Why Human-Centred Design?
In a recent survey of 270 innovation leaders, the most commonly cited barriers to innovation were:
1/ Politics, turf wars, and a lack of alignment
2/ Cultural issues
3/ Inability to act on signals crucial to the future of the business, and
4/ Lack of budget.
The same issues are true for the Higher Education institutions, but each massively amplified. To overcome these barriers, new ways of working and thinking must be explored. The talent to do so exists within any given institution, they just need to be aligned, empowered and motivated to act. But how might we do that? When we framed it as a design challenge it became an irresistible opportunity!
Design approaches to innovation, be it design thinking, human-centred design or strategic design, are now proven to be effective techniques for understanding and tackling complex social and organisational challenges. Professor Jeanne Liedtka, in a 2018 study, found that design thinking offers potential to significantly improve innovation outcomes. Supporting this, PWC recently found that 59% of organisations have adopted design thinking as their operating model to drive innovation. While this sounds positive, we know that the majority of Higher Education institutions do not utilise design to understand and act on challenges.
There are many definitions of design, but we are particularly drawn to the simplicity of Herbert Simon’s “transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones”. Does this not describe the essence of what Higher Education is attempting to do; transform students, knowledge and society for the better? In 1876, Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of John Hopkins University said that Higher Education is centred on “reaching out for a better state of society than now exists.” He went on to describe his vision of Higher Education as “a wish for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business, less folly in politics.”
Rather than solely wishing for ‘better’; design approaches provide an effective, teachable and actionable framework, skillset and mindset that could become a relevant part of a new Higher Education operating system. The operating system provides a nice metaphor, as it simply describes a piece of technology which acts as an interface between the end user and the hardware. It gets more interesting if you think of design thinking as a ‘social technology’, as proposed by Professor Jeanne Liedtka. A social technology such as design thinking acting as the interface, helps insure the correct problems are being solved, it provides a unique ability to cut across and align disciplines, it effortlessly blends practice and theory, it unlocks creative potential and it ensures those affected by decisions are at the centre of the decision making process.
Finally, we know design is most commonly associated with creative thinking, but its secret weapon lies in its ability to harmonise and put critical and creative thinking to use. While much attention is given to critical thinking in education, creative thinking is often seen as nice-to-have rather than a must have. In a global survey by Adobe, 52% of respondents said they feel that creativity is being stifled by the education system. In the same survey, only 25% of respondents said they believed they were living up to their potential to be creative. Creative thinking is needed today more than ever and “is as important as literacy” according Ken Robinson. According to the World Economic Forum, creativity is among the top three skills needed to succeed in any professional environment in 2020. These are the kind of ‘soft’ mindsets and skills that can never be replaced by automation. Embedding Human-Centred design offers an effective way of teaching creativity, unlocking it and actually directing it towards important challenges.
So, why Human-Centred design? We believe it is the most effective approach for understanding and tackling the challenges facing Higher Education institutions. It breaks down silos and it gets smart people to collaborate across disciplines to work together effectively and creatively, in turn, helping us to think in new, interesting ways and design outcomes that actually make things better. Human-Centred Design holds the potential to not just transform practices within the Higher Education system but also embed new attitudes, abilities and mindsets that help ensure the sustainability of Higher Education into the 21st century.
