Effective stakeholder engagement increases research relevance and utility. Though published principles of community-based participatory research and patient-centered outcomes research offer guidance, few resources offer effective techniques to engage stakeholders and translate their engagement into improvements in research process and outcomes. The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (Indiana CTSI) is home to Research Jam (RJ), an interdisciplinary team of researchers, project management professionals, and design experts, that employs human-centered design (HCD) to engage stakeholders in the research process. Establishing HCD services at the Indiana CTSI has allowed for accessible and innovative stakeholder-engaged research. RJ offers services for stakeholder-informed study design, measurement, implementation, and dissemination. RJ’s services are in demand to address research barriers pertaining to a diverse array of health topics and stakeholder groups. As a result, the RJ team has grown significantly with both institutional and extramural support. Researchers involved in RJ projects report that working with RJ helped them learn how to better engage with stakeholders in research and changed the way they approach working with stakeholders. RJ can serve as a potential model for effectively engaging stakeholders through HCD to improve translational research.

Engaging communities can increase the speed of translating health and health equity research into practice. Effective engagement requires a shared understanding of the health of a community. This can be challenging without timely and accurate local health data, or ways to provide that data, that are directly applicable to improving community health outcomes. The University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research formed the Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program (NHP) to overcome this challenge, making sub-county health data available to researchers and community stakeholders while incorporating community voice into data delivery processes. The NHP team used a human-centered design approach to facilitate community engagement. Through co-design, the team created NHP reports and data-to-action tools to maximize accessibility and utility for a diverse set of community stakeholders. Early indicators show that the final co-designed NHP reports and data-to-action tools will be immediately useful in promoting community–academic partnerships and in planning, implementing, and evaluating research and other initiatives in communities. The NHP program demonstrates that an effective co-design strategy can lead to increased usability and adoption of Clinical and Translational Science Award resources, enabling a shared understanding of community health and ultimately leading to the successful translation of research into practice.

Human-centered design provides a means to help designers create products or systems with ‘people’ as the focus. Compassionate Design (CD), introduced in this paper, is an approach that addresses niche sensitive needs and involves a way of thinking where designers pay special attention to the users’ sense of dignity, empowerment, and security. These niche needs surfaced as a result of analyses of 12 cases situated in sensitive contexts where the users felt vulnerable, had a high level of emotional engagement and were negatively affected by the situation. The designers described their deep concern for the users in various talks and interviews. This paper explains the conception of CD and its development that resulted from iteratively and qualitatively analyzing these cases in which designers were intuitively focusing on niche user needs. Dignity, empowerment and security form the basis of CD and have been contextualized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs after they emerged as a result of the analysis of data. This research sets the platform for a design approach that can help designers to consider the often unarticulated user needs of dignity, empowerment and security, in a more intentional manner and not be left to chance.

In recent years design has had a renaissance in business and management research and practice. Several authors have discussed if management is a design practice and how far design ought to go to design behaviors. This article discusses, evaluates and explores organizational design as a human-centered design practice. Relevant theoretical concepts of organizational theory, design approaches and practices are discussed to evaluate gaps in management practices and potential opportunities for design practice. The study collected and analyzed data from two organizations. The researched revealed several propositions, which provide insights of the usefulness, appropriateness and value of a human-centered design practice to organizational design.

Human-centered design (HCD) offers a systematic approach to innovation practice, driven by customer research and feedback throughout the design process. Within the community of engineers and researchers who engage in design for global development, interest in HCD has grown in the past decade. In this paper, we examine the human-centered design for development (HCD+D) academic community to better understand the interactions between researchers. By building and evaluating a co-authorship network from a dataset of HCD+D papers, in which the nodes are researchers and the connecting links are co-authorship relationships, we provide a decade-long benchmark to answer a variety of questions about collaboration patterns within this emerging field. Our analysis shows that most HCD+D authors publish few papers and are part of small, well-connected sub-communities. Influential authors that bridge separate communities are few. HCD+D is emerging from disparate disciplines and widely shared scholarship across disciplines continues to be developed. Influential authors in HCD+D play a large role in shaping HCD+D, yet there are few authors that are in a position to connect and influence collaborative research. Our analysis gives rise to several implications including an increased need for cross-disciplinary collaboration and the need for a stronger core of HCD+D practitioners.

This position paper presents a new approach based on my experience in the evolution of human-centered design (HCD) during four decades, and how it has struggled to become a discipline in its own right in complex socio-technical systems’ creation, development and operations. The 20th century saw tremendous industrial developments based on tangible materials that were transformed and assembled to make washing machines, cars, aircraft and power plants; during its last three decades, electronics and software were incrementally added to hardware machines. Operationalization issues moved from hardware to software, making automation and user interfaces central issues. From the beginning of the 21st century, we began to do the exact opposite! Currently, we typically start a project by designing and developing technology on computers, using software only, which is later transformed into hardware (and software). I denote this shift, the ‘socio-technical inversion’. Operationalization issues are moving from software to hardware, making tangibility a central issue. Three useful conceptual models are presented: the SFAC (Structure/Function versus Abstract/Concrete) model; the NAIR (Natural/Artificial versus Cognitive/Physical) model; and the AUTOS (Artifact, User, Task, Organization and Situation) pyramid. Concepts developed in this article are based on the rationalization of a long experience in the aerospace domain.

In human-centered design, user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity. Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries. To build researcher–client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes. This reframing of the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.