HumanCentred

Humancentred is an approach and design philosophy that prioritizes human needs, capabilities, and values in the development of products, services, systems, and policies. The term, often written as human-centred or human-centered in other variants, emphasizes understanding real people’s contexts and behaviours to create solutions that are usable, useful, and aligned with users’ goals.

Origins and applications trace to industrial design, human–computer interaction, and user experience disciplines. Prominent manifestations include human-centred design, participatory design, and human-centred artificial intelligence, each applying similar principles to different domains. Practitioners use ethnographic research, interviews, personas, usability testing, prototyping, and iterative refinement to ground decisions in empirical insight about users.

Core principles include empathy for users, involvement of stakeholders, iterative development, accessibility, and responsiveness to diverse needs. Ethical considerations—such as privacy, autonomy, and fairness—are increasingly integrated, especially in technologies with broad social impact. Humancentred approaches aim to reduce friction, improve adoption, and deliver value that matters to people rather than prioritizing technical novelty or organizational convenience.

Critiques highlight potential limitations: vagueness in definition, risk of reinforcing dominant perspectives, tokenistic participation, and insufficient attention to systemic or ecological consequences. To address these, many practitioners combine humancentred methods with inclusive, systems-thinking, and rights-based frameworks.

Humancentred remains influential across design, technology, public policy, and healthcare, where centring human experiences is used to improve effectiveness, equity, and acceptance of interventions.