Human Centered Design Connect

This past week, IDEO.org launched their latest project, HCD Connect. HCD Connect is an online platform for people who are doing work in social enterprise, to leverage human centered design principles to their projects.

HCD Connect was born out of the Human Centered Design Toolkit, which is a toolkit that shows people how to integrate human centered design principles into their projects. "The Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear the needs of constituents in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind (HCD Toolkit)." The toolkit is broken up into three phases: Hear, Create and Deliver.

1. Hear: During the Hear phase, your Design Team will collect stories and inspiration from people. You will prepare for and conduct fi eld research.

2. Create: In the Create phase, you will work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase you will move together from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities, and then back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.

3. Deliver: The Deliver phase will begin to realize your solutions through rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation planning. This will help you launch new solutions into the world.

The goal of the toolkit is to bring innovation to emerging markets in a manner that is contextual to the region, understanding the needs and wants of individuals and creates new methods for monitoring and evaluation. The toolkit is a great resource for new or experienced researchers and entrepreneurs.

HCD Connect was created to foster relationships and communications between other researchers and entrepreneurs in social enterprise. In essence HCD Connect is a social network for people designing for those at the bottom of the pyramid. It's a great place to elicit feedback about your project and get inspired as you read the stories of others. It's also a great place to see how people are using methods from the Human Centered Design toolkit in context.

I would encourage everyone to sign up and explore HCD Connect, the website is www.hcdconnect.org. You can also download the toolkit from there, it's free!