HCD: Fad or Fab?
Human-Centred Design (HCD) is at the centre of everything we do at Praekelt. But does the rest of the world agree?
For the past few years it has been an uphill battle to get industry buy-in to this approach. Recently, when we went to the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit (SBCC) in Indonesia to find out about global trends in this field, we found out that HCD has now become part of the globally accepted approach to Behaviour Change work, punted by the big NGO’s like UNICEF, USAID, and Johns Hopkins. Speakers continuously emphasised the importance of Audience Driven Design, Deep Audience Engagement, Participatory Practices, and Community Engagement. This was music to our ears.
At Praekelt we call this HCD. HCD provides a way of thinking that places the people we’re designing for at the center of the design and implementation process. It brings the community to the forefront and allows the people we’re designing for to have their voices heard. It’s not often favoured though because of the amount of time required to co-design with the community. The major challenge with an HCD process is convincing funders why they should spend 45% of their capital in the field before starting to build the solution.
According to many speakers at SBCC, until now, Randomised Control Trials (RCT’s) have been considered to be the gold standard of research. But funders and practitioners are now saying that the numbers and results that you get from an RCT are great, but they aren’t enough. It’s useful to know what works and what doesn’t, but if you don’t know why it works or doesn’t work, then you aren’t that much better off than you were before. And that’s where HCD brings so much value to the table. The RCT allows you to get the hard cold facts, and HCD provides you with deep insights and a better understanding of the target audience and the environment they live in.
HCD is a process, not an outcome.
We provided a second training on the HCD process at the ICT4D Conference in Lusaka, Zambia where it was also clear that many organisations expect HCD methods to give them all the information they need after one attempt. However, after applying HCD to a hypothetical challenge in the room, it was clear that HCD enables us to try and fail and then try again. The process allows us to fail quickly and iterate on our ideas, quickly moving through a variety of iterations, building on what we’ve learned from the people we’re designing for. At the end of the training session, ICT4D participants committed to including HCD into their projects from Day 1 and also to incorporating it into how they adapt and improve their existing projects.
HCD has a number of benefits. It improves service delivery, provides accountability and allows new platforms to flourish. HCD also promises to solve last mile challenges by introducing diverse perspectives and providing a structured design process to uncover new solutions to entrenched challenges. However, it is a struggle to communicate the impact of HCD because there are no HCD solutions, but rather only solutions developed through HCD. HCD is a process, not an outcome.
We have a long road to travel before HCD can be considered a mature methodology. First, we need to map the pathway from empathy to impact by reaching a common ground as a community of practice: a shared definition of HCD. Then we need to work on providing evidence that HCD delivers impact and sustainability, and that interventions designed by HCD can go to scale.
We should even take this further and commit to eating our own dog food: we should use HCD not only for external projects, but to also solve any internal challenges in our organisations. HCD can be used to generate ideas to improve Human Resource processes such as recruitment; prototypes can be tested to address issues of inclusivity; and focus groups with employees can provide feedback as to what works and what doesn’t with the current processes. All these methods can be used to develop empathy with our employees ensuring a welcoming and inspiring workplace. After all, how can we expect to care for people outside of the organisation if we can’t even care for our own? We need to start leading by example by involving the end-users of our processes — external and internal — in the design thereof.
But this means we first have to make a mindshift in terms of who makes the decisions in the work we do. The question we were left with at the end of the SBCC Summit, was well articulated by James Deane of BBC Media Action, who said, “Who decides which behaviors get changed? Who decides which social norms get shifted? Who decides which voices get amplified? That’s our key challenge for the future.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Written by Lauren Kotze & Estee Liebenberg, Services Designers at Praekelt.org
