Human-centred design foundations
Begin your journey into solving real problems for real people with our practical and interactive training, designed and facilitated by our team of human-centred design leaders.
You might be working in public policy, service delivery, or simply have a passion for thoughtful problem solving that makes real impact.
Our Human Centred Design Foundations training is the perfect place to begin your design journey.
Why HCD?
We believe in putting people first in our designs.
Create change through your work
Technology is moving faster than most organisations can absorb it. Services get rebuilt around new tools, decisions get made quickly, and the people those decisions affect are often the last to be asked. Designing well doesn't happen on its own in that environment. It happens because someone keeps asking who this is for, and knows how to answer it.
Our Human-Centred Design Foundations workshop is for people who want to be that person, and want the practice to back it up. You'll cover the fundamentals across research, ideation, prototyping and testing, and build skills in active listening, creative confidence, and applying HCD inside your own organisation.
What you can expect from our training
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A shared method, and the language to use it
The phases of human-centred design and what each is for: understanding a problem before solving it, framing it, generating ideas, developing and testing concepts. For a mixed cohort, it's the common language that makes problem-solving consistent across teams.
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An ethical lens on your own practice
Where people really sit on the spectrum of engagement, from informing through to sharing decisions, and how to be straight about which one you're offering. Recruitment, consent, and what changes when someone has lived experience of the thing you're designing.
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Practice, in a rapid design challenge
A full Double Diamond inside the session: frame a problem, explore it, narrow to a direction, and develop a concept. Facilitated in Miro, so you also leave knowing how to run this remotely with a team that isn't in the room.
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A toolkit you keep
Stakeholder mapping, empathy mapping, anecdote circles, journey mapping, synthesis. Online, and usable the next morning.
What people are saying about our training
“I found the human centred design course exciting and practical. I thought the facilitators were skilled and adept at creating a safe online environment where people felt comfortable sharing. I was impressed by the content and excited to learn more!”
“The course was so well run. I love how interactive it was – it didn’t feel like you’d spent half a day on zoom at all! It provided a great introduction to HCD and I went away with lots to think about.”
“A great introduction to this topic – using real world examples, an online participation engagement tool, and practical group exercises, we were walked through the deeper level of participation required to work with people, rather than for people.”
“I want to thank you for the engaging HCD session. It was really great to learn about HCD with an ethical lens and the spectrum of engagement – something that I'm definitely going to dive into more after attending this session!”
The people powering our training
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Joanne Osbourne-TaylorBusiness Director, Design Services
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Joe SciglitanoCreative Director
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Julia BirksPrincipal Design Strategist
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Willhemina WahlinSenior Design Strategist
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Aishling CostelloSenior Design Strategist
Interested in customising your options?
Talk to us about custom training for your team
This course runs to a set schedule for a general cohort. If your team needs something built around your own context, we do that too: a private version of this course, or a program shaped around any of the capabilities we work in daily, from AI and data engineering to strategic design and content strategy.
