HCD Part I – The evolution of Human Centered Design

Human Centered Design (HCD) is the key ethos that drives Erdmann Solutions in its mission to create sustainable market-friendly platforms for national and international enterprises, with emphasis on medtech and healthcare.

The Erdmann Solutions team sees HCD as a principal means of fostering genuinely innovative solutions that strengthen brand value and create meaningful design milestones that can be successful as well as attractive.

This series of articles examines the foundations of HCD, its evolution and methodology, and its relevance to pharma, medtech and healthcare. All are derived from the eBook ‘Human Centered Design’ authored by founder and Chairman Raimund Erdmann that provides a basic guide to the subject.

Key Questions

The book first seeks to answer two fundamental questions:

• What drives our perceptions of design as a discipline?
• Which (or whose) ideas supplied the matrix for the roots of contemporary design?
• Understanding the basis of design as a discipline is necessary to be able to differentiate the HCD approach.

Answering these questions starts with the roots of design in the architecture of the ancient world, where iconic Egyptian, Greek, and Roman structures such as the Pantheon or Hagia Sofia required both spiritual inspiration and pragmatic application of technology. This blend of art and science was rediscovered during the Renaissance, particularly in the writings of Vitruvian that influenced Leonardo De Vinci and Michelangelo.

Evolution of Design

Design thinking as a recognized discipline first began to evolve from the late 19th century with the Arts and Crafts movement spearheaded by William Morris championing connection between art and daily life and a more humanistic approach, while John Dewey’s concept of experiential learning and problem-solving stressed recognition of the users’ needs.

The early 20^th century saw the emergence of the concept of industrial design as a separate discipline that focused on the aesthetics, functionality, and usability of products, particularly mass-produced ones. Pioneers included Peter Behrens, Henry Dreyfuss, and Raymond Loewy who strove to blend art with engineering, emblemized by Loewy’s iconic Coca-Cola bottle and Shell logo. This was taken a stage further by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mihes van der Rohe’s studiedly minimalist and functional architecture and interiors, and the associated Bauhaus Movement in 1920s Germany that again emphasized the integration of art, craft, and technology, with a focus on functionality and simplicity, summed up as ‘form follows function’,  a maxim first coined in 1896 by the father of the skyscraper, Louis Sullivan.

Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus peers influenced many aspects of design, from architecture to product design, and laid the foundation for user-centered design principles that would become integral to design thinking.

The first real steps towards human centered design date can be traced to the Design Methods Movement from the late 1960s, which sought to formalize design as a scientific discipline, drawing on methodologies from fields like engineering, psychology, and systems theory to create structured and repeatable processes.

An early seminal work was Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (1969) arguing that design was a way of problem-solving that could be applied to a wide range of contexts, from engineering to social systems, and introducing the concept of “satisficing,” which could be summarised as not allowing perfect to be the enemy of ‘good enough’.

American architect Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language (1977) proposed a set of design patterns for architecture and urban planning that would emphasize recognition of user experience and context.  Alexander argued that human needs should be expressly included in design decisions, with creational, structural, and behavioral patterns determining the use, form, and functional proportions of buildings.

While largely ignored at the time, Alexander’s proposals then guided the subsequent generation of computer hardware and software engineers, with the new focus on ‘usability’, or UX (User Experience) as is now known. Principal instigators of this new design thinking were the design and engineering labs of Stanford University in California, which Erdmann Solutions has had a close relationship over more than two decades.

A key figure here was Donald Norman, whose The Design of Everyday Things (1988) is now recognized as a landmark in the field of design, setting out how good design should be intuitive and accessible, focusing on the user’s experience and the usability of products. Norman emphasized the importance of empathy in design, a concept that would become central to design thinking and the emergence of HCD.

Modern designers are also influenced by the key phrase “Less is more” that has shaped design for the digital age, led by the IDEO studio in Palo Alto, California, and its fervent disciple Steve Jobs of Apple Computer. From the moment in the early 1980s that Apple II welcomed users at start up with a smiley emoticon, visual iconography, and intuitive mouse point and clicks, Apple has been celebrated as the epitome of interaction design.

It was also a leap into the dimension in which products form emotional connections with their users, the phenomenon we now call ‘brand value’.

Resources

Click on Human Centered Design by Raimund Erdmann to access full Red Book eBook
Click on www.erdmann.ch for further details.