In 1979, after the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear accident, researcher and author Don Norman was brought in to answer a seemingly simple question: Why had the plant operators made such “stupid” mistakes?
He found the opposite. The operators were highly skilled; the system was flawed. The control room was packed with 4,000 nearly identical switches, competing alarms, cryptic indicators, and poor feedback loops.
“If you wanted to design something to cause errors,” Norman recalls, “you couldn’t have done a better job.”
This insight formed the basis of his philosophy of human‑centered design, a framework for how to design products, systems, and services made popular around the world by his many books, especially The Design of Everyday Things.
But today, Norman champions a more expansive approach. Where human-centered design focuses on users, humanity-centered design focuses on systems—asking us to consider the long-term impact every decision makes on the overall ecosystems we exist within.
In an era where products and services are optimized for speed, not stewardship, this philosophy offers a blueprint for how organizations can build solutions that consider the entire human experience across every stage of development, from raw material to real-world use.
Humanity-centered design rests on five principles that challenge how organizations can move to designing systems for long-term resilience.
Look at the entire ecosystem. Humanity-centered design asks us to remember that everything is interconnected, and each decision has downstream impacts. For example, a procurement choice may make your supply chain more or less brittle and stabilize or de-stabilize local economies.
Solve the root issue. Most teams are incentivized and trained to solve surface-level problems. For leaders, this might surface as trying to solve attrition with better perks and team happy hours without understanding that the cost of childcare is the driving force behind women leaving your workforce.
Think long-term and systemically. Every decision has a cause and effect which ripples through systems, creating problems that might not show themselves until years later. A gen-AI project may improve productivity, but without proper guardrails and workflows, it may also lead to burnout and diminish critical thinking. Humanity-centered design asks us to consider the repercussions, big and small, and weigh them against the promises of short-term gain.
Test and refine. This framework asks us to think systemically, but tackle problems incrementally. Through these small interventions, teams can measure and iterate quickly, enabling adaptability even under budget constraints.
Design with the community, not for them. The people closest to the problem often understand it best. For example, leaders of a mining company may not realize that mandated jumpsuits and small restroom facilities make it difficult for women to take bio breaks. They may also overlook how mining operations damage the environment—polluting waterways, land, and air. Only by earning employees’ trust can leaders discover these impacts and work to improve them.
This framework is not just a process for designing products, but a way to create organizational trust by re-building organizational processes and equipping leaders to address problems and systems more holistically and sustainably.
The cost of keeping the status quo is already here, in your culture-building initiatives that aren’t fixing retention rates, in the AI implementations with low productivity gains, and in the loss of your customers’ trust.
The first three principles of humanity-centered design demand that leaders have the foresight to predict the long-term impact to every ecosystem their decision touches.
The problem is structural: most companies still hire and train for narrow expertise, rewarding engineers who stay in engineering, analysts who stay in analytics, designers who stay in design. But the pressures senior leaders now face, from geopolitical instability, AI governance, to supply‑chain fragility, are not siloed problems with isolated risks. They are intertwined.
This is where humanity‑centered design becomes a talent strategy, not a design philosophy. It’s focused on developing two capabilities:
Interdisciplinary, humanities-informed thinkers who are able to connect history and culture to human behavior, technology, operations, economics, and ethics. These leaders build trust more easily, because they understand the motivations, language, and pressures different groups face.
Norman’s career is one example. As an engineer turned cognitive scientist turned business executive turned designer, these seemingly contradictory fields were exactly what allowed him to tie together technology and human behavior.
By rotating leaders through frontline and regional roles, organizations can build empathy and expand cultural awareness. A classic example is Trader Joe’s, a retailer that requires everyone, including leadership, to bag groceries. This builds camaraderie through a shared understanding of the day-to-day experience of the customer and staff.
Talent who thinks systemically and cross-functionally, who can identify upstream causes of problems rather than react only to symptoms. These leaders work collaboratively, under ambiguity, and across competing priorities.
Norman describes how this worked when he was an executive at Apple, “I could walk in in the middle of the night and see people working on things and I wouldn't recognize which group they came from because they were a team. If there was a problem that had to be done, anybody who thought they had the ability to work on that would work on it.”
This kind of collaboration isn’t accidental, it’s engineered and reinforced by culture, by how teams are measured, what’s taught, and what is rewarded. Many of these skills can be learned by creating end-to-end rotations across delivery systems, doing ecosystem mapping exercises, and aligning cross-functional teams against one goal.
Leaders who earn trust aren’t specialists or visionaries, they are systems-thinkers. In a world of compounding risks, they build trust by understanding how people, power, and systems break down.
If leaders need the ability to see an entire system, then they also need a way to see where that system is breaking. Here, humanity-centered design’s second and fifth principles (solve the root issue and design with communities, not for them) collide. Both require trust to succeed.
When people enter neighborhoods, health systems, or civic spaces as “experts,” they create mistrust that clouds their ability to see the problem clearly.
“Trust takes time to build,” Norman says. Communities don’t grant it automatically and certainly not to outsiders parachuting in with preset solutions.
Inside organizations, the dynamics aren’t so different. A warehouse worker may know a workflow is unsafe without knowing the contractual constraints. Yet hierarchy filters, dilutes, or silences their insights. Leaders who assume they have the full picture miss critical context.
The aviation industry offers a powerful example. For decades, pilots hesitated to report near‑misses or design flaws because doing so risked blame or punishment by the Federal Aviation Administration. It was only when NASA hired former pilots and introduced a confidential, non‑punitive reporting system that patterns of failure became visible.
The system stopped asking who made a mistake and instead asked what in the environment made the mistake likely.
When leaders create channels for people to safely surface what isn’t working, organizations shift from punishing individuals to reducing risk. Feedback loops are how root causes are identified, and what enables teams to prioritize what to test and refine. This allows you to identify symptoms faster and prevent issues long before they become systemic.
A humanity-centered approach reframes how leaders listen and engage:
Work through trusted connectors. ERG leaders, shift supervisors, and local advocates bridge power gaps more effectively than top-down communication.
Co-diagnose the problem. Include people early in framing challenges, not only during usability testing after decisions are made.
Resource the time trust requires. Relationship‑building is infrastructure. It prevents rework, resentment, and backlash.
Norman’s hope for the future is cautious but clear. Everything he describes, whether it’s collaboration, systems, or interdisciplinary thinking, is learnable.
The challenge, Norman notes: “It’s hard to pull off. Humanity‑centered design means changing the way a company works.” The change can be difficult and costly.
Organizations that choose to change won’t just be more resilient; they will see problems before they happen, and have the institutional trust needed to adapt quickly—reducing errors, harm, and waste along the way.
Elevate emerging voices: Prioritize early‑career professionals because those closest to lived experience often surface blind spots seasoned experts miss. In organizations, the same principle helps leaders hear truths that rarely rise through hierarchy.
Give clear, transparent feedback: Give detailed guidance explaining what worked, what didn’t, and why. Inside companies, this level of clarity strengthens alignment, accelerates growth, and reduces the ambiguity that erodes trust.
Treat failure as data, not disgrace: Invite organizations to openly share failures so the entire community can learn. When leaders normalize early, blame‑free learning, teams speak up sooner and systems improve faster.
The takeaway: The foundational conditions for trust in any high‑performing organization starts with a culture where people feel safe to contribute boldly, learn publicly, and challenge systems honestly.
This blueprint is adapted from the Don Norman Design Award, which recognizes practitioners and organizations addressing challenges at the community level.
Van Bommel, T., Jackson, D., & Brassel, S. (2025). Futureproofing your organization: Scenario planning with a critical inclusion lens. Catalyst.
Norman, D. A. (2023). Design for a better world: Meaningful, sustainable, humanity-centered design. MIT Press.
IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation. (2021, June 14). What is Humanity-Centered Design? IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation.