Design Contribution Square

During the last couple of decades a remarkable number of human centered design (HCD) approaches have been introduced. Understanding the differences between more traditional methods and emerging creative approaches has become a non-trivial challenge for practitioners. This article outlines a framework, Design Contribution Square (DCS), for organizing human centered design approaches and assisting in identifying their characteristics. The Square is based on the amount of proactive initiative users and/or designers show in design collaboration. The article presents activity scales describing the participants’ design contribution from inactive to proactive, constructs the DCS framework, and positions several human centered design approaches on the framework. It will be shown that a mapping based on the participants’ initiative is capable of explicating essential differences between HCD approaches, and consequently, is a feasible tool for planning HCD projects and competence development with human centered approaches.