Human Centred Design as Action Research
Here’s me unpicking my latest thoughts as I prepare to work with a client where we are implementing a year long project framed by Human Centred Design as Action Research.
Human Centred Design
I often discuss with our education clients that human centred design is not just about problem solving but a way of exploring and experiencing the world around us. Indeed, to reduce human-centred-design (HCD) down to “problem solving” is to undersell it’s potential to drive creativity, innovation and learning. I’ve come to view and describe the way we utilise HCD in education as Participatory Action Research.
HCD provides an ‘innovation framework’ to help us to work systematically and collaboratively while researching and making sense of our social settings and then to take action on any opportunities that emerge from this collaborative research. The hope is to achieve significant and long-lasting positive change. The three pillars of human centred design that we strive to honour are empathy, exploring problems and low-fidelity prototyping. But, we also acknowledge that HCD is also a systematic approach to help us all change our practice using a collaborative model of design and exploration. At its core HCD is an evidence based approach to inquiry that is biased towards developing practical actions. HCD is advocated for use in education because of it’s commitment to involving people in the diagnosis of solutions to problems rather than imposing on them solutions to predefined problems. What‘s not often discussed is that HCD is a form of action research; and just like HCD action research does not just mirror reality but refracts it, “to show us how reality might be if things were different.” (O’Toole & Beckett, 2013).
Action Research
There is no one type of action research but simply it’s a systematic approach to help professionals change practice by exploring issues about their professional lives. The general characteristics of action research are shown in the following image.
Action Research Design (Image adapted from McMillan & Schumacher, 2010)
We can see from this diagram that in the education system action research designs support teachers (or other individuals in educational settings) to gather information about and subsequently improve, the ways their particular education setting operates, their teaching and their student learning. The purpose is for educators to improve the practice of education by studying issues or problems they face (Cresswell, 2014; McMillan & Schumacher, 2014).
It’s important to note that what distinguishes action research from other types of research designs (e.g evaluation research) is that action is taken, there is an applied focus to this work.
In “Participatory Action Research” (a term used by Cresswell) there also exists a commitment to collaborative and emancipatory work (see image below). This is also highly democratic work where teachers initiate the research and undertake diagnosis of and the design of solutions to problems — rather than having imposed on them predefined problems and solutions.
Collaborative Teams in Action Research (Image adapted from Cresswell, 2014)
The hope of action research is to empower individuals in schools, systems of education and school communities. This emancipatory work allows educators to assume responsibility for their own emancipation and change (Bryman, 2012, Cresswell, 2014).
Summary
I view human centred design and the way we apply it in schools as a form “Participatory Action Research”. It’s power is it’s ability to:
Encourage change in schools
Foster a democratic approach to education
Empower individuals through collaborative projects
Positions educators as learners who seek to narrow the gap between practice and their vision of education
Encourage educators to reflect on their practices
Promote a process of testing new ideas.
These ideas are from Cresswell as he cites the importance of action research.
These points also describe the typical hopes carried by a human centred approach to the transformation of teaching and of learning. The change is in how we work (design) together and undertake authentic teacher inquiry where teachers enhance their understandings of their contexts while developing new educational practices.
Please gift me with your thoughts on this topic. To reference this medium post:
Keily, S. (2021). Human centred design as action research [Medium Post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/graccon-learning-solutions/human-centred-design-as-action-research-e89c476e0d8b
References
Bryman, A. (2012). Social research methods (4th ed.). Oxford, UK: OUP.
Creswell J.W. (2014). Educational Research: Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research [Kindle version]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com.au
McMillan, J,H., & Schumacher, S. (2014). Research in education: Evidence-based inquiry [Kindle Version]. Retrieved from http://ww.amazon.com.au
O’Toole, J., & Beckett, D. (2013). Educational research: Creative thinking and doing (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
