design have proven to be effective and
> productive

Perhaps this assertion is patently obvious within the field, and doesn't need
a reference, but for those of us less familiar with human-centred design are
there any well known instances of human-centered design being "effective
and[/or] productive"?

~~~
ThomPete
Yes but not in the way it's used today.

I wrote about it several years ago

[http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-
you...](http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-
about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/)

