Human-centered Design: Inclusive Design in the Company
Services
Translation of “Human-centered Design. Il Design Inclusivo in azienda” on HBR Italia by Natascia Palmina D’Amico and Nathalie Ospina Cruz.
Design is known as a discipline useful for solving problems of varying complexity through creativity. That’s why the central point of the design process is to identify the right question, often framed as “How might we…?” This approach, developed by Procter & Gamble in the 1970s and adopted by IDEO, sparks ideation and makes us active participants in finding the solution: there is strength in “we” and confidence in finding an answer.
The design process harmonizes uncertainty with methodology, and through a defined framework, it enables synergy among different actors, guiding them through moments of divergence and convergence in an iterative process to generate impact through small, recurring steps.
Design, therefore, begins with and is driven by a clear identification of a goal, a purpose, a function, a need, or a desired state. There are certainly different ways to achieve the same objective, leading to various design approaches and methodologies, processes, and paths.
FROM “WORKING ALONE” TO “WORKING TOGETHER”
When faced with different options, we favor the approach of doing. Not solitary doing, but doing “together.” In our experience with companies over time, various reasons have led to this choice. The main reason is the awareness that companies are complex organisms, ecosystems of interconnected and therefore interdependent parts.
It is unrealistic to think that top-down interventions can take root or that an element can be inserted into an environment without causing consequences or being influenced by the context.
This perspective naturally leads to a way of working that takes into account the system and its actors, and for this reason, it is inherently inclusive. The ecological approach has a second dimension related to the very current theme of sustainability: the ability to maintain or sustain something over time.
In this context, when applied to the corporate organizational environment, sustainability has a specific meaning linked to the persistence of interventions, the longevity of newly learned behaviors, and the adoption of new practices and habits.
MAKING DESIGN SUSTAINABLE
Design must focus on creating interventions that do not fade away but leave a lasting mark, keeping in mind that the goal is not the intervention itself, but the activation of change processes.
However, anyone who has ever tried to change a habit, stop or adopt a new behavior in their daily life, knows how difficult this can be. At best, it involves learning and applying something new; in other cases, the effort is doubled: unlearning old behavior and thought patterns and replacing them with new ones.
Change, therefore, involves effort, and there are various objective reasons that explain why. For example, cognitive inertia—the tendency of individuals to maintain their current cognitive structures—or the human desire for stability and predictability, combined with fear of the unknown.
Design is a powerful tool in support of transformative processes, as it can help facilitate transformation by highlighting possible directions and methods, thereby guiding the entire process.
A certain type of design allows this while keeping people at the center, from start to finish.
THE ROOTS OF HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
To make an intervention sustainable over time, it is essential to correctly identify the needs to be met, starting with listening to people’s needs and aligning these with the feasibility and strategies of the business.
Human-Centered Design is an umbrella term that encompasses a set of methodologies focused on designing solutions that prioritize people as part of the organizational ecosystem. These methodologies are replicable and scalable due to a sequence of steps that systematize the design process.
The roots of this systematization come from the intersection of design with the scientific spirit (Langrish, 2016), which has enabled the definition of clear and complementary phases: understanding the problem, analysis, identifying needs, and synthesizing to arrive at a desired output (for more on this, see Dubberly, 2005).
However, it was not until the 1980s that Don Norman (1986) introduced the term User-Centered Design, though initially as a concept focused solely on system ergonomics to ensure usability and reduce errors. The use of this term has since expanded from “user-centered” to “human-centered,” also considering the impact on various system stakeholders, not just users (ISO, 2019). In terms of benefits, employing a human-centered approach leads to higher productivity and user well-being, stress avoidance, and greater accessibility (Ibid., 2019).
FROM TOP-DOWN DESIGN TO CO-DESIGN
Considering the needs, motivations, frustrations, and goals of different stakeholders and the end user allows design to influence and guide the planning of interventions within organizations, with collective creativity as the driving force.
The Human-Centered Design process is iterative and enables the co-creation of various outputs, such as products, services, strategies, concepts, and frameworks. Shifting the paradigm from top-down interventions to co-created solutions allows for the identification of opportunities that challenge the status quo and solve problems.
This “applied collective creativity” (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) is part of Participatory Design, which “brings together the expertise of designers and the unique experiences of people whose work is impacted by the change” (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).
Co-designing interventions not only treats actors as subjects of study to identify their needs but also positions them as experts in their context, leveraging their experiences. The co-design space thus becomes a place where idea generation is enriched by the diversity of experiences and perspectives that participants bring.
UNCERTAINTY AND THE PROCESS
We know that change processes and innovation can create uncertainty. Design is a process of exploring ideas to propose possible solutions, a journey that moves from research to clarity and culminates in a solution. One of the mindsets of Human-Centered Design is embracing ambiguity (IDEO, 2015).
This is important because it allows for challenging assumptions and avoiding premature solutions without exploring the context, fostering open thinking, enabling new ideas to emerge, and finding even unexpected answers.
Let’s now explore the key phases that guide the Human-Centered Design process (see figure).
The unknown also holds the charm of wonder, capable of guiding teams through uncharted territories.
Source: Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com
EMPATHIZE AND DISCOVER
The first part of the process involves research and data collection. Understanding existing solutions helps identify initial directions for planning ethnographic research.
- Who are the potential users?
- Which other actors do they interact with in the system?
- Which experts could help us explore the topic further?
In this phase, interviews, focus groups, shadowing, and even auto-ethnography techniques are conducted. Once the information is gathered, it is synthesized to find opportunities.
DEFINE
Using the information collected, the initial problem is redefined.
- What does the context and the interaction with people tell us about this topic?
- Are there emerging themes or patterns that highlight the underlying issues?
This phase aims to identify the right challenge, framed in a design question that outlines the constraints while simultaneously stimulating ideation.
IDEATE AND DEVELOP
This is the phase where the group is guided to imagine solutions to the identified challenge. Often, a time constraint is used to encourage quick thinking, pushing people to generate more ideas and freeing them from the notion that there must be one perfect solution. This unlocks creativity and fosters creative confidence (one of the mindsets proposed by IDEO, 2015).
It’s important to convey the message of building on others’ ideas. As the process advances, it becomes more collaborative, facilitating decision-making.
PROTOTYPE AND DELIVER
After ideation, the group decides, using voting methods and defined criteria, which idea or ideas to move forward with and test through prototypes, of varying complexity levels. This step allows the group to identify which ideas work and refine the concepts accordingly.
The entire process becomes iterative, where every piece of information gathered from testing can lead to reformulating the challenge and fueling further research. This process has been condensed and adapted into various models, including the “Double Diamond” from the Design Council, which represents the sequence of phases as alternations between divergence and convergence (see figure).
Source: Design Council, www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/the-double-diamond. Graphic reinterpretation
THE BENEFITS OF INCLUSIVE DESIGN
Involving the target audience in creating the solution is an inclusive process that increases engagement and adoption while ensuring alignment between company directives and the needs of employees.
One of the fundamental aspects of the Human-Centered Design process is the synergy among participants, generated by the structure of the session, the tools provided, and the facilitation and ground rules that enable all participants to feel empowered, comfortable, and safe in contributing with psychological safety, regardless of organizational hierarchy.
This characteristic makes the experience inclusive and horizontal, facilitating the sharing and pooling of key themes as well as the proposal of responses and solutions.
In Human-Centered Design, this interaction is represented by the concept of a journey. It is a sequence of a person’s actions over time through the phases of a process, recording emotional highs and lows, touchpoints with the system, motivations, goals, and frustrations. This type of representation helps navigate complexity and directs interventions to moments that matter for greater effectiveness.
Identifying these critical moments allows for targeted training to develop inclusion skills, taking into account the interdependent relationships among the various actors involved in the organization. Sustainability over time is supported by the creation of a network among participants, opening space for dialogue and the formation of alliances, allowing inclusion to continue circulating.
The direct involvement of people helps avoid certain simplifications that would otherwise be as inevitable as they are inaccurate. Just consider the use of categories to simplify and organize reality. While indispensable for managing complexity, there is a risk of reducing the existing reality into artificial categories and representing individuals’ characteristics and uniqueness in a non-authentic way.
As Fabrizio Acanfora (2021) reminds us, even statistics carry this risk. The very concept of “normal,” which comes from statistical language, is meaningless: normal simply means more frequent.
With this risk in mind, design—especially human-centered design—becomes a necessary tool for managing differences effectively. In this vision, the role of the designer is not that of a deus ex machina coming to solve the situation, but something quite different.
It is the person who helps the collective express itself, becoming the facilitator of the process.
A maieutic approach enabled by design methodologies, where people are guided to design solutions that work for them. Solutions designed by the community for the community, reducing barriers in an inclusive way, with the intent to empower people to take action.
INCLUSIVE DESIGN IN ACTION
Now let’s share some examples where we successfully implemented the approach described so far.
The first case is of a large international company that requested our support in cascading certain best practices that had already been implemented globally, related to raising awareness and spreading knowledge on specific DE&I topics at a local level. The project’s goal was to create awareness by generating and disseminating knowledge while promoting discussion and exchange.
DESIGNING AN AGILE AND SCALABLE GOVERNANCE
The main challenge was to surface all the virtuous mechanisms that had developed spontaneously within the communities, identify high-effort moments, and address complexities in assigning ownership, ultimately creating an agile and scalable governance system. The process involved a series of co-design workshops in close collaboration with the most active members of the communities. Initially, it was crucial to define objectives using key design tools to shape the participants’ knowledge.
Facilitation helped bring valuable information to light, which was systematized collaboratively into synthesis reports. This allowed us to define the nature of the communities, roles within them, mutual commitments among members, goals, expectations, scope of action, and communication mechanisms with stakeholders. These documents became a valid and reusable guide for all future communities, enabling the scalable creation of new networks.
DESIGNING INCLUSIVE TALENT ACQUISITION PROCESSES
The second case involved a large Italian company seeking support in their talent acquisition processes to increase the number of women in technical roles within the organization.
Here, the challenge was to use design as a tool to facilitate relationships and exchanges between internal actors familiar with the company’s culture and processes, and external experts in DE&I.
The project’s first phase involved listening and co-designing, engaging all figures involved in the talent acquisition process, including the HR team, training team, as well as administrative and operational unit staff. This diverse group enabled synergies and knowledge sharing among colleagues who, due to their distinct roles, had previously had few opportunities for collaboration. It also allowed the inclusion of different perspectives within the same company, contributing to a bottom-up intervention strategy.
After collecting the necessary information, we systematized it with the company, highlighting specific best practices. We went further by testing these best practices: KPIs were defined, and the practices were piloted in a select number of facilities. This allowed us to compare the performance of those facilities with others that did not follow the experimental best practices, proving their effectiveness.
RAISING AWARENESS ABOUT INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE
The third case involved an Italian company aiming to raise employee awareness about the importance of language in promoting inclusion. The intent was to generate awareness about recognizing people in their entirety, going beyond barriers and categories, in line with the company’s cultural model.
The process involved launching challenges and engaging groups from different offices in a “gamified” way, involving a diverse population. Each group contributed words, concepts, and behaviors related to inclusive language during a series of meetings to identify the most representative ones.
The main challenge was facilitating the selection process of the most frequent and emerging expressions related to inclusive language, overcoming individual or group preferences, all in a hybrid format. Design tools helped facilitators guide different groups toward convergence through shared moments and specific voting criteria. This method, applied in every step, helped the groups select clear, coherent, original, and widely accepted content, in an intellectually honest manner.
The process also included educational segments on language and micro-aggressions within the co-design sessions, providing groups with the necessary criteria to identify biases and recognize inclusive language expressions, values, and behaviors, as well as offering clarity and civil courage elements. In the final phase, the teams contributed words and ideas for creating an identity statement to guide the company’s inclusive language definition and belief system.
The value of this manifesto lies in its fully bottom-up creation, stemming from the participants themselves. Between the first and second meetings, there was a notable improvement in awareness and sensitivity, and the dynamic became formative for the group as they found new ways to make their language more inclusive.
FROM HUMAN-CENTERED TO HUMANITY-CENTERED
Design, as part of transformation processes, increasingly impacts systems by considering not only people’s needs but also interdependence within an organizational ecosystem. Due to this systemic view and its focus on collective innovation, design plays a role in addressing even more intricate and large-scale problems.
The Design Council identifies this practice as “Transformation Design,” emphasizing the potential of design to find solutions to complex social and economic issues (Burns et al., 2006). The role of design in social innovation has been extensively exemplified and studied by Manzini (2015), becoming key in our current context as we face the planet’s limits. In this context, not only “problem-solving” but also “sense-making” becomes the most original contribution of design. This involves creating new values and systems of meaning for a new “sustainable civilization.” These new values and meanings will emerge from collaboration between designers, experts, and non-experts alike. According to Manzini, all of us act as designers when shaping our lives and solving everyday problems.
This great challenge necessitates an evolution in methodology: expanding the focus from human-centered to humanity-centered design. Humanity-Centered Design focuses on the entire ecosystem of people, all living beings, and the physical environment. It takes a long-term view, continuously checking the proposed projects to ensure they truly meet the needs of people and the ecosystem they are designed for. The role of designers in this case is to act as facilitators and mentors, empowering the community to take charge, move forward, and continue benefiting from the intervention. In the words of Don Norman (2024), “Democratize design so that everyone has a voice, everyone can play a role.”
