Understanding Human-Centred Design Principles

Design principles are essential in today’s time. We may undermine the importance of design, but each field today is directly or indirectly related to design. Designing opens doors to many career fields. With the generation inclined towards creative career options, design principles are rudimentary. The need to understand human-centred design principles is inevitable.

What are human-centred design principles?

Human-centred design principles are philosophies and methodologies of design where the needs of humans are prioritised for better functionality. Human-centred design principles usually involve a more detailed understanding of the user, the core of the problem, and continuously refining the solution as per the feedback.

What are the key steps of human-centred design?

Prioritising user needs and experience, human-centred design revolves around these five steps. Those five steps are:

• Empathise: This step is the primary step, as it helps in understanding users and their context. It involves understanding the preference of the user, its behaviours, and experiences and defining the problem.
• Recognising the needs and requirements: This step is essential as it helps it understand the problem and begin searching for answers. This step is about gathering information and assessing the information.
• Conclude the findings: After analysing the data, one should explore different solutions and delve into better concepts and designs to enhance user experience.
• Prototyping: While this may be a technical concept, this stage ideally deals with solutions/prototypes which help in deciding the efficacy of the design concept.
• Evaluating the design: With the collected feedback and deep understanding of the problem, one can improve the user experience.

How can human-centred design principles help with evolving career choices?

Human-centred design principles play a critical role in shaping today’s career choices. The creative career choices which can be explored after a deep understanding of human-centred design principles are:

• Product Design: Product design is one of the most exciting, creative and lucrative careers in this era. Centre design principles give an understanding of design, making it easy to navigate through the complexities of product design as a career option.

• Communication Design: With the understanding of current philosophies and a detailed understanding of print, media, audio and visual communication, human-centred design principles help in broadening the scope for communication design career opportunities such as graphic design and UI/UX. The foundation of design principles help in gauging different designs much better and help in enhancing them..

• Interior Design: Interior design is a field which relies heavily on human-centred design principles. Understanding space and its functionality and elevating it aesthetically with design principles and aesthetics makes design principles needed for this career path.

Institutions which lay a strong foundation for human-centred design principles.

Several institutions and reputed organisations offer a strong foundation in design principles. The design principles allow students to grasp the concepts of design and have a clear understanding of it.

Among all, ATLAS ISDI allows students to explore their creative side and, with experimental learning and hands-on industry experience, enables individuals to widen their thinking and catalyse their concepts about design principles. The undergraduate programme in collaboration with Parson’s School of Design ensures that students learn through the experience of teachers, and experiential learning helps them in lifelong lessons for a lucrative future and career.