We design for Humans. Don’t you?

It sounds obvious. But so much of what students, teachers and employees in big firms are asked to design isn’t about designing for humans at all.

The Design Process that I taught my pupils in school was very linear and based on ‘Things’. Well, it was aimed at Product Design and how to manufacture those products. When we designed a specification, we did look at the “user” and the ergonomics and anthropocentrics, but really we designed from the product out to the person.

But over the last few weeks I’ve had two experiences which have really demonstrated how much wider the process can be.

The first involved working with over 260 13–14 year-olds in Calderglen High School, Scotland. In the weeks prior to our workshop, we asked them to collect a Bug List: literally, a list of what bugged them (though not the people who bugged them, as that might have ended up a very long list). No, this was what bugged them in the school and community. Being teenagers, they had quite a few ‘bugs’. When asked what would they do to solve these they really had to stop and think, and move beyond how it impacted on them. They started to think about how the challenges they found impacted on others.

One example of this, was that quite a few of them were bugged at not being allowed out of school at lunch time. When they had to dig deeper into what they would do and the ‘why’ of the situation, they struggled to come up with a solution. Though one group pitched the idea of electronically tagging themselves. This was an idea that they were certain of until they asked for feedback. Feedback wasn’t just from their peers but from as many different people as they could find: teachers, parents, dining room staff, or school support staff. This gave them huge insight into the problem. They discovered that often they had found something that was their problem but not a problem shared by a wider public.

The second situation was in Mexico City supporting our local consultant, Adriana. She is working with a group of hotel managers to reinvent their service.

The hotel staff had been working on Problem-Finding for while and with some really interesting results. The magic happened, though, when we introduced them to the creation of user profiles and stories.

“Who is the Who are we designing for? What do they feel? What would be the experience even before they arrive at the hotel?”

Even I was used as the basis for a user persona in a luxury Mexico City hotel, as they tried to reshape challenges they perceived as staff members and see them from the perspective of the customer.

These are two very different groups in so many ways but they both struggled with something similar: empathy, or imagining how situations impact on others.

In our team, we try to help people get immersed in whichever subject matter they’ve found an initial bug. In an immersion people undertake desk research, but also get out there to see a situation from a different perspective and empathise with how others feel about it.

We then asked them to Go and See for Themselves (what Japanese automotive firm Toyota calls Genchi Genbutsu), and discover who is actually using the hotels. One thing they noticed from their initial profiling was they had focused almost exclusively on Western clients. They saw they had a range of cultures and a particularly large number of Asian guests. How would this change the prototyped ideas? How would the shape of the initial problem change if we saw it through the lens of the user story for a different human being?

This showed me that, wherever we live, we all have bias and we need to step out, no matter who we are, to empathise, to understand, to Genchi Genbutsu before we decide on a solution.

In a month’s time I will be in Melbourne, seeing another NoTosher, Simon, at work. Simon is working with 200 boys at a prestigious school for a whole week, pushing them to find problems, identify humans who will be impacted by those problems and by the possible solutions they later develop. They will have humans at the centre of their thinking, they will be empathising, they will be going and seeing what the situation is really like, and they will pull all this together into prototypes. Teenage boys thinking, empathising and developing for others. Busy hotel managers and teenagers, with the potential for every distraction under the sun to derail them, can see the value of taking time to look, to empathise and to Design their Thinking.

Who else can?