Human-Centered Design as an Integrating Discipline

Guy André Boy

What is research today? Good research has to be indexed within appropriate mechanisms to be visible, considered and finally useful. These mechanisms are based on quantitative research methods and codes that are often very academic. Consequently, they impose rigorous constraints on the way results should be obtained and presented. In addition, everything people learn in academia needs to be graded. This leads to standard packaging of what should be learned and results in making people executants and not creators nor inventors. In other words, this academic standardization precludes freedom for innovation. This paper proposes Human-Centered Design (HCD) as a solution to override these limitations and roadblocks. HCD involves expertise, experience, participation, modeling and simulation, complexity analysis and qualitative research. What is education today? Education is organized in silos with little attempt to integrate individual academic disciplines. Large system integration is almost never learned in engineering schools, and Human- Systems Integration (HSI) even less. Instead, real-life problemsolving requires integration skills. What is design research? We often hear that design has nothing to do with research, and conversely. Putting design and research together, as complementary disciplines, contributes to combine creativity, rigorous demonstration and validation. This is somehow what HCD is about.

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