Orchestrating Human-Centered Design

The time has come to move into a more humanistic approach of technology and to understand where our world is moving to in the early twenty-first century. The design and development of our future products needs to be orchestrated, whether they be conceptual, technical or organizational. Orchestrating Human-Centered Design presents an Orchestra model that attempts to articulate technology, organizations and people. Human-centered design (HCD) should not be limited to local/short-term/linear engineering, but actively focus on global/long-term/non-linear design, and constantly identify emergent properties from the use of artifacts.

Orchestrating Human-Centered Design results from incremental syntheses of courses the author has given at the Florida Institute of Technology in the HCD PhD program. It is focused on technological and philosophical concepts that high-level managers, technicians and all those interested in the design of artifacts should consider. Our growing software -intensive world imposes better knowledge on cognitive engineering, life-critical systems, complexity analysis, organizational design and management, modeling and simulation, and advanced interaction media, and this well-constructed and informative book provides a road map for this.

“For academics who deal with humans in systems concerns, the book is rich in references and theory of design processes. … this book is also targeted at corporate chief technology officers, program chief engineers, and systems engineering managers … . For INCOSE members, the book should be required reading for the Human Systems Working Group. It will also be of interest to the Complex Systems Working Group, the System Science Working Group, and the System of Systems Working Group.” (Lawrence D. Pohlmann, Insight, Vol. 16 (2), July, 2013)

Dr. Guy André Boy is a University Professor at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) where he is also the Director of the Human-Centered Design Institute (HCDi), Chief Scientist for Human-Centered Design at NASA Kennedy Space Center, Senior Research Scientist of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). Fellow of the Air and Space Academy, Former President and CEO of the European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO International) and Co-Founder of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique (Institut de Cognitique), Bordeaux, France. Involved in the development of human-centered design (HCD) and cognitive engineering for more than 30 years, he worked in both research and industry with major companies (including aerospace, automobile, defense, telecommunication, energy and software), large public organizations, and international bodies, to advise on both strategic and operational issues related to life-critical systems, risk management, advanced automation, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and knowledge management.