Home > Essays

Humanity-Centered versus Human-Centered Design

This excerpt is from Chapter 22 of my new book:
Design for a Better World: How to create a meaningful, sustainable, and humanity-centered future. MIT Press (expected publication, early 2023).

Chapter 22 Moving from Humans to Humanity

Why the name Humanity-Centered Design? How is it different from Human-Centered? Don’t the terms “human” and “humanity” mean very similar thing?

The meaning of the phrases cannot be inferred simply by the words: it is necessary to view the context: History matters (remember the discussion in Chapter 3?). The term “Human-Centered” was developed in the late 1980s and at that time, the focus was primarily on the individual people for whom the design was intended. This has many virtues, and it is the dominant approach today. But now, four decades later, we have developed an increased sensitivity to the biases and prejudices against societal groups plus increased concern about the impact that people have had on the environment. The phrase “Humanity-Centered” emphasizes the rights of all of humanity and addresses the entire ecosystem (the term ecosystem includes all living creatures plus the earth’s environment). Here is how I describe Humanity-Centered Design to the Interaction-Design Foundation for the series on 21st Century Designs that I developed with them:

Humanity-centered design represents the ultimate challenge for designers to help people improve their lives. Where “human-centered” puts a face to a user, “humanity-centered” expands this view far beyond: to the societal level of world populations who face hordes of highly complex and interrelated issues that are most often tangled up in large, sophisticated, “human-caused” systems. 1

When we design for humanity, we cannot stop with people. We must consider the entire globe: all living things, the quality of the land, water, and air. The loss of species. The changes  in climate. We are an integral part of the system called “Earth,” where changes in one component can impact every component.

The Four Principles of Human-Centered Design (HCD)

There are four basic principles to Human-Centered Design (HCD). 2

  1. Solve the core, root issues, not just the problem as presented (which is often the symptom, not the cause).
  2. Focus on the people.
  3. Take a systems point of view, realizing that most complications result from the interdependencies of the multiple parts.
  4. Continually test and refine the proposed designs to ensure they truly meet the needs of the concerns of the people for whom they are intended.

These are important principles, but they ignore the problems of sustainability, inequity, and bias. In addition, the emphasis is usually on the immediate issues, not the long-term impact. In other words, they describe the way we did things in the past, not the issues in this book, and not the way we need to do things in the future.

Humanity-Centered Design (HumanityD) accepts the basic framework of these four principles but expands them so that they are far more explicit about coverage of all living things, for the ecosystem, and looking at the long-term future impact. To move from HCD to HumanityD requires adding one new principle (principle 5) and slightly modifying principles 2 and 3 to widen the range of issues being addressed.

The Five Principles of Humanity-Centered Design (HumanityD)

Transforming HCD into HumanityD: Five basic principles.

  1. Solve the core, root issues, not just the problem as presented (which is often the symptom, not the cause).
  2. Focus on the entire ecosystem of people, all living things, and the physical environment.
  3. Take a long-term, systems point of view, realizing that most complications result from the interdependencies of the multiple parts and that many of the most damaging implications upon society and the ecostructure only reveal themselves years or even decades later.
  4. Continually test and refine the proposed designs to ensure they truly meet the concerns of the people for whom they are intended.
  5. Design with the community, and as much as possible support designs by the community. The professional designer community should serve as enablers, facilitators, and resources, aiding the community to meet their concerns.

References

1. "What Is Humanity-Centered Design?" Interaction Design Foundation, 2022, accessed January 31, 2022, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/humanity-centered-design.

2. "The Four Fundamental Principles of Human-Centered Design and Application." 2019, accessed February 16, 2022, https://jnd.org/the-four-fundamental-principles-ofhuman-centered-design/.

Essay types