Georgia Guthrie's blog

The practice of human-centered design can be challenging. Above all else, designers in this field must maintain focus on the user, which is more difficult than it seems. What happens when the target user has vastly different day-to-day experiences than the designers? Several members of our team had our human-centered skills put to the test with such a challenge recently.

In our efforts to understand how people deal with death and dying every day, we took to social media to look at how people talk about hospice. We used the tool Storify to capture social media posts related to hospice, and wove them into a real “story” that gives personal context to this large, unwieldy topic.

Death and taxes; the two things we are told are unavoidable in life. Most of us have come to terms with facing taxes we owe, but when it comes to facing our death we have a number of ways to defer, delay, and avoid acknowledging it. These methods to avoid death are widely accepted, but at what cost?

Recently at the Action Mill, we have been focused on designing ways to help people create work habits that improve their efficiency and satisfaction with their day to day tasks. In December, we were pleased to participate in an open house for participants of the National Performance Network (NPN) Annual Conference.