How organizations can apply human-centered design in crisis response

When Jocelyn Wyatt became CEO of U.S.-based humanitarian agency Alight late last year, she had no idea how Russia’s war in Ukraine would shape her first few months at the helm of the organization, which serves displaced communities globally.

Wyatt is an expert in human-centered design — or designing with, and not just for, the end user. She formerly headed IDEO.org, a nonprofit that partnered with Alight to give refugees a say in the services they receive. In that role, she worked with Alight and other social impact organizations to seek new approaches based on feedback from the people they serve and learn from mistakes to develop better solutions.

Alight, which was established in 1979 as the American Refugee Committee, spent a decade working with IDEO.org to make its approach more human-centered. It was re-branded as Alight in 2019 in response to refugees saying they often felt they were defined by a single moment in their lives.

Today, Alight's 2,000 employees strive to incorporate the perspectives of displaced communities in all of their work. In Alight’s response to the war in Ukraine, aid workers meet people at train stations as they flee the dangers at home and ask what they need. The organization helps them find housing and provides them with basic goods, including suitcases to replace their plastic bags.

Igor Radonjic — a senior global technical adviser at Alight who specializes in humanitarian infrastructure, including shelter, water, and sanitation — told Devex that when speaking with someone he hopes to support, he begins the conversation with basic questions like, “What do you need?” and “How can we help?”

In recent weeks, one of the answers was often that bitterly cold temperatures created extreme discomfort for Ukranians crossing the border into neighboring countries. Some of them came from areas that had lost power, heat, and running water. As a result of those conversations, Radonjic and his colleagues have been distributing gloves, blankets, hats, and other cold weather items.

Whereas many humanitarian organizations responding to a crisis begin by asking what relief efforts donors will fund, Alight asks what people need, Wyatt told Devex.

“Initially, the focus was on connecting with people, understanding what their needs are, meeting with local partners, and seeing where the gaps are,” she said of Alight’s efforts in the early days of the Ukraine crisis.

That focused work is an example of how human-centered design functions in a crisis, when many organizations might neglect these best practices in order to respond quickly. While $30 billion a year is spent on humanitarian aid, the majority of people being served “have virtually no say in its use,” according to the description of a session about “Centering Refugee Voices in Humanitarian Response and Philanthropy” at this week’s Skoll World Forum.

“We’re starting by listening,” Wyatt said. “That’s driving what we’re doing.”

A ‘prototyping-first approach’

One criticism of human-centered design is how much time it takes to move through its phases: inspiration, or understanding the needs of users; ideation; and implementation.

But the approach can be adapted to any crisis, whether it is a conflict or a natural disaster, said Shauna Carey, interim CEO at IDEO.org.

“In such high-stakes situations, it’s important to think of human-centered design less as a linear, sequential set of steps, and more as a way of working anchored around two core ideas: listening deeply to what communities really want and need, and testing new ideas through rapid loops of prototyping and iteration,” she said in an email to Devex.

“If applied thoughtfully, both of those core principles can actually make humanitarian response more effective and efficient, which might seem counterintuitive,” she said.

In the weeks immediately following a crisis, a human-centered design approach is most useful in ensuring that the provided services are relevant to a community’s unique needs, Carey said.

By gathering input from people who have been affected or displaced, as well as the host communities receiving them, organizations can identify and address gaps in support, she continued.

This test-and-learn approach can also help stretch the scarce resources available for critical services such as mental health care, refugee resettlement, and livelihood support, Carey said.

“Crisis settings, by definition, are fueled by urgency. This means it’s often best to lead with a prototyping-first approach; implementing and adapting solutions that have worked in other contexts, and employing iterative cycles of learning and refinement to improve and enhance those services over time through community feedback,” she said.

Human-centered design gains steam

While most humanitarian aid continues to be spent in a top-down fashion, there is growing awareness, and adoption, of human-centered design among NGOs.

In addition to Alight, IDEO.org has worked with Mercy Corps; UNICEF; the International Rescue Committee, or IRC; and others to design programs that support people who have been displaced by crises.

These organizations bring human-centered design to their work responding to conflict and natural disasters, as well as the long-term fallout that usually results.

For this method to be most useful in an emergency, the process should be initiated well before unexpected events arise, said Carla Lopez, associate director for health innovation at IRC, which has an in-house team working on user-centered design approaches.

“We know that for every acute crisis, there’s always going to be a logistics mechanism that needs to be put in place to respond to the crisis, and that’s not something we dream up the minute a crisis starts,” she said. “That’s something we’ve put in place well in advance.”

One of the biggest challenges that organizations face in taking user-centered design approaches during moments of crisis is access to the people they aim to serve, Lopez said.

“We don’t make decisions for users from an office far away. We are guided by what people want and how they’re doing and how they behave. Otherwise, we risk having good intentions but not achieving the kind of support we intended,” she said.

When organizations invest in human-centered design, they understand problems through new lenses, which can lead to a new, and more effective, way of responding to challenges, whether they are acute or protracted crises, Lopez said.