Human-Centered Design and the Field of Technical Communication

Introduction

This special journal issue gave us the opportunity to examine the role of human-centered design (HCD) in technical communication (TC). HCD has a winding history extending back at least 60 years. A key point of discussion in these years has centered on whether HCD is different from user-centered design (UCD), focusing on the role of the user versus the human in these two frameworks. Also of note is the discussion of social context and collaboration that underpins an HCD approach. In this article, we discuss the turn toward HCD thinking, its role in pedagogy, and its relationship to TC scholarship. Finally, we briefly discuss the four articles in this special issue of this journal and their use of HCD principles, given the authors’ academic backgrounds in both HCD and TC.

A Turn in Design Thinking

The turn toward HCD has gained momentum in recent years, though designers have been moving in this direction since the mid-20th century. In 1955, famed industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (1995) marked this trend with his publication of Designing for People. That work, perhaps more directly than any other previous publication, articulated the value of approaching design work from a people-focused perspective on the uses and implications of objects introduced to society. His work spelled out an early vision of what it means to engineer objects for people in the context of lived experiences. In subsequent years, thinkers have expanded and helped develop ideas expressed by Dreyfuss at mid-century. Some of this work developed under the moniker of human factors and ergonomics, a loosely defined approach to design that draws on insights from multiple disciplines, including anthropology, engineering, and cognitive psychology. Elsewhere, thinking about HCD developed in other start-up fields such as industrial design, participatory design, and usability studies. More closely related to the concerns of many of this journal’s readers, antecedents for HCD have also come from TC and human–computer interaction (HCI). The many turns and nuanced sub-plots in this history are beyond the scope of this article, but we would like to call attention to a few key, recent developments that we see as important for understanding what HCD now is.

To begin, we largely agree with Rouse (2007), who offers three defining objectives for work that is guided by an HCD perspective. As he contends, work that is guided by HCD should:

“enhance human abilities”;

Expanding on these objectives, Steen (2012) articulates four principles that underlie HCD. Drawing ideas from ISO 13407 (Human Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems ISO 13407, 1999), he proposes that an HCD approach includes:

“involving users to better understand their practices, needs, and preferences;

Framing HCD from the perspective of the business of design, Denning and Dargan (1996) contend that HCD involves obtaining results that must be satisfying to the customer; using a design process that involves collaboration, evolution, and adaptation between customers and designers; and having ongoing communication between the customer and designer throughout the process.

We believe that HCD is fundamentally about accounting for and reflecting shared human values in the creation of the technologies, artifacts, and systems that humanity shares in the collective pursuit of life. Recognizing that values vary from context to context, and that they are subject to change as people and technologies interact, we remain grounded in the assumption that human values are primary and should guide the world that people collectively create. Our assumption here is in agreement with Krippendroff and Butter (2007), who contend that an HCD perspective is one that acknowledges the role of humans in actively constructing artifacts—conceptually, linguistically, and materially. And, further, it is a perspective in which those who engage in design are tirelessly concerned with such artifacts, handling them and putting them to work to enhance the world they create.

HCD arrived at this current focus on human values as the ways in which the field collectively thinks about people and technology evolved over the last few decades. Following the general story as Liam Bannon narrates it, much of the early work in human factors engineering and human-centered automation required humans to adapt to well-designed machines. Further, as Bannon (2011) explains, early work in HCI focused on the “individual human user, viewed as an information processing mechanism” (p. 52). A major shift in HCI, he notes, came when insights from the Scandinavian participative design movement began to be recognized. Another major shift, he observes, occurred when the field of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) emerged. With this development, he notes a change in HCI, which had focused on individuals from a psychological perspective, understood via lab studies. Starting to account for humans as parts of groups from a sociological perspective, HCI researchers largely arrived at the position that field studies could help them better understand the relationship between people and technology. He thus concludes that researchers have evolved to a human centered perspective, one that “places our understanding of people, their concerns, and their activities, at the forefront in the design of new technology” (p. 53). He further says that fields such as participatory design, CSCW, interactive design, and HCD are not simply aspects of HCI but [are] themselves radically different interdisciplinary research programs that re-specify the very nature of the relation between people and technology” (p. 56). This view is complemented by others such as Kling and Star (1998) who, theorizing about human design, define a human as an entity that includes and goes “beyond individuals and their cognitions to include the activity and interactions of people with various groups, organizations, and segments of larger communities” (p. 23). Gasson (2003) notes that HCD takes on a sociotechnical view and balances the requirements of a social system.

Rouse (2007) differentiates HCD from UCD, contending that “human-centered design is a process of assuring that the concerns, values, and perceptions of all stakeholders in a design effort are considered and balanced” (p. 5). He contrasts the balanced stakeholder values and perceptions of HCD with a definition of UCD in which “the user is a very important” and “the success of a product or service is strongly influenced by other players” (p. 5), a definition he derives from others (Billings, 1996; Booher, 2003; Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983; Norman, & Draper, 1986). Agreeing with Rouse’s sentiment about the stakeholders, Krippendorff and Butter (2007) state: “Human-centered designers must acknowledge the critical role of stakeholders—supporters and opponents—welcome their active roles in bringing a design to fruition, and see themselves not as masterminding the process but as active participants in such networks as well” (p. 6). Gasson (2003) notes that user-centeredness concerns a focus on one user at a time and that usability overlooks “the social context” incorporated in HCD (p. 29).

Richard Buchanan (2001a) advances the HCD model of humans and their relationship to design by including a stronger emphasis on human rights and values:

As an instrument of cultural life, design is the way we create all of the artifacts and communications that serve human beings, striving to meet their needs and desires and facilitating the exchange of information and ideas that is essential for civil and political life … Finally, design is the way we plan and create the complex wholes that provide a framework for human culture—the human systems and sub-systems that work either in congress or in conflict with nature to support human fulfillment. (p. 38)

Buchanan (2001a) also insists on the “central place of human beings” in the field of HCD, pointing out that

Unfortunately, we often forget the full force and meaning of the phrase [HCD] … This happens, for example, when we reduce our considerations of human-centered design to matters of sheer usability and when we speak merely of “user-centered design.” It is true that usability plays an important role in human-centered design, but the principles that guide our work are not exhausted when we have finished our ergonomic, psychological, sociological and anthropological studies of what fits the human body and mind. Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances. (p. 37)

As Buchanan (2001b) notes elsewhere, the ongoing move toward a more expansive view of design, one that includes HCD, is evidence of the artful, rhetorical nature of design, which produces meaningful artifacts that affect others. In this expansive understanding of design, a design approach must be multi-faceted, broadly inclusive, and tuned to core, shared values of humanity. In the academic programs that have recently developed around HCD, we see some evidence of how academics attempt to incorporate such important concerns as human rights, broad-scale consideration of inclusion, and the balance of design-for-what-is-possible versus design-to-reflect-human-values in education.

A Turn in Higher Education

Within higher education, HCD has recently emerged as a focus for degree programs and curricula. Institutions across the United States now offer concentrations, certificates, and degrees in HCD at all levels. As it has emerged in higher education, HCD exhibits a multidisciplinary character with degree programs integrating courses from various disciplines, including engineering, psychology, computer science, business, arts, and the humanities.

A sampling of these programs illustrates just how diverse HCD is in higher education.

The Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth offers an interdisciplinary minor in HCD that integrates coursework in design, human factors from a psychological perspective, and ethnographic methods (http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/academics/undergraduate/ab/human-centered-design-minor).

Beyond the formal degree programs and concentrations, HCD has also taken root in hands-on learning spaces in higher education, including the offerings in studios and labs.

The College of Design at North Carolina State University offers project-based learning in its HCD studios in which students in industrial design follow a UCD approach to develop prototypes of devices (http://design.ncsu.edu/human-centered-design-studios).

As these efforts within higher education demonstrate, HCD takes slightly varied forms as it emerges in different educational settings. In the following section, we describe how the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering developed from a Department of Technical Communication.

A Turn in the Field of TC

As a broad and diverse field, TC includes research and theory that aligns well with HCD. Many have called for the field of TC to broaden its focus in a way that engages and collaborates with other fields to achieve interdisciplinary goals (Spilka, 2009). Spilka (2009) urged those in TC to focus on questions that would “make a difference … through collaborative efforts,” “contribute to the social good,” and “matter in the context of the larger social environment” so that they can “help in broad, even global ways” (Spilka, 2009, p. 6). Both TC and HCD are relatively new professional and scholarly fields that have struggled to articulate their value, priorities, and identity.

The turn to HCD in TC and in higher education is closely connected to our own work at the University of Washington (UW). In 2009, our Department of TC engaged in a process of reimagining itself. At the end of this process, we emerged as the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE). As we explain here, this transformation, in our view, is in itself an example of institutional redesign following an HCD process. Our department started as a program of TC in the 1970s, becoming the Department of Technical Communication in the 1980s, with its own BS and MS degrees and eventually its own PhD. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the intellectual and political climate in the Department and the College of Engineering at the UW had begun to shift. While we still offered courses in such traditional TC areas as technical genres, style, editing, and publication production, faculty research agendas had expanded radically beyond such domains. This expansion was drawing the intellectual center of gravity in the department away from TC and into such areas as remote usability testing, automated content summarization tools, information and communication technologies for the developing world, and computer-supported collaborative work. In a sense, these areas can be seen as taking their cue from ideas at the edge of TC, but we were certainly pushing them beyond the traditional realms of the field.

Institutionally, as a unit in the College of Engineering, we also felt some pressure to reflect the new intellectual nature of the department by explicitly acknowledging that we were directly involved in design and engineering work, not only communicating about such work. It was this overall climate in addition to national and international research shifts that helped drive our department name change, the reimagining of our curricula, and the development of a new culture in the department. Our processes for engaging in this redesign of our department was accountable to the people involved at several levels, and it was one in which the community was closely involved. As a community, we considered what our values were; what was academically and theoretically sound; what our alumni, current students, faculty advisors, peers, and advisory board members were telling us; what industry and jobs were asking for; who our competitors were and what they were doing; and where we wanted our department students and faculty to be in the next 10 to 15 years. We opened forums for discussing these issues with different stakeholder groups, both locally and nationally.

A Preview of the Articles in This Special Issue

Our ongoing interest in what a transition to HCD meant for our program and, perhaps for the field more generally, led us to plan this special issue. The four contributions to this issue offer different ways of conceptualizing the HCD-TC connection, given each of the authors’ perspectives on research and methods in HCD. Together, the articles help further define HCD and discuss the authors’ views of the relationship of HCD to UCD. In addition, these articles help delineate HCD in terms of its grounding in human rights and human dignity. All four first authors hold doctoral degrees in HCDE from the University of Washington and are professors at institutions across the country.

Cynthia Putnam and her coauthors surveyed information and communication technology professionals about the practice of building interactive systems. They found that participants had varied views of HCD but that human-centered thinking is on the rise. They conclude that there is a need for effective communication tools, particularly personas, but that persona creators will need buy in, in addition to quality research and presentations.

Rebecca Walton presents the results of an exploratory research study with Rwandan youth. Her research explores what Technical and Professional Communication research can achieve when it is based on a foundation of human dignity and human rights. She concludes that direct acknowledgement of human dignity and human rights can help researchers reflect upon whether their work honors the intrinsic worth of every person and also help identify those who may have been overlooked.

In a similar vein, Emma Rose uses a variety of qualitative methods in a design ethnography to investigate the experiences of homeless bus riders. She examines information design, communication technologies, and policies that impact vulnerable populations. She presents a social justice perspective, with a focus on advocacy, for technical communicators who are engaged in HCD. She offers them the opportunity to bring about socially responsible design, encouraging them to take into account the needs of vulnerable populations.

Also exploring social justice, Natasha Jones investigates a method for developing design scenarios and using narrative inquiry, along with the feminist concepts of silence and voice, so as “to promote social justice and inclusion in design.” She argues that HCD is ideal for engaging in issues of social justice and that designers must attend to the how their designs impact the human experience. She concludes that narrative inquiry scenarios can provide HCD practitioners with solid ways in which to engage social justice issues by “privileging the voice and experience” of users and removing the silences that reinforce oppression and injustice.

Conclusion

HCD emerged from the intersecting edges of many fields, offering a unique way of involving people and designers in collaborative and contextually relevant forms of engagement to create effective and desirable designs. We believe that this special issue of the journal offers a provocative set of research-based arguments about how to think about HCD. We hope the issue will lead to new thinking about our field and what it means to design for, with, and through humans. An obvious potential focus of this thinking across our field will be to consider HCD in the context of post-human rhetorics (Mara, & Hawk, 2010). Most importantly, we hope that the conversation initiated by this special issue will lead researchers to consider deeply how best to think about human values in the research, educational, and productive work of design.