Reading/Human Centered Design.
February 23, 2009
The website made it easy to understand the main idea with smallholder farmers. It was also very helpful with understand what you were trying to tell us last thursday..with the idea of thinking Big or Bigger. The Human Centered Design helps organizations get connected to smallholder farmers and then ‘act’ upon it. The process of Human-Centered Design: Hear, Create, and Deliver technique. It does start with the people and we need to listen to what they have to say. It’s not about the designer, but creating a solution to improve-ways. The research and data collecting reminds me of our last project and how much research we had to gather in order to create an idea or solution. And we did deliver an idea or prototype. It makes sense, now. The three lenses,which are desirability, feasibilty, and viability, of Human-Centered Design is a process to develop new solutions. The first one, desirability, is really important because it’s about the ppl needs, and what one could do to improve, grow, develop, and expand. Feasibility, what solution is capable of being done or likely to work, to me is more of trying to solve the problem and keep working on it if it doesnt work (like never giving up). Viability is taking it to another level- making it big or bigger. 
http://www.experientia.com/blog/human-centered-design-for-small-holder-farmers/
http://http://www.customer-experience-labs.com/2008/12/15/human-centered-design-toolkit-from-ideo/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g4X2gAjW-oBXf8J82UA6awc36Vmw
I’m from a small farm town and it’s true that most farmers have their own methods of doing things ‘the right way’. But this reading makes me wonder about my town and how its always ‘seasonal’ and with the economy its kinda- scary. I know technology is always upgrading so it hard for the farmers to keep up with production.
Anyways, on the website the intro. tab, gave an excellent & understandable example to understand the prg-the bicycle platform to encourage non-bicyclists to start riding.
