18 Jun Human-Centered Design is BAD All Over
As described by IDEO, a global design firm that first popularized the term, Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for. It’s about generating tons of ideas and testing them on the audience. It’s about sharing what you’ve made with the people who matter most – the end user.
“Taking a human-centered approach means going a step beyond being user- or customer-centered,” explains Emilie Colker, managing director of IDEO, in a 2019 interview with Raconteur. “It means continuously studying the person you are influencing or engaging with as a whole, looking beyond what the data shows, and what people say and do, but also at what they think and feel.”
”Taking a human-centered approach means going a step beyond being user- or customer-centered" – Emilie Colker, IDEO
Getting to know the human effect is what drives BAD to be, well, BAD. The rewards of embracing a human-centered approach towards strategy and creative design are overwhelming. When BKK Art Department approaches a new project, we take a human approach. Or in other words, when we strategize and create for our clients, we start with the people.
Human-centered design is US all over
By taking inspiration from real people while remaining realistic about our client’s market and technological constraints, we see every product touchpoint or service message as an opportunity to surprise, impress and benefit the end-user.
When you work with BAD, you will notice that we take the time to talk, understand and relate to your brand and your customers. We identify the problems you need to overcome and our three-phase approach fuels new creations and attracts new audiences.
Add on a professional team of strategists, creatives, and production artists, and we strategize, design, develop, produce and implement everything a brand needs to reach success.
Our Three-Phase Approach
To resonate and engage with the Southeast Asia market, we utilize decades of experience in the region and our team’s vast and varied industry expertise to create a human-centered strategy that works best.
Every BAD strategy begins with inspiration. Whoever our client, we start by leapfrogging the brand’s perception of itself and focusing on the people we’re designing for instead.
We immerse ourselves in their lives, understand how the product or service works for them, how it doesn’t work for them. We need to thoroughly understand their needs first to move forward effectively.
“We bring solutions to life. Test them. Adapt them. Refine them. Only when perfected, do we bring them to market." Thom Hayward, Founder, Bangkok Art Dept
Once we have this connection, we use it to form our ideas. We make sense of what we’ve learned, identify opportunities for new designs and strategies. We develop possible solutions.
When all is aligned, we implement. We bring solutions to life. Test them. Adapt them. Refine them. Only when perfected, do we bring them to market.
And how do we know it’s perfected? By keeping the people our clients are looking to serve at the heart of the process.
Strategy is a Team Sport
Throughout our process, we constantly articulate our ideas with both our clients and their users. By doing this, we further advance our thinking while our collaborators continue to bring different frames of reference and fresh perspectives to the problem.
As Patrick Lencioni says in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, “if you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
This approach elevates the work on a team level and cultivates shared ownership of ideas. The work we produce and the designs we create are a team effort between us, the client and their network or users.
BAD believes no good idea comes from just one person. It’s about the quality of the idea and then the success of that idea in the real world.
Feel like being BAD? We hear humans love it.