Overview
Africa’s largest engineering advisory firm wanted to embrace human-centered design as a problem-solving mindset and competitive differentiator. They wanted to ensure that large infrastructure projects were always designed with the needs of local communities at the centre of the planning process.
The Challenge
The design discipline has always been embraced by engineers, so the specific challenge in this case was to get buy-in by showing the nuanced differences between the human-centred design toolkit and the type of design work that is normally done in the course of engineering projects.
Our Approach
Based on a prior, extensive investment to create a design thinking mindset in the business, we set out to conduct a comprehensive design maturity audit that sought to map out the wide range of practices that had been informed by this new way of thinking and working. We also looked at the way this approach has shaped the impact of traditional engineering projects and how this might be used to create a new way of working that we framed as creative intelligence.
Key Insight
Engineers are hard-wired to go straight into solution mode and want to solve a problem as quickly as possible. By supplementing and strengthening the engineering toolkit with human-centred design, engineers are taught to pause and consider…Are we asking the right question and solving for the actual problem? Is our proposed solution taking people’s needs into account, while being technically sound?
The Outcome
The business decided to embark on an ambitious growth path in terms of both equipping staff with new creative intelligence capabilities and also to build this mindset into all large projects that are being scoped out. The company has also been able to win some awards based on this new approach which gives them more confidence to start deploying it at scale.