Moving Towards a Radical Human Centricity

Our work at the Human Futures Studio is focused on one thing, to develop the next generation of rigorous applied methods for studying the splendor of the human experience and making it viable and immediately useful to companies, not-for-profits, and policy makers. While our commercial work is guided by our human futures approach to human insight and foresight, our research is devoted to growing a Radically Human-Centric Model for applied research in the social sciences.

Radical Human-Centricity is an attempt to change the way most commercial and applied behaviour studies are conducted. Through it we are trying to fulfil the promise of human-centricity, which we believe has not lived up to its hype. Radical Human-Centricity is a way to bring the rigour of applied anthropology into applied behavioural research. It is radical because it has been developed to take the idea of “understanding the customer/user,” or always “considering the person” to its logical conclusion, all while eliminating the shortcuts that are the cause of the disappointing state of human-centricity. We have abandoned many of the traditional commercial practices because they were never intended to study the world as it is, or put the human experience first. Instead, we work to develop ways to translate rigorous, real research into commercial and other applied applications, where the human detail is never lost but the research can be efficient, ethical, and effective.

However, many people are not interested in theory. It is always better to demonstrate what you mean with clear, concrete examples. With this in mind, we present to you a series that demonstrates some of the core principles of Radical Human Centricity and their implications.

Over the next six months, we will provide examples of failures of intractable human problems that cannot be addressed with out a profound rethinking of how business is done We will uncover the failures of many traditional commercial research and innovation methods. And we will tell you human stories about how people experience the world and how this means we must design, create, and innovate for people and not customer/users to be successful in a rapidly changing world.

The first in this series is an article about the problems that arise in the car sharing industry.