A white, simplified human figure stands in front of a multicolored target with concentric orange, dark gray, and red circles on a light pink background, symbolizing Human Centred Design and Ethical Research principles.
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VCD 2024

Human-centred Design & Ethical research

Human-centred design is quite simply design that is aimed at improving people’s lives. However, it’s not as easy as it looks. Designers operate within social, economic, stylistic and financial contexts which impact the ways that conceive and resolve solutions to problems. Students in VCD understand that Good Design places people, communities and societies first.

When students are discovering information to help them frame a design problem they use ethical research methods. They develop empathy with people involved in the sphere that surrounds their design process. These include the client, target audiences or users and other stakeholders.

Takeaways

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Human-centred design & research

Human-centred design is design that is aimed at improving people's lives by placing the needs of people, communities, and societies first. It is about creating effective, fair, and just solutions to problems or needs that affect the lives of people, believing that designers can create the change that is needed for the good of humankind and putting the people you are designing for at the heart of the process.

  • Human-centred design requires empathy and suspending judgment
    This approach involves developing empathy by stepping into other people's shoes to understand their lives and perspectives. Students must learn to suspend their judgment and embrace ambiguity, allowing themselves to dream, ponder, and make unconscious connections.
  • Ethical research principles are essential when working with people
    When discovering information to frame design problems, designers must use ethical research methods that operate within principles of consent, confidentiality and anonymity, respect and transparency. These principles ensure that research is conducted responsibly and that participants' rights are protected.
  • Stakeholders must be identified and consulted throughout the design process
    Stakeholders are individuals or groups that have a vested interest in an issue and can be affected by design decisions, including those from communities or institutions. Stakeholders should be consulted and involved throughout the design process to ensure solutions meet as many people's needs as possible.

A matter of priorities

Infographic with four colored circles: red for human-centred design, yellow for finance, green for environment, and blue for form and function. Each circle lists priorities and includes related icons and keywords.
The illustration above shows four influential spheres that exist within the social and cultural context where design is practised. In a similar way to the Factors that Influence Design, each sphere acts on designers and their decisions like winds that push the formation, development and delivery of design concepts towards particular and different objectives and away from other, often opposing ends.

Spheres of influence

Consider how each of the four spheres influences design in different ways. The aim of each sphere is discussed at right. In truth, all contemporary design is a product of all four of these influencing spheres to different extents – exactly how much each sphere influences design solutions that are delivered, varies within the contexts of each separate problem, need or opportunity.
The Visual Communication Design Poster Pack Full includes an infographic on human-centred design, stakeholders, research methods, and ethics, featuring icons of people and speech bubbles with grey, green, and orange accents.
Order this poster to compliment your learning. Click on the image above to find out more. Alternatively, get a VCD poster set or find it in the VCD Theory Reference Kit.
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Human-centred Design
Ethical research
Stakeholders

Human-Centred Design

Human-centred design is about creating effective, fair and just solutions to problems or needs that affect the lives of people, communities and societies. It is about believing that designers can create the change that is needed for the good of humankind. It’s about having the optimism to take risks and dream big in the pursuit of making the world an equitable place. “Human-Centred design (HVD) is an approach to problem-solving that puts the people we are designing for at the heart of the process”. 1.

Large and small scale projects

Examples of Human-Centred design frequently tackle large-scale problems such as transportation infrastructure projects and health and sanitation systems, yet can also be on smaller scales such as the design of ergonomic objects or intuitive and accessible interactive experiences.

Before you learn about the principles of Human-Centred design, take a look at the four examples shown below. There is one in each of the VCD fields of design.

Environments

Neighborhood Project CoDesign Studios, 2019

The Neighbourhood Project by CoDesign Studio was a Human-Centred design project intended to create places in communities where people can come together to share ideas, interests and activities. Layers of red tape often control the unrestricted use of underutilised spaces in municipalities and prevent the unrestricted use and allocation of resources. This project focused on hearing the needs of people in micro-communities and established a process where residents can create shared spaces for themselves. Community, rather than council office-led projects lead to doing more with fewer resources, building social connections through shared interests, and building reliance and social cohesion. The human-Centred design methodology was used to empathise with what stakeholders wanted and to develop and deliver solutions to enable their needs to be met.

Objects

Aeron Chair Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf, 1994

If you like this website then maybe it has something to do with the fact that it was written whilst sitting on the Herman Miller Aeron Chair! Designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1994 this chair used the principles of Human-Centred design by empathising with and understanding all sizes and shapes of the human form at work. In order to meet the need to provide optimum support, not one chair was designed, but three different sizes are produced. The current iteration of the chair uses recycled plastic from ocean waste in the flexible fabric covering the seat and back. The Aeron chair is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as an example of both aesthetics and function.

Messages

Aeroplane safety cards The Interaction Group

The interaction group conducted research in the 1960s into aeroplane crash fatalities. They found that although aeroplanes had become safer and offered more protection for passengers in impact, finding a safe exit quickly continued to be difficult. Discovering the needs of passengers in distress, who may also speak different languages, designers led by Dr Daniel Johnson developed simple, pictogram-style images in narrative-style sequences to illustrate the quickest and safest paths for evacuation. In 1978 these flagships of visual communication became mandatory on all aircraft. This Human-centred design program focused not on what airlines felt they needed to say but on using visual language to explain what users needed to know.

Interactive experiences

Digital hub for students, teachers and parents Portable

Portable sought to create a single online platform where students, teachers, parents, carers and department staff could connect and communicate.

“To explore how the frustrations caused by inconsistent information and user experience, Portable was commissioned by the Department for its outside, user-centred perspective. We set out to uncover what each user group needs and wants from an education hub, and what their experience with the hub could look like.

While stakeholders often have predefined ideas about the end result of technological implementations, Portable approached this project by stepping away from a solution-oriented approach, instead bringing its user-centred design expertise to achieve a real understanding of the users and their experiences.

We set out to define a student-centred hub that allows parents and carers, teachers, staff and students to connect, collaborate, engage and communicate about the student’s entire education journey.”

Portable (Accessed 25 May 2023)

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A screen mock-up of an interactive experience. (Image: Portable).

What is human-centred design?

Human-centred design methodology involves people at every stage of the design process. It requires listening to others, hearing their perspectives, recording observations and working with ambiguity. The designer discovers for themselves the true nature of a problem, and how they may be able to improve the lives and experiences of people. It is for this reason that the concepts of Ethical research and Stakeholders are also discussed on this page.

Empathy
“Empathy is the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their perspectives. Human-centred design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions…”1. Building empathy opens up new channels for innovation. “Immersing yourself in another world not only opens you up to new creative possibilities, but it allows you to leave behind preconceived ideas and outmoded ways of thinking.”1 But moving away from the familiar, and embarking on the path to Discovery can be challenging for the student designer. Here they are asked to embrace ambiguity.

  1. p22 Field Guide to Human-Centred Design. By IDEO.org. 1st Edition, 2015. Accessed 21 May 2023.

Suspend Judgement
Students develop the capacity to search and discover. They suspend their judgement and find out what others think, in the ways they think. In our world, where students are pushed to learn and recall knowledge after knowledge, giving themselves the licence to dream and ponder, to be inspired by other needs and sometimes making unconscious connections is challenging. To design an innovative solution means that as students begin the process – the result is unknown. On their way, divergent thinking will reveal many different ways a problem could be framed and solved. In a similar way, analysing data with convergent thinking strategies will yield new and previously unknown perspectives. Students develop the confidence to allow them to hold and process numerous parallel ideas simultaneously.

Two useful resources

To find out exactly how to work using Human-Centred design methodology, download these two amazing resources.

Both of these guides are structured for our design process. The Human-Centred Design Playbook uses an enhanced version of the UK Double Diamond whereas the Field Guide to Human-Centred Design is segmented into sections that mirror similar approaches.

The strategies in the Human-Centred Design Playbook and the IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centred Design frame behaviours designers can use to reach deeper understandings by empathising with people, listening to different perspectives and revealing data about ideas. They are presented in an order that roughly corresponds with the sequential progress through the design process. They can be used as frameworks to support research, analysis of information, generation of ideas or ideation, prototyping of ideas and presentation of ideas for feedback in collaborative forums such as the design critique or pitch.

Cover of the Human-Centred Design Playbook with bold white text on a dark blue background and a pink geometric shape below. Victoria State Government logo appears at the bottom right, along with Version 1.4.

Human-Centred Design Playbook

Helpful strategies in the Human-Centred Design Playbook include;

  • Low-fidelity prototyping
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Desktop research
  • Landscape review
  • Research synthesis
  • User testing
  • Service safari
  • Affinity diagramming
  • User scenarios
  • Wireframe
  • Design principles (Caution, not VCD design principles!)

Human-Centred Design Playbook by The Victorian Government

Three children sit on a bench holding disposable cameras up to their faces, aiming at the photographer. Notebooks and papers rest on their laps. They are outdoors under a wooden shelter.

The Field Guide to Human-Centred Design by IDEO.

Helpful strategies in the IDEO Field Guide to Human-Centred Design include;

  • Frame a Design Challenge
  • Build a team
  • Secondary Research
  • Interviews
  • Define your Audience
  • Immersion (done locally)
  • Guided Tour
  • Download your Learnings
  • Top Five
  • Find Themes
  • Insight Statements (or Headlines in Project Zero)
  • Explore your Hunch
  • Create Frameworks (similar to the Four Field Matrix)
  • Brainstorm
  • Bundle ideas
  • Design Principles (Caution, not VCD design principles!)
  • Determine What to Prototype
  • Rapid Prototyping
  • Get Feedback
  • Integrate Feedback and Iterate
  • Define Success
  • Create a Pitch

The Field Guide to Human-Centred Design by IDEO.

Using Human-Centred design in the design process

Human-Centred design is about understanding the needs and desires of people as stakeholders in a design project. As student designers, we need to be mindful that H-C-D methodology can be used at every stage of the Double Diamond design process.

Here are three examples of how human-centered design can be applied at each stage of the design process:

Discover

A red sailing ship with three masts sails toward a blue globe, following a dashed red line that echoes the Double Diamond Design Process VCD. The image is enclosed in a light gray circular border.
  1. User Research
    Conduct interviews, observations, and surveys to understand the needs, motivations, and pain points of the target users. This helps designers gain insights into user behaviour and preferences, ensuring that the design solution is tailored to their requirements.
  2. Contextual Inquiry
    Engage with users in their natural environment to observe their interactions, challenges, and goals. This method allows designers to uncover hidden insights and design opportunities that may not be evident through traditional research methods.
  3. Competitive Analysis
    Analyse competitor products and services to identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses. This helps designers understand the existing market landscape and informs the design direction.

Define

A circular icon with a red and white quartered design, inspired by the Double Diamond Design Process VCD, is centered on a background of blue and light blue checkerboard squares.
  1. Persona Development
    Create fictional representations of target users based on research findings. Personas capture different user groups' characteristics, needs, and goals, helping designers empathise with users and make design decisions aligned with their preferences.
  2. Empathy Mapping
    Visualise user emotions, behaviours, and pain points to foster empathy and deeper understanding. Empathy maps serve as a reference during the design process, ensuring that user needs are considered and addressed.
  3. User Journey Mapping
    Map out the user's end-to-end experience to identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. This technique helps designers pinpoint critical moments and design solutions that enhance the overall user experience.

Develop

A stylized illustration of three airplanes—blue, white, and red—stacked diagonally on a light gray circular background. The minimal outlines and overlapping planes subtly echo the iterative flow of the Double Diamond Design Process VCD.
  1. Co-creation Workshops
    Collaborate with users, stakeholders, and peers to generate ideas, explore possibilities, and iterate on design concepts. This participatory approach ensures that users have a voice in the design process and encourages diverse perspectives to drive innovation.
  2. Prototyping and Iteration
    Build low-fidelity prototypes to quickly validate design ideas and gather feedback from users and peers. This iterative process allows designers to refine their solutions based on user input, ensuring a more user-centred and effective final product.
  3. Usability Testing
    Conduct user tests on prototypes or early versions of the product to identify usability issues and areas for improvement. This method helps designers validate design decisions and make informed iterations based on user feedback.

Deliver

A red delivery truck with a white airplane illustration on its side, set against a gray and blue background, evokes fast or air express delivery—reflecting the streamlined efficiency of the Double Diamond Design Process VCD.
  1. Design Guidelines and Standards
    Create a set of guidelines that capture the design principles, visual style, or interaction patterns to maintain consistency and enhance the user experience across different touchpoints.
  2. Accessibility Considerations
    Ensure the design is accessible to users with disabilities by adhering to accessibility standards and guidelines. This involves providing alternative text for images, designing for colour blindness, ensuring proper keyboard navigation, etc.
  3. User Documentation
    Provide clear and concise user documentation, such as user guides to help users understand how to interact with the product effectively.

task

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1.1 Frame a human-centred design problem
In groups identify a need in your school or community that is related to the safety, education, health or well-being of young people. Determine which groups of people would need to be consulted to ensure the development of ideas is human-centred.
1.2 Redesigning a classroom
Apply human-centred design principles to improve the layout and functionality of a classroom. Observe and interview classmates to understand their preferences and needs. Based on the findings, create design concepts and present the final design proposal, explaining how it enhances the learning experience and accommodates diverse user requirements.
1.3 Designing a Community Engagement Project
Apply human-centred design principles to address a specific community need. Identify a problem, conduct research to understand the needs and aspirations of community members, and collaborate with stakeholders to design a project that meets those needs. The final design should consider factors like inclusivity, cultural sensitivity, and community empowerment, demonstrating an understanding of the human-centred approach to community development.
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Ethical research

The first stage of our Double Diamond design process is Discovery. It’s about searching and finding out. We find out about similar products, visual communications or interactive experiences that have been made in the past or exist now and we find out about people. We learn how, when, and why they use these things, what they think of the experiences using these products give and what they might like to see in even better ones. In this stage, we find out about the people we are designing for.
A diverse group of five adults sits in a circle indoors, engaged in a lively discussion. One woman in the center is smiling and speaking while others listen, smile, and hold notebooks or papers.

Empathising with people is listening to their needs. (Image: Fizkes@shutterstock.com).

Seeing information correctly

There are many ways designers find out about users and target audiences. They can make site visits, sketching taking photos and notes, they can conduct interviews and record the conversation, can create surveys that rank feelings, preferences and opinions and can convene focus groups where selected or random members of an audience sample different goods or watch alternative movie endings and give their reactions.

Each of these activities is used to create qualitative information and quantitative data that can be sorted, analysed and used to draw conclusions, revealing trends.

Principles of ethical research

As you would also be aware, collecting and storing information about people is a sensitive issue. People have the right to know what information is being collected and how it is being used. Ethical design research operates within principles including consent, confidentiality, respect and transparency.

Researchers must approach the task with a genuinely open mind and be prepared to listen. They are invited to remember that research is done to find out and understand – not to dismiss or confirm assumptions or predetermined ideas!

Consent
Students should obtain informed consent from participants before their involvement in research. They clearly explain the purpose, procedures (including how their information will be used and for how long) and benefits of the research method, before beginning and allow participants to make an informed decision about their participation. Students should consider what kind of information is necessary for their study and if personal information such as age and gender are part of the study this should be presented clearly to potential participants. Consent should be voluntary, and participants should have the freedom to withdraw at any time. Consent is particularly important if researchers intend to photograph, film or record on-site or online. Researchers should document the consent processes appropriately.

Confidentiality and anonymity
Students should safeguard participants' privacy and confidentiality by ensuring that their personal information remains secure. They use pseudonyms or codes to anonymise participants' identities in any data collected or reported. When processing or sharing their research findings, they must do so in a way that participants’ identities cannot be linked with their responses. This is particularly important in student research where their findings are in folios that may be viewed by peers, teachers, assessors or visitors to a College exhibition.

Respect
Students should treat participants with respect, dignity, and sensitivity. They ensure that the research process is inclusive and free from discrimination or unintended bias. Students should carefully consider how they are forming their sample group in order to achieve true and unbiased results. They should be mindful that participants are doing the researcher a favour so they should approach people in an open and collaborative way, remembering everyone’s opinion is valid. That’s why students are conducting research.

Transparency
Students should be transparent and accurate in reporting research findings. They should consider the limitations, potential biases, and the ability to make generalisations from their research.

Simplified ethical survey program

The images here show a simplified method for setting up a survey whilst observing the principles of ethical research shown above. Note: what is asked and what isn't asked.
A labeled survey form titled Safety for bikes at intersections with annotations identifying the title, consent, data handling note, and examples of quantitative and qualitative survey questions.

Set up your survey using the categories shown above. Students will have several questions in the bottom two categories.

A screenshot of survey results shows bar charts for quantitative data, text responses for qualitative data, and notes describing how each data type is gathered and analyzed. Red arrows highlight specific features and explanations.

Click 'Responses' to see the results of a survey. They will be represented visually. This will help to identify the priorities of students' sample groups.

A Google Sheets screenshot displays a survey about driving behaviors, listing timestamps, user responses about agreeing to participate, reasons for being a bike rider, and options for possible causes of motorcycle crashes as selected by participants.

Results can also be processed and analysed in Google Sheets or Excel. If several questions were giving numerical data, they could be compared to identify the sample group's priorities or interests.

Screenshot of a Google Sheets document titled Bike safety, showing survey responses. Red arrows highlight a formula calculating averages for each column to compare quantitative data and determine design priorities.

When your survey includes several questions to gather quantitative data, enter the formula to create the average of all the responses in each column. Students can use this information to create priorities for their communication need.

A spreadsheet shows survey responses about bike riders, highlighting comments that bikes cannot be seen in the drivers blind spot as a common reason for accidents at left turns or intersections. Red boxes and arrows emphasize key points.

Finally, responses to qualitative questions need to be synthesised and any trends spotted and reported in the presentation of insights.

task

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2.1 Ethical Research?
Discuss and form a definition of ‘ethics’ used in the context of design research.
2.2 Consent
List several things a research consent form should contain if it is to be used to have people agree to participate in a research survey.
2.3 Prior assumptions
Identify a few assumptions you might have about teenagers and homework. Discuss three survey questions that would enable you to get useful data that is not biased by your assumptions. Can it be done?
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Stakeholders

Stakeholders are people who hold a ‘stake’ in an issue. Ok, but what does this mean? A stake is an interest or a potential to be affected by an issue. A stakeholder can be a person, a group of people or community or an institution. Human-Centred design projects involve and consult with a wide range of stakeholders so that a design solution can be found that meets as many people’s needs as possible.
A person holds up a cardboard sign reading Black Lives Matter at a crowded outdoor protest, with many people gathered and a large building visible in the background.
Stakeholders are people who have an interest in an issue or stand to be affected by a design decision.
(Ground-Picture@shutterstock.com)

Who's involved?

Part of the planning stage for conducting research using the Human-Centred design methodology is to do a ‘horizon scan’ to discover who (individuals, communities, institutions) might benefit or alternatively, be disadvantaged by creating a design innovation in a particular area of the community.

Business models use the terms primary and secondary stakeholders. They define primary as people who have a direct financial stake in a business operation like an employee, a client or a customer and secondary stakeholders as those with an interest that is not connected with the financial operation. These include communities and competitors. VCE Visual Communication Design does not distinguish between primary and secondary stakeholders but when students are determining who might be involved, benefit or, be disadvantaged by a design solution they should be mindful that stakeholders may exist in layers. For example, the direct stakeholders in a device to help aged people open cans are the client and the user. However, on another layer, indirect stakeholders are those who may have an interest in different aspects of the product. For example, carers might be concerned about the ergonomics of the hand grips and environmental activists will certainly protest about the use of non-renewable and non-recyclable plastic for the body of the opener!

VCD Stakeholders

The VCD Study Design (2024-2028) p. 19 identifies stakeholders as any people involved in a design project, who have an interest in the process or the outcome. This includes people who might influence the defining of a Design Problem and those who are involved in creating Design Solutions to solve the problems.

By contrast, when referring to Human-Centred design the term stakeholders refers mainly to people who have a 'stake' in the project outcome. For example; If a school wanted to build a new, large performing arts centre on its grounds a range of stakeholders would need to be identified and consulted with. These would include; school leaders, parents, grandparents, the local council, neighbours, members of the college alumni and local business owners. These are the people who stand to win or lose from the completion of the project.

A stakeholder map diagram showing groups impacted by a process: Regulators, Audience, Client, Sponsors, Specialists, Peer Designers, Project Manager, and Supplier, with “You the Designer” at the center, dividing stakeholders by roles.
This illustration shows a range of people who influence both the defining of a Design Problem and the production of a Design Solution. The light blue part 'Audience and Users' focuses attention on Human-Centred design stakeholders. Although this is only one component of the illustration, this group often represents a large group of people known as primary and secondary stakeholders.

Who and what's at stake?

To give students an idea of how much is at stake when designing large projects, they can explore this resource created by the State Government of Victoria during Premier Daniel Andrew's 'Big Build'. This comprehensive resource outlines clearly what must be done to understand the impacts of a rail project and consult with stakeholders.

task

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3.1 Stakeholder Analysis
Identify and consider a hypothetical scenario or a real-life design project for a stakeholder analysis. Identify different stakeholders, such as clients, end-users, project managers, investors, regulatory authorities, and community members. For each stakeholder, describe their interests, expectations, influence, and potential impact on the project.
3.2 Stakeholder engagement plan
Develop a stakeholder engagement plan for a design project. In this task, consider how to effectively engage and communicate with various stakeholders throughout the project you identified in Task 3.1. Refer to the key stakeholder and describe their communication preferences, and appropriate methods and channels to engage them. Finally, outline strategies to address any potential conflicts of interest or challenges that may arise during the project.
3.3 Stakeholder Perspective Presentation
Present a design project from the perspective of different stakeholders. Pick the issue of a major work such as found in ‘Victoria’s Big Build’. Divide the class into groups and assign each group a specific stakeholder role, such as a client, end-user, or community representative. Each group should analyse the project from their assigned stakeholder's point of view and prepare a presentation highlighting the stakeholder's interests, needs, concerns, and desired outcomes. They should also provide recommendations or modifications to the design based on the stakeholder's perspective. This task will require students to demonstrate empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to understand multiple viewpoints.
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