Over at Fast Company, Alissa Walker blogs about IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit, with a history of the project and some good real-world examples of its use. IDE was one of three organizations chosen by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to collaborate with IDEO to develop the toolkit.

“Human-centered design has always been IDEO’s approach to creating innovation,” says HCD Toolkit project lead Tatyana Mamut. But it was the Gates Foundation’s work in developing nations where IDEO saw an opportunity to apply their three core values for sustainable design: human desirability, technical feasibility and technical viability. “What we’ve done with this toolkit is taken the basic structure of that methodology and turned it into a process that makes it applicable to the developing world.”

Read article at FastCompany.com

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“Learning the limits of your expertise—and challenging your own assumptions—can be the beginning of a whole new level of learning. For IDE, learning about the details of poor farmers’ daily lives—for example, the unexpected importance of gender roles in appropriate design—was critical to helping the organization develop technology that would meet farmers’ needs.”

–What We’re Learning, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

At IDE, we often talk about the necessity of listening to our customers–small-plot farmers in developing countries–in order to develop income generating products which are useful and affordable. As part of our Rural Prosperity Initiative, we collaborated with the design firm IDEO (no relation) to develop the Human Centered Design Toolkit, a set of tools that can be used by organizations to better listen and respond to farmers and translate their experience and expertise into new design solutions.

Read more about it at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s website.

Download the Human Centered Design toolkit at IDEO’s website.

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