# Human-Centered Design Foundations

**Track:** Human-Centered & Inclusive Design — Design & Human-Centered Design — proposed (25)
**Framework / surface:** design
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Introduction to Design Thinking

**In one line:** Put people first — their needs, contexts, and capabilities drive the whole process.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Human-centered design begins from a stance: people — their needs, contexts, and capabilities — drive the process, not the technology at hand nor the business that wants to ship. Don Norman crystallized this in "The Psychology of Everyday Things" (1988), later retitled "The Design of Everyday Things," reframing usability breakdowns as design failures rather than user error. The philosophy hardened into method with ISO 9241-210:2019, which specifies an iterative loop — understand the context of use, specify requirements, produce solutions, evaluate against real use — repeated until needs are met. Practitioners still operationalize it through IDEO.org's "Field Guide to Human-Centered Design" (2015) and its Design Kit, moving from inspiration to ideation to implementation while keeping the person central.

## References

- [Human-centered design — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-centered_design)
- [ISO 9241-210:2019 — Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems](https://www.iso.org/standard/77520.html)
- [Design Kit — IDEO.org Human-Centered Design resource](https://www.designkit.org/)