Human-centered design (HCD) offers a systematic approach to innovation practice, driven by customer research and feedback throughout the design process. Within the community of engineers and researchers who engage in design for global development, interest in HCD has grown in the past decade. In this paper, we examine the human-centered design for development (HCD+D) academic community to better understand the interactions between researchers. By building and evaluating a co-authorship network from a dataset of HCD+D papers, in which the nodes are researchers and the connecting links are co-authorship relationships, we provide a decade-long benchmark to answer a variety of questions about collaboration patterns within this emerging field. Our analysis shows that most HCD+D authors publish few papers and are part of small, well-connected sub-communities. Influential authors that bridge separate communities are few. HCD+D is emerging from disparate disciplines and widely shared scholarship across disciplines continues to be developed. Influential authors in HCD+D play a large role in shaping HCD+D, yet there are few authors that are in a position to connect and influence collaborative research. Our analysis gives rise to several implications including an increased need for cross-disciplinary collaboration and the need for a stronger core of HCD+D practitioners.

OpenIDEO.com is an online collaborative platform developed to crowd source design talent across the Internet to tackle difficult interdisciplinary problems. Many of their design Challenges have focused upon issues concerning impoverished communities. Challenges include human sanitation solutions, alternatives for serving maternal health issues with mobile technologies, affordable learning tools, and social business models to improve health, and other pressing global quandaries. The platform uses tens of thousands of designers to contribute inspirations and design concepts for product and service-based solutions. The design process uses Human-Centered Design (HCD) techniques to develop interventions for the public and private sectors, in the form of products and services which are catered specifically to users’ needs. These products and services have considerable economic, social, and cultural benefits for firms and customers alike. In fact, the IDEO community has developed a Human-Centered Design (HCD) toolkit that helps designers develop products and services tailored for communities at the base of the pyramid. Although HCD techniques are practiced by IDEO consistently, a collection of larger HCD literature argues for parallel, yet slightly different, metrics of design success, which rarely have a chance to be tested against real-world settings. Fortunately, the rich content of OpenIDEO affords a novel opportunity to study the presence and effectiveness of HCD metrics in practice. By synthesizing seminal texts describing metrics for design thinking, we develop a collection of metrics that use empathetic methods to identify user needs. We then apply qualitative coding methods to find parallel themes between OpenIDEO Challenges that address issues in impoverished communities. Moreover, we use this comparison to answer the following questions: 1) Which, if any, of the HCD characteristics are potential predictors for successful designs? 2) How well do the present themes and metrics of the OpenIDEO design community correlate with metrics of Human-Centered Design? These qualitative methods complement previous quantitative network analyses of the OpenIDEO network, in the hopes of developing benchmarks for HCD methods that successfully cater to user needs.

In this case study, we present a project of Reflex Design Collective, an experimental social equity design consultancy based in Oakland, California. Since founding Reflex Design Collective four years ago, we have reimagined the role of “designers” to transform relationships structured by oppression. To illustrate this reimagination, we present a case study of our work as ecosystem-shifters. In 2017, we facilitated a co-design innovation summit where unhoused Oakland residents led collaborative efforts to alleviate the burdens of homelessness, with city staff and housed residents serving as allies instead of experts. Our approach to design facilitation differs from a typical design thinking process by pairing our clients with those on the front-lines of social inequity in a collaborative design process. Specifically, we elevate the importance of democratized design teams, contextualized design challenges, and ongoing reflection in a design process. We highlight successes of our design facilitation approach in the Oakland homelessness summit, including outcomes and areas for improvement. We then draw higher-level key learnings from our work that are translatable to designers and managers at large. We believe our approach to equity design will provide managers and designers an alternative mindset aimed to amplify the voices of marginalized groups and stakeholders.

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