Characterizing Competencies for Human-centered Design

Employees and employers alike increasingly value humancentered 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 on 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. INTRODUCTION Human-centered design and design thinking are approaches to developing a deep understanding of potential users or other stakeholders to drive design ideation and decision-making processes. Illustrating the connection between human-centered design [1] and design thinking [2], Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, states on his company’s webpage: “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” [3]. Brown and IDEO used their conceptualization of design thinking to popularize human-centered design by linking its principles to the needs of the business world [1]. Though the popular concept of design thinking has mainly been applied within the realm of product development, the roots of the term can be traced back to Peter Rowe’s 1987 book “Design Thinking” [2]. In the book, Rowe credits Rittel and Webber’s (1973) [4] presentation of wicked problems – problems that require iterative processes that can only be understood within socially complex contexts – as inspiring the tenets of design thinking [4]. As the practice of human-centered design – including design thinking – has become more popular, practitioners from many different backgrounds have begun to incorporate humancentered design principles in their work. Despite its growing multi-disciplinarity, human-centered design’s core set of underlying competencies remains poorly understood. Throughout this paper, we use the term “competencies” broadly to encompass a range of mindsets, skills, and tasks. The wide range of human-centered designers, including those in engineering, design, architecture, business, public policy, education, and more, each have their own unique set of mindsets, tasks, and skills. In this work, we begin to characterize the fundamental competencies in human-centered design that transcend the practitioner’s discipline. The preliminary sets of competencies that we present in this paper are hypotheses; in our future work, we will validate the competencies with practitioners of human-centered design and their employers. BACKGROUND The Importance Of Design In Employment Human-centered design (HCD) is becoming more and more prevalent in industry and in employment. In 1997, a Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) study found that new products accounted for almost one-third of the revenues from a sample of US-based companies [5]. PDMA also found that those companies who followed a formal