Create more effective, efficient, and equitable education policies.

Human-centered design is a way to create solutions for problems that focus on the needs, contexts, behaviors, and emotions of the people that the solutions will serve. It is an emerging approach to public policy development and shows promise when deployed thoughtfully.

As someone who researches or writes education policy, human-centered design methods can complement your current research methods in order to articulate more accurate definitions of problems and more relevant solutions, generate a wider variety of potential solutions, and continue to meaningfully involve community members in the creation of rules and laws that affect them. When done well, conventional policy research methods and human-centered ones fortify one another. 


Explore this list of curated human-centered research and design methods to expand your analytic toolkit.

Allocate more time to defining the problem, generate multiple solutions, test ideas, and regularly examining your own assumptions, biases, and preferences.

These field research methods for interviews and observation seek to understand problems from the people closest to them.

Make your analysis more collaborative, generate discussion, and reveal different insights from diverse team members.

Produce multiple potential solutions, zero in on the highest potential ones, and test them so recommendations to policymakers are strong.

Connect with decision-makers, influencers, and supporters while anticipating and mitigating potential opposition.