The origins of human-centered design
From World War II to Civic Tech
From Don: I’m fascinated by the emergence of human-centered design as a set of practices that can change how we fix public services. If offers the promise of direct engagement with citizens in the meaningful creation of products. Like many innovations, it was popularized in the private sector, especially in the tech industry. But this post points to how innovators in government embracing human-centered design long before it had a name.
In the early years of World War II, air force pilots were mysteriously crashing the B-17 bomber at alarming rates. In a 22-month period, 457 crashes were reported for non-combat related issues, such as pilots who approached the runway for a perfect landing without their landing gear deployed. With an influx of new recruits, the general assumption was that crashes were caused by inadequate training and pilots who were ill prepared to fly. Instead of simply writing off crashes to incompetent pilots, the Air Force asked psychologists in the Army Air Force Aero Medical Lab to look into the issue.
A psychologist named Alfonse Chapanis investigated these crashes not by reviewing crash reports, which often listed “pilot error” as the cause, but by talking to the pilots themselves and sitting in the planes they were tasked to fly. Pilots reported how confused and terrified they’d been before crashes, describing the consequences of misreading gear labels or finding instrument panels rearranged. Also, flying conditions were stressful and required quick and accurate decision making.
What Chapanis’s investigation revealed was not training or pilot error, but design error, where control levers for wing flaps and landing gear looked identical. This error in design resulted in pilots crashing their planes into the ground with the landing gear still tucked in. Chapanis designed a solution, now called shape coding, which assigned a distinct shape for each knob and lever that allowed pilots to distinguish between controls through touch. Shape coding is still used today in everyday objects from airplane cockpits to video game controllers.
Cliff Kuang recounts this story in his article, “How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh.” The research and redesign of the B-17 is an early example of what we know today as core human centered design. While there are variations, it generally includes the principles of action: discover, design, develop, and implement. These principles are certainly not unique to HCD, but their application to understanding how to improve human interaction with the system around them sets HCD apart. In essence, “human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving…It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing with and ends with new solutions that are purpose-built to suit their needs.”
Three versions of the four-phases of human-centered design
The Evolution of Human-Centered Design
The techniques applied to resolve the mysterious crashes of the B-17 laid the foundation for subsequent work in design thinking, service design, human-computer interaction (HCI), user-experience design (UX), civic design, and civic technology. HCD has always been an interdisciplinary field, frequently intersecting with the disciplines of psychology, engineering, anthropology, and the arts. A mechanical engineer named John Arnold is credited with formalizing the HCD process in 1958, resulting from his “creative engineering” course, which he taught at M.I.T. and Stanford. HCD processes were primarily applied to industrial and product design up until the development of the first laptop in 1982.
Technology sparked rapid growth in HCD practices in the field of HCI and UX design. Don Norman, a clinical psychologist and first user-experience architect at Apple, coined the term “user experience design” in 1993, citing “I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.” This focus on comprehensive experiences with technology led to increased innovations that reduced frictions and increased connectivity and autonomy in people’s daily lives. Pivotal innovations included the launch of Amazon’s one-click purchase in 1997, and the launch of Google’s search engine in 1998.
Twenty-five years after the launch of the Macintosh computer, technology served as the gateway for HCD practices to enter into government services. In 2009, Code for America (CfA) was founded, which deployed technologists to local governments with the goal of improving government services. Technologists not only brought their knowledge of software development, but their research methods as well—deploying HCD and UX practices to the public sector. While these strategies improved digital infrastructure and government service delivery, they also helped to address more endemic frictions in government systems, unearthing needs of end users and administrators along the way. The failed launch of HealthCare.gov in 2013, coupled with demonstrated successes of CfA, led to a growth of “civic tech” organizations, both in and outside of government. See Table 1 for a timeline of pivotal moments in HCD over the years.
A Brief Timeline of Human Centered Design
1958 - John Arnold, a professor in mechanical engineering at M.I.T. and Stanford, is credited with formalizing the human-centered design process through his “creative engineering” course.
1970’s - Industrial designer Dieter Rams publishes his “Ten Principles of Good Design.”
1978 - IDEO is credited with coining the term “design thinking” as “a response to the question of what design had to contribute to the modern world.”
1983 - G. Lynn Shostack, a Citibank marketing executive, is credited with coining the term “service design” in a Harvard Business Review article, Designing Services that Deliver. There she identified that like products, services need design too.
1988 - Donald Norman, a trained cognitive psychologist, published the “Design of Everyday Things,” a foundational text which popularized user-centered design.
1993 - Donald Norman coined the term “user experience design,” citing “I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”
1997 - Amazon launches the one-click purchase, a pivotal moment in the reduction of frictions in computing and task completion.
Civic Tech Adoption
2009 - Code for America begins their fellowship program, placing civic-minded technologists with local government.
2013 - The failed launch of government website, Healthcare.gov
2014 - Government tech initiatives, 18F and USDS, are launched to enhance digital government modernization.
2021 - President Biden signs the “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government” executive order.
HCD to Build Trust and Engagement with Government
Over the past 15-years, HCD practices in the public sector have received recognition from government officials and academics as a mechanism for increasing trust and reducing the administrative burdens that often characterizes citizen-state interactions. In 2021, Ppresident Biden signed the Executive Order, “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government.” This order encouraged the use of HCD practices to design services around public feedback to improve fairness, transparency, and public trust, defining HCD as “an interdisciplinary methodology of putting people, including those who will use or be impacted by what one creates, at the center of any process to solve challenging problems.”
While the government collects vast amounts of private data on U.S. residents, it has placed little focus on understanding how individuals interact with its systems. This results in the government having a lot of information about its residents, but very limited information about their needs, motivations, or attitudes. Consequently, government processes cater more to administrative needs than to those of individual citizens. Furthermore, the government offers few channels for engagement that would provide insights into resident needs.
Other resources on applying human-centered design to improve public services:
Code for America Benefits Playbook
Beeck Center Preparing for Human Centered Design
Rachael Zuppke is a user experience researcher specializing in legal design. She consults with courts to enhance access to justice initiatives through human-centered design, and serves as a research assistant with the Better Government Lab. She has over 15 years of experience in non-profits, and a diverse background in visual art and public interest law. This piece is excerpted from a collaborative project with Rachael Zuppke, Maria Manansala, and Shannon Gielow.
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It would be a shame to leave out the emergence of ethnographic research in design, pioneered by Lucy Suchman at Xerox Parc for copy machines. Rick Robinson, while at the Doblin Group (1989), and later E-Lab furthered the methodology for business and popularized the use of ethnography in the design/product development process. The Institute of Design was the pioneer of human-centered design education, having close ties with the Doblin Group.
Until then, industrial design and product development was concerned mostly with physical human factors (rather than behavioral.) IDEO was first exposed (1990) to ethnographic approaches by Design Research, later Gravitytank, founded by Chris Conley (me!) They integrated "user-centered research" into their product development process which they later coined Design Thinking.
Just trying to add to the history!
It's frustrating, ok, infuriating.
The current attack on government and more generally, the shift from life saving/human efficiency enhancing studies/practices towards simply extracting money from a population, that we, as a nation, thanks to Trump's MAGA crowd, are engaged in when there is so much more to be learned and implemented to improve people's lives drives me nuts.
We haven't yet picked all the "low hanging fruit" contra Tyler Cowen.