Human-centered Design Thinking
Learning from and with people is at the heart of human-centered design.
An increasingly popular approach in many academic and professional spaces, human-centered design (also known as design thinking) is a process that sparks innovation by placing users at the heart of any endeavor.
What It Is
Human-centered design is a problem-solving approach used to create new products and services based on knowing and empathizing with people. In family engagement, families’ voices, experiences, and needs become the center from which new ideas, processes, and services are developed.
Human-centered design helps educators and other practitioners use families’ perspectives as a foundation for reframing assumptions about problems, imagining new possibilities, and piloting and refining practices over time. It can be used in almost any context in order to help educators place themselves in the lives of families, with a goal of better understanding families’ perspectives, actions, and beliefs while placing assumptions aside.
How It Works
Although there are different ways to use human-centered design methods, Global Family Research Project suggests the following process, which involves three overlapping steps:
- Inspiration means observing people, talking with them, and stepping into another’s shoes to understand problems and opportunities that exist in their lives. This phase generally involves observations, interviews, and empathy building.
- Ideation is the process of defining a problem and brainstorming different ideas and ways to solve it.
- Implementation involves prototyping and testing innovative and new ideas, delivery, systems, and strategies.
Many of the techniques and tools that have emerged from the three overarching steps in human-centered design can be used in workshops as well as integrated into an organization’s operating processes. Human-centered design can be used as part of workshops to inspire new ideas for products and services; as part of an ongoing initiative bringing families, educators, and communities together to reimagine ideas for family engagement within a community; or as a part of a university course.
What Changes
Human-centered design can lead to learners becoming more intentional about engaging families and including their voices in teaching, learning, programs, and services, as well as lead to increased empathy and the likelihood that educators will listen to families and take time to understand their perspectives.
And when organizations adopt human-centered design techniques, they create a platform for raising up families’ voices and perspectives. This platform creates an “us with them” mentality rather than an “us versus them” stance. This process also builds strong relationships and understanding between families and educators and leads to the development of more-effective family engagement policies and practices, which, in turn, can result in high participation rates, more meaningful engagement, more differentiated services, and stronger child outcomes.
Approach In Action
Approach In Action
Human-centered design thinking transforms programs
Nashville Public Library used the Design Thinking process to create a new family literacy program for incarcerated teenage fathers. After a visit to a juvenile detention facility and conversations with the young men, librarians understood that their usual family literacy workshops would not work. They brainstormed what would be special and meaningful and came up with the idea of having the dads use rap to record a children’s book.
The librarians worked on a prototype workshop and brought several books, especially about fathers and men of color, to the detention center. Rather than offer a formal discussion of early literacy the librarians gave the fathers time to explore the books, showed videos of how to read to young children, and responded to questions. Although designed as a three-week workshop culminating in the fathers recording a book of their choice, the men asked for more time to prepare. They chose to record the stories using different formats such as rapping over beats, playing the guitar, or simply reading aloud. After finishing the recording, the librarians burned them onto CDs, which we put inside a new copy of the book. Facility staff placed the completed books in the men’s belongings, which they would have access to upon their release.
According to library surveys, all participants agreed that they learned a great deal about literacy. Several mentioned that they planned to visit a library with their kids.
Human-centered design as an organizational process
Created by the Early Learning Lab (Oakland, California), the Parent Innovation Institute was a nine-month intensive human-centered design experience that brought together families and different community providers — including librarians, early childhood educators, and health practitioners. Its goals were to improve programs and services to better meet the needs of families, develop the leadership skills and innovation capacity of staff and parents, and strengthen the connections between organizations serving parents in a community. Participants included families and four community-based organizations — the César E. Chávez Branch of the Oakland Public Library, East Bay Agency For Children, La Clínica de La Raza, and the Unity Council. Families were at the heart of the work, identifying problems and solutions through guided discovery and human-centered design. As a result of the work, organizations adapted to meet the changing needs of families. For example, at the library, the original cohort of mostly 4-year-olds has moved on to preschool and the library staff now have more toddlers in attendance. The staff are adjusting the curriculum of the play group to fit this younger crowd and trying out new materials and activities together with families.
