ep. 12: How do you teach Human-Centered Design?
6 min read
Next week, I return to UC Berkeley to welcome students into my classroom at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. I’m excited, not just because of the energy of a new semester. It goes deeper than that for three reasons. Before I unpack that here, let’s learn more about what exactly I’m teaching.
What is this course?
Design Methodologies is an introduction to the mindsets, skillsets and toolkits of Design, serving as the foundation for subsequent Design classes. As such, the class has no prerequisites, and will be highly interdisciplinary, including over 60 students across departments and years of study. In other words, it’s not only for aspiring Design professionals. The range of students will include people who aren’t going to become Designers - for example, future cross-functional product partners (think mechanical engineers, software engineers, product managers), entrepreneurs and community leaders.
The course is grounded in human-centered design, a problem-solving technique that centers the design process around people, enabling you to create solutions that resonate and are tailored to your audience’s needs.
The course is extremely hands-on. A core piece of my Design teaching philosophy comes from Albert Einstein: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not”. Tales of problem and solution spaces can be highly abstract until you do the thing. As such, by May, students will have completed an end-to-end design project in teams, including needfinding, ideating, prototyping, testing, iterating and storytelling about their process, designing a solution to address people’s needs discovered during needfinding. This project is designed to double as a portfolio piece, should students wish to use it as such.
Why I’m excited
Reason #1: This is the course I wish I had available to me as an undergraduate.
Despite training in Psychology, a field that translates extremely well to Design, it would only be after leaving academia and discovering Design Research on the job as a research scientist that I would come to learn that what I do today is a career option (read my full journey here).
That’s right - I had gone as deep as a person can hope to go on human behavior, perception and cognition, PhD in-hand, and had no knowledge about the existence of “human-centered design”, “user experience” (UX), or even “human-computer interaction”. The siloing ran deep, and is not an unfamiliar story after years of exchanging tales with other UX professionals (especially design researchers). I cannot wait to share what I’ve learned as a UX practitioner with students this early in their career journey, if not just for the exposure to the discipline of Design - knowing that this field exists and a big-picture view on what it’s all about. We need more courses like this offered to students early, encouraging an interdisciplinary audience to participate.
Reason #2: I have the opportunity (and responsibility) to lay the groundwork of human-centered design for a new generation of product leaders.
Not everyone in the class will go on to build products in some capacity, but many will. I have the opportunity to lay this human-centered groundwork before they’re exposed to the pervasive, bad habit of what UX research leader Judd Antin calls, “user-centered performance”. An example: a product manager’s requests to run user research right before the product is about to go out the door. It’s too late to matter. The study is just being performed to check the box. This isn’t just about UX research philosophy - it’s a symptom of a bigger failure to test product hypotheses early to iterate.
Regardless of whether you have a researcher on your team, I’ll hypothesize (see what I did there?) that you got into this business of building products at least partly because it’s an energizing, creative act of problem solving for people. The fact that you conceived of some user need, created an MVP, tested whether you met that need and iterated accordingly, is not only exciting, but as Lean StartUp will tell you, existentially important for the success of your product and company. Yes, it can be scary, but so is losing time and resources only to see your product fail for the first time after launch.
I’m not so naive to think user-centered performance came about only because of a lack of sufficient user-centered design education. There are often systemic factors (e.g., flawed incentivization structures, political team dynamics) that lure us into the “validate” rather than “falsify assumptions” mindset. However, if I can inspire even one student to champion testing over validating in the future against all odds, then I’ll see that as a win.
Reason #3: Iteration, not perfection.
A core mindset of Design is that of iteration. Whether you call it human-centered design, Lean StartUp, or design thinking, the cyclical design-test-iterate process is the common variable. If you “wait until it’s perfect”, you’re gonna have a bad time. Typical results of the latter include: wasted time and resources and misalignment on your team (unveiling your fully-baked idea that no one has heard of until that moment tends to go poorly).
Something I love about teaching iterative design early is that this approach goes beyond a college class or even product development. Iteration, not perfection, is a life philosophy that I personally strive for. It’s a burnout buffer, a whole lot more fun than perfectionism, and if my own journey was any indicator - not your default outlook as a high-achieving undergrad. Let that prototype you’re building be a metaphor for life: You had an idea, tested it, learned from it, and hopefully, had some fun with your teammates along the way.
Human-Computer Interaction News
Extended reality (XR) products were on full display at 2024 Consumer Electronic Show (aka CES). However, Apple’s Vision Pro stole the show without being an exhibitor: There’s been a prolific amount of press on the various headsets and glasses exhibited on the conference floor (good starting points include: Charlie Fink’s AR Glasses at CES and Top XR at CES, Tom Emrich’s spatial computing roundup). The general consensus was, as The Verge succinctly put it: Apple won the CES headset game without showing up.
One interesting stand-out for me was the Sony XR headset, released in partnership with Siemens. It appears to target computer-aided design (aka CAD) designers/engineers, allowing them to create 3D designs in an embodied way (relative to on a flat 2D screen), and allowing their stakeholders to more easily visualize those designs with depth in a real-world context.
The main differentiators I see from Apple’s Vision Pro is its interoperability with the Siemens Xcelerator platform (see prediction #5 from last week’s newsletter), enterprise/industry-focused, CAD design use case, and user interface (UI). To this last point: the headset comes with a ring and stylus controller, affording finer motor control to users manipulating spatial content. While I'm all for more natural UI/using hands for direct manipulation, the 3D design workflow still requires precision that direct manipulation may not always serve. This review suggests that the controllers are indeed useful.
What comes after Humane’s AI Pin? Rabbit’s r1 AI device: The Rabbit r1 is a smart agent capable of understanding natural language requests. It’s designed as a one-stop shop for getting things done: people give Rabbit complex requests. Rabbit breaks those down into different tasks and performs them, obviating the need for individual apps. Intuitiveness and efficiency of the interface are key selling points (“It can do x amount of things that your phone can do, but MUCH faster and more intuitive.” - Jesse Lyu, Rabbit CEO), and it seems to be resonating: there were 20,000 preorders in 48 hours.
Signals of the future AI/XR podcast episode: If you liked last week’s newsletter, you’ll love this podcast. I recently had the opportunity to nerd out about signals of the AI/XR future with wonderful UX humans (and fellow Torontonians), Patrick Keenan and Alan Smith, on their podcast, The Machine is the Message.
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That’s a wrap 🌯 . More human-computer interaction news from Sendfull next week.