HCD IS DEAD, LONG LIVE HCD

Dan Dixon
UX and Service Design Director, Digital Arts Network
Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Dan is a long-term practitioner of human-centred experience design and has a wealth of experience in discovery and qual research. He’s worked in academic, agency and client-side roles in both the UK and NZ, covering diverse fields such as digital, product design, creative technology and game design.

His history has blended a background in the digital industry with creative technology teaching and user experience research. He has taken pragmatic real-world knowledge into a higher education setting as well as bringing deeper research skills from academia into commercial design projects. In higher education, as well as talks and workshops, Dan has been teaching and sharing these skills for the last 16 years.

Stéphan Willemse
Strategy Director, Digital Arts Network
Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Stéphan uses creativity, design and strategy to help organisations innovate towards positive, progressive futures. He works across innovation, experience design, emerging technologies, cultural intelligence and futures projects with clients including Starbucks, ANZ, Countdown, TradeMe and the public sector. He holds degrees in PPE, Development Studies, Education and an Executive MBA. However, he doesn’t like wearing a suit and his idea of the perfect board meeting is at a quiet surf break. He thinks ideas are powerful and that his young twins ask the best questions about the world we live in.

Talk description:

There is a strong backlash about the perceived failures of Human Centred Design (HCD) and its contribution to contemporary macro problems. There seems to be a straightforward connection: HCD and Design Thinking have been adopted by organisations and are increasingly a part of product/experience development, especially in big tech. But the full picture is more complex than that and HCD really does have some issues.

In this talk we cover a little history to show where HCD came from and discuss the current context of use. But mostly we present a future of post-HCD. What is it? How is it different from today? We look at being post-human and a move away from anthropocentrism. Then we turn to post-centred and reconnect with systems thinking and assemblage theory. Finally, we question the very term ‘design’ and ask what post-design is required to be.