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Humanity-centered design is a practice where designers focus on people’s needs not as individuals but as societies with complex, deep-rooted problems. Designers can co-create proper solutions when they work with populations, address the right problems, perform systems analyses and co-design small, simple interventions. During #DesignForTomorrow 2023, Don Norman joined the Panel Design for Good where he addressed the need for the industry to apply more Humanity Centered Design thinking. What are some great examples of Humanity Centered Design or where can I find more information about Humanity Centered Design?

Just like the name indicates, this design topic explores the effects of design in trauma and seeks to develop trauma informed design choices. Checkout this meetup group to learn more : https://www.designinfocus.org/networks-communities/trauma-informed-design-global-learning-group

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During #DesignForTomorrow 2023 Cecilia Brenner talked about Life Centered Design during her Design For Life talk. As mentioned in the Regenerative Design thread, I'm still exploring the differences between the two. What are your thoughts on Life Centered Design?

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Regenerative design examines how buildings and products can be designed to minimize their environmental impact and improve the health of ecosystems. It upgrades the old mantra of “recycle, reduce and reuse” to “restore, renew and replenish.” During the #DesignForTomorrow awareness initiative in 2023, Laura Korculanin talked about regenerative design where she mentions life centered approach. Life Centered Design and Regenerative Design sounds very similar. I'm curious to explore the differences. Life Centered Design is another topic in this discussion list. What are your thoughts on regenerative design?

Platform member, @Linda van der Zwan who has been a participant in Industry talks where she talked about how customer journey mapping led to success, joined our first Dream Team Roundtable which is centered around Sustainable fashion and the role of design. Reach out to her on this platform to learn more and open discussion on this topic.

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While it may be profitable for us on the short term to create unethically, there are many factors to consider, for example in Democratising Research. The mentalities we shape with our work are our colleagues too, and now some are pushing to democratise research. While there are some good aspects of it, please rest assured that it will most likely not be for you. If the concept of democratizing research reaches your company, your colleagues can vote and then tell you what to do. How much of a challenge is it already to present your work? Do you have to alter it over and over and over? If pleasing a handful of bosses is hard enough, pleasing your teammates will be even more so. What are your thoughts? Discuss it here and learn more about Ethical Design at the Ethical Design Network.

Darja Jerjomcenko asked how can we upcycle more, and what purposes can we repurpose fabrics for. Below I will post what I know (soon), and invite everyone to list examples of cases where fabrics are given a second life.

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This year I spoke to @Tiziana d'Agostino who writes for the Ethical Design Network (among others) and we briefly touched on a few topics such as dark design. She is also a member on this platform and you can have a chat with her. Tiziana's Portal She is a good source to hear more about cognitive load in dark design.

While I was initially cautious about the topic of ethics, it has become a popular topic and so much of what I do ties into it. To demonstrate how I intend professionals who would like to start a network or community could use the Design in Focus platform, I started the RANDSTAD UX network because of my own involvement in this area. Open invite to start any other CID (creative, innovation, design) networks & communities! In the coming time I will share training on that too. Back to the topic, Randstad UX took off and grew a bit bigger than anticipated. In January we collaborated with Ladies that UX for an interactive discussion event. PwC, who graciously hosted us, requested that we use the theme Design for Good and with that we landed on the topics ethics & AI. On the event page you can watch the livestream, although it's a bit noisy because of last minute unavoidable challenges, there are some interesting discussions. Event page Some bad news For the event I also published an article with some of my thoughts and discoveries. It is a highly critical and brutally honest reflection of my encounters linked to the topic. It's a super long article too, so I don't think it has much appeal to the average person, but if it does for you, drop your comments below and let's start talking. Article During the event and in the article, you can find Cecilia Scolaro's quote "AI is learning from us". While many are concerned about losing their jobs, there is a very real threat in AI which I have not yet seen addressed. Machine learning develops stronger strategies, who has access? I will leave it at that and if you read the article you will either know or we can start a conversation here. Now, the good news While finding members for the event panel, all kinds of conversations started and I got in touch with so many dedicated professionals who are working on solving problems daily and making positive impact. Due to the sheer amount of people, I decided to create the Design for Tomorrow Awareness Week event in summer this year. During this week I'm planning an explosion of events relating to positive impact design. Ethics once again pops up! Event page Well and that is already a lot of developments surrounding this topic, but wait! For this months Randstad UX event, we decided on the theme Design for Accessibility. Even more human centered design. Event page Ok, is that enough advertising? Yup, and reflective of the extend to which ethics has become a popular topic here on Design in Focus. Does this interest you? What kind of topics should we include, or could you add?

While I'm on this topic, I'd like to have some discussions from a more personal perspective touching on some of the thoughts relating to the mental model that has resulted of my own experience as a professional and human. This was the summary of how I interpreted the topic at the time. My optimism has sparked in recent months, but I think it's undeniable that there are a lot going on under the hood and that it may be too much of a party pooping topic to get into for most. What are the challenges, and how may we incrementally optimise to solve, overcome or deal with it? How to strike the balance between idealistic altruism and stone cold reality? I remember getting familiar with an org called effective altruism and attending their meetings in Amsterdam briefly before being swept up in another tide. In case you're interested https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ I've not had too much time to thoroughly research it but I'd like to know if there are any groups who offer tools for incremental change applied to specific fields. I've created Design in Focus because I feel that the CID (Creative | Innovation | Design) sectors offer the most potential in solving some of the biggest challenges we face. The biggest challenge rearing its ugly head time and again is that we are not always enabled to create the changes needed to facilitate "better". Sometimes the commitments needed outweigh the realities provided. By unifying those who actually create and planting seeds, we may in the long run be able to make measurable impact. Share your ideas and thoughts below. Add some links to great reading or training, bearing in mind all walks of life.

During the Dream Team 01 Session, Xavier, Tom & Mike mentioned that there are some existing organisations already working on ideas that we thought of also during the session. Let's use this thread to list organisations and movements that are relevant to the topic.

During the Dream Team 01 Session, one topic that repeatedly pops up is mindset and culture. Let's use this thread to discuss how to go about that.

One of the first participants on design in Focus was Trine Falbe, founder of the Ethical Design Network. On her experience portal you can listen to our discussion on Ethical Design. I was really fresh and the quality is reflected, but listen to Trine, she has great things to say. Ethical Design under a minute On her experience portal you can learn more about her and her work. The page has links to her training, some of her talks, publications and events. Also on the page there are a few facts & figures as well as many links to get started with Ethical Design, linking to Trine and other independent references. None of the work is sponsored so I'm sharing my exploration and discovery to dive deeper into the value and impact of design. Ideally this platform will grow and other CID professionals can lend to the conversation. My field is corporate identity and experience design, therefore I may have more opportunities in these areas, but I invite every design stakeholder to share their own discoveries. Link to Trines page Share your thoughts below

Our first session of the Dream Team Roundtable was recorded in December, due to unfortunate circumstances the editing of the recorded session is taking a bit longer than expected and will be only be published in the next few weeks. Despite not publishing the work, I've had a lot of conversations surrounding sustainability and circular economy/design recently and have recorded more sessions for this dream team. While working on this project, I've heard an increasingly louder narrative calling on the creative design industry to take more responsibility in creating and crafting products and services that lend to becoming more sustainable and circular. One major question that perturbes me is how? When we are working for companies and organisations that determine the "raw materials" and scope of our resources and capabilities, how do we actually perform in accordance to the responsibility set out for us? We should consider a whole lot more, for example as discussed in this dream team, designers should start considering the product life cycle of the garments they produce. In reality I ask myself, how many of the designers in this category actually get to choose their materials? Any creative, innovaro or designer can tell you that there is always a lack of budget, a lack of resources. I myself as a founder and experience designer who even has the option to choose frequently, do not have the capability to build according to vision. Take this platform for example, I know how to create a better user experience, but I am not financially there yet to make it happen. Furthermore, the workload and key developmental areas forces me to allocate my time and resources into MVC's. Yes, maybe a new word. You may be familiar with MVP's, minimum viable products, but applied to what I've been doing with this platform, I've come to work on what I call MVC's. Minimum viable concepts. Take for example this Dream Team Roundtable, the concept existed since May last year, I only got the first team together in December last year, I've recorded two episodes, but now it's March and due to accidents with and aging or limited equipment, combined with a high workload and multiplae other projects requiring effort, the sessions are not yet published. In most instances we know what we must do, how we can get there, and even invest time and energy to realise it, but there are limitations. If every brilliant idea just magically had all the required resources to make it happen, we'd be solving a lot of problems and the human experience would be elevated to generally more enjoyable lives, but in reality, we are more short term in our vision and many who determine or impact the output of our work are also lacking in vision or character or merely trying to survive themselves, resorting to the continuation of what is ot working in order to brig home the bacon. So, the role of design is important, and there is a certain level of onus to perform according to scale, but at the same time we are restricted on many levels. My ultimate question is, how do we enable makers to make actual change?

What is the value & purpose of using KPI's to determine your design performance? I've had several conversations with Ricardo Faria about the subject and you can learn more in his experience portal -> Ricardo is also a member of this platform and you can hit him up directly to learn more In his introductory program in Design in Focus's Mentoring & Training area, you can learn about the 7 steps method in developing key performance metrics. What do you think about KPI's in design? It's common knowledge that creative industries are more challenging to measure in terms of ROI in relation to efforts, so how do you or your company determine the value & impact of your creative, innovation and or design efforts?