At work, we design around people. At home, we react to them.
What happened when I stopped reacting as frustrated parent and started thinking like a designer at home.
Many professions require a deep understanding of people. Doctors care for patients, teachers study how students learn, detectives read behaviours, lawyers analyse motives. In design, product, marketing and business innovation, this understanding is intentional and built into the process. We run research, map needs, test ideas, and design systems around human behaviour.
And yet, when we come home, the place where people matter most to us, we rarely apply the same deep intentional thinking.
At work, we design systems around people. At home, we mostly react to people.
I don’t even remember the first time I heard the term human-centred design. By the time I moved from advertising into corporate and consulting work, it was already a common language. In tech and innovation, designing around people is a basic expectation.
As my career progressed, part of my scope involved training colleagues and clients across different functions, designing and facilitating workshops to help teams think through problems together. Over time, my work was more about embedding design as a way of thinking within organisations.
I loved many aspects of the work, but something always felt slightly off.
Businesses and organisations put people in the centre, but it is often in the best interest of the business, not the people. That means, the human is carefully considered, but ultimately in service of the goal.
To be fair, it was less of a tension when I worked on public service clients, which was quite a large part of my work in Singapore. When the mission is to improve public services or citizens’ experiences, the intention genuinely leans more towards helping people.
I felt this tension for years, but for many different reasons, I never did much about it.
When work thinking accidentally showed up at home
After a few challenging seasons with my family, I remember one particular day, in a desperate attempt to get everyone on the same page, I pulled out blank sheets of paper, sticky notes, and a couple of sharpies.
I gathered my husband and two kids (5 & 9 years at that time), around the dining table to discuss what mattered to each of us. It was the first time I consciously stepped into my facilitator role instead of reacting as a frustrated parent.
Looking back, it was messy. I was both a facilitator and participant. And the kids had never talked about ‘serious’ topics in this way before. Plenty of facilitation rules were broken. But something shifted.
Instead of interrupting each other, we took turns to speak. Instead of dismissing ideas, we wrote them down and built on them together. In fifteen minutes, we moved from a state of frustration to shared understanding and a rough plan for how to move forward together.
For the first time, I wasn’t performing to meet a workshop objective. I was simply trying to get the people around me to listen and understand one another. It felt very different, and I wondered why it took me so long to do this at home.
Family life is human-centred work
Parents already do human-centred thinking. But many are doing it by instinct. When we start to see ourselves as designers of our culture at home, we become more conscious of the experience we create for one another. And the beauty of it is that it’s not another thing for busy parents to learn. It is one way of thinking that can simplify many parts of life.
I’m not suggesting that we all start running workshops at home, although it can be a surprisingly fun thing to do. What I mean is bringing some of the thinking behind human-centred work into family life, like:
getting curious before assuming
understanding before fixing
experimenting instead of perfection
collaborating instead of controlling
These are small shifts, but they change the atmosphere of how families learn and solve problems together.
What this might mean for work
These same mindsets are now common in organisational cultures, though often with varying levels of success because people can see when they are framed to serve the business. Perhaps that is why they rarely make it into our homes.
Maybe the flow should run both ways.
When we bring human-centred thinking and tools into our families, we practice them with the ones who matter most. Organisations will still need to serve the business. But when people have experienced what human-centred thinking actually feels like in their own lives, they may carry different instincts back into the larger cultures they help shape.
Related Posts:
Design Thinking Framework
Experience Design for Families
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