People-centred design report

The mission report from the recent UK DTI Global Watch Mission for People-Centred Design, to the US, was launched this week at the UK Design Council.

You can download the full report, 'Innovation through people-centred design - lessons from the USA' from the Global Watch website (where you'll also find a report summary).

If you have any experience in this field, neither the mission report nor the launch event presentations really say anything new about methods (US and UK practice are pretty similar). And as practitioners in the UK, we also know that in the US qualitative field research is much more integrated into the corporate world - even Walmart has an ethnographer! - than in the UK.

What I feel is important here is that a government agency - the DTI - now has a glossy report out on this stuff. In other words, the user/human/people agenda is hitting the mainstream rather than being the preserve of a niche community.

The report is a curious beast: probably too shallow for the practitioner, and I think too technical for the novice client. Rather than giving the mission participants the opportunity to tell their stories - and storytelling as a genre is definitely on the people-centred agenda here - the report is split into a set of segments that aren't very involving, but perhaps that's in the nature of government reports. Maybe what is really needed is one report for practitioners - with a lot more meat from the mission - and another for 'outsiders', that explains the basics in plain language. But that's a minor quibble.

While mission participants have pointed to one of the UK problems being fragmentation/a lack of integration (large firms without capability, lots of micro-firms offering an external service), the DTI project doesn't seem to offer anything that might bring these communities together...or indeed that might bring the micro-practitioners themselves together. The same applies to the problematic academy-practice relationship, an area commented on by mission participant/organiser Nina Wakeford.

But at least these issues are being raised, which is a great step forward. We need to look to other initiatives, perhaps, to start addressing them.

Having said all that, if you're interested in this field, the report very well worth checking out, and could provide some useful ammunition in working with clients, as well as insights into people-centred approaches to design. The Mission visited around thirty organisations large and small, including SonicRim, Intel, Aaron Marcus and Associates, IDEO, Swim Interaction, Intel, BMW Designworks, Adaptive Path, FXPal and Microsoft Research. There are some fine quotes, such as the following from Gayna Williams at Microsoft:

There's more to life than adding another feature.