GLOSSARY

Design Disciplines

A discipline is a specific field of study with its accompanying philosophies, concepts, practices, and methods. I draw from visual, product, digital, and social design disciplines.

Human-Centered Design / Co-Creation / Design Thinking

“Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet.” Don Norman [1]

Human-centered design and Design Thinking arose within innovation efforts as a way to shift from traditional business-as-usual to understanding the needs and desires of customers and end-users. Instead of prioritizing only shareholder profits, it seeks to identify all the relevant stakeholders related to a problem, then harness their collective expertise in solving it.

The underlying premise is that people will support what they create, and good business can grow out of better understanding the needs of customers.

The terms human-centered design, co-creation, and design thinking get thrown around, mixed up, and criticized—sometimes rightly so. Here’s how I think of them:

  • Human-centered design is a philosophy and mindset that emphasizes inclusion, empathy, and iterative progress. It prioritizes the needs of a constituent group or customers, incorporating them into programming, products, and engagements that meet organizational goals. In short, it means designing for and with people first, rather than leading exclusively with the business or shareholder needs.

  • Design Thinking uses the methods and techniques of designers, encouraging participants to “think like a designer”. This includes lots of sticky notes and creative ideation. However, Design Thinking is often found more heavily in business and product innovation environments than in exploring social issues or community needs. I have seen Design Thinking deployed within organizations where workshop participants are happy to use new techniques for discussing and creating ideas … but without directly engaging the people they are presumably designing for. When this happens, it is mere window dressing and a waste of time, in my opinion.

  • Co-creation is a term that has arisen as a response to the theater of Design Thinking. It more heavily emphasizes the inclusion of constituents and communities as experts in crafting their own solutions and opportunities. Co-creation proponents sometimes critique human-centered design and design thinking by pointing out how you can design products and services by thinking of the users and communities (thus taking a human-centered approach) but without actually engaging them. Instead, they emphasize the critical importance of engaging people throughout the process.

Zahler Design uses the techniques and mindsets of human-centered design, paired with awareness of greater system dynamics, a priority for equity and inclusion, and an understanding of how people learn, change, and make decisions. The goals are to:

  • Use structured techniques for framing problems, unleashing creativity, harnessing process and progress, and measuring impact

  • Help users, constituents, and participants understand the context of a problem to contribute to solutions

  • Help businesses better understand the context of their users to better connect and provide resources

When to use Human-Centered Design

  • When implementing or improving processes

  • Building out new opportunities, solutions, or innovations

  • Enhancing and reinforcing the culture within an organization

What Human-Centered Design invites us to do

  • Focus on the problem, not a favorite technology

  • Invite the people experiencing an issue to create its resolution

What Human-Centered Design doesn’t do so well

  • An emphasis on problem solving can narrow focus away from what’s working well or spotting new opportunities

  • It is not a panacea, and has been overhyped and over promised

  • It doest not encourage groups to say no or to inaction, when that might be the most appropriate response

References & Learn More

[1] The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

[2] The Design of Business by Roger Martin

Learning Experience Design (LXD) is a term advocated for by Niels Floor, to define a new practice bridging the gap between creative design disciplines and the field of learning.

LXD draws principles from interaction design, user experience design, graphic design, and game design. These design principles are combined with elements of training and development, instructional design, cognitive psychology, experiential learning, educational sciences, and neuroscience.

Floor argued that traditional instructional design methods often fail to fully engage learners in the learning process, and over emphasized the goals of an organization, rather than the learners themselves. In contrast, the learner hasn’t always been the central figure in education historically.

For example, educational publishers generally focus on subject matter experts first. They decide what matters and what doesn’t. Next, they design their materials in a way that makes them appealing for their clients: the schools. When a school purchases materials they want their teachers to be able to work with it. Finally, we get to the student who learns from the teacher. LXD works the other way around: we start with the learner and everyone else is there to support them. [3]

Critics have argued that exceptional Instructional Designers have always taken the approach of centering the learner and engaging them in multiple modalities. But this shift in language and approach mirrors what has been happening with the adoption of design thinking in businesses—thinking more expansively and engagingly by introducing co-creation design techniques.

Learning Experience Design

When to use Learning Experience Design

  • In any change effort, recognizing that change requires learning

  • When sharing subject matter expertise to an audience

What Learning Experience Design invites us to do

  • Recognize that learning happens outside the classroom, and to deliberately design a variety of experiences and engagements

  • Invite learners to co-create their own skill development

  • Apply the design process to creating learning engagements that hit the mark

Learning Experience Design pairs well with

  • Impact Measurement

  • Service Design

“Service design choreographs processes, technologies and interactions within complex systems in order to co-create value for relevant stakeholders.” Birgit Mager

In the excellent book, This is Service Design Doing, Megan Erin Miller expands the definition:

Service design helps organizations see their services from a customer perspective. It is an approach to designing services that balances the needs of the customer with the needs of the business, aiming to create seamless and quality service experiences. Service design is rooted in design thinking, and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services. Through collaborative methods that engage both customer and service delivery teams, service design helps organizations gain true, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements.” [4]

Most organizations now provide a mix of products, services, and other offerings—sometimes combining elements of all three at once. Service design is a powerful tool for helping organizations provide the best quality offerings to their customers, while making the most of limited time and resources.

Service Design

When to use Service Design

  • Considering or building out a new offering for customers or constituents

  • Looking for potential business models or revenue streams

  • Breaking down silos within an organization for a more seamless customer experience

What Service Design Invites us to do

  • Ensure that a great idea can be successfully and consistently delivered by the organization

  • Recognize that customers don’t differentiate between products, programs, or customer service—they desire a consistent experience every time they engage with your organization

  • Organize service delivery around the customer or constituent’s mental models, rather than business silos and departments

References & Learn More

[4] This is Service Design Doing by Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence, Markus Hormess, and Jakob Schneider

[5] Service Design by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason

[6] This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider

[7] Good Services by Lou Downe