What is our process?

Introduction

The Introduction to Human-Centred Design book is designed to orient you to the rest of the guidebooks as well as introduce the Human-Centred Design process.

Launch

Your design team (or a smaller initiating team) will start by preparing for the design process. This includes scoping the design challenge, selecting the most appropriate design pathway for your project, creating design teams, reflecting on the best community-based design model to use, aligning all stakeholders around the requirements of the project and building your team.

Understand

Your design team will then work to understand the problem you are trying to solve. This means conducting research to understand the context, the stakeholders that are currently involved, the current problem scenario and how the challenges are being addressed today.

empathise

Your design team will use empathy to learn from your communities. Through interviewing and observations, you will engage people in conversations to generate insights and understand what they care about and their challenges and needs.

Synthesise

Ideate

Once your design team knows what problems you want to focus on, you engage in idea generation to explore a wide variety and large quantity of ideas that go beyond the obvious solutions to the problem.

Prototype

Then your design team will use rapid prototyping to make your ideas tangible and enable others to interact with the idea. The goal is to make something quickly without using a lot of resources that will allow you to get closer to knowing what will work, what won't, and why.

Test

And finally, your design team will ask for feedback on your prototypes, so you can rapidly iterate and improve your solutions until you gain the confidence that your solution is desirable, feasible and sustainable.

Plan

Once your design team is confident about the solution you want to implement, it is time to begin planning how to scale your solution. This means creating road maps, identifying resources, deliverables and milestones.

Storytell

At the end of the process, your design team will want 
to make sure the stakeholders and the community understand your design process and potential solutions. During the process it is important to document everything so that you can present the process and share your learnings with the goal of inspiring stakeholders and partners to take action and provide support.