This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design practice and industry. This prevents design practitioners from accessing the rich body of research and knowledge posed by academia. Various web platforms and textbooks allow users to discover or search for design methods, but little support is provided to assess whether or not a method is appropriate for the context or the task at hand. In this exploratory study, interviews were conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Interview responses were coded and analyzed in an effort to understand the patterns in searching, selecting, assessing, and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice. This analysis showed that interviewees would like to search for design methods based on their desired outcomes. Additionally, interviewees considered their personal contacts to be the most valuable source of new methods. These insights show that web-based communities of practice may be a potential link between academia and industry, but existing web repositories and communities require further development in order to better meet the needs of the design practitioner community.

In human-centered design, user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity. Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries. To build researcher–client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes. This reframing of the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.

Employees and employers alike increasingly value human-centered design, as it can drive innovation across a wide range of industries. With the growing interest in understanding human-centered design processes as they apply in different professions, there is a rising need to recognize the specific competencies necessary to perform these jobs well. Though there is a body of research on how people discover, create, and use design methods, there is a lack of understanding of what core competencies are necessary for people to apply these methods. Previous interactions with target users of theDesignExchange, an interactive community-driven portal to support design researchers and practitioners, have demonstrated a desire for increased awareness of the competencies required for employability and for successful design practice. This paper reports on a portion of an expansive competency-finding project aimed at identifying the core set of competencies that human-centered design practitioners need and employers seek. In this paper, we present our lists of cultivated mindsets, specialized disciplinary skills, contextualized tasks, and basic skills in human-centered design. These lists represent a first pass at identifying the essential and underlying competencies a practicing or aspiring human-centered designer must have in order to perform their current or future design tasks. The work we present in this paper serves as a preliminary starting point for future research interviews with design practitioners and employers, as we seek to understand human-centered design competencies.