A systematic review of human-centered design for development in academic research

Abstract Recently, many organizations have begun to leverage human-centered design, a design approach where designers gain deep empathy for their stakeholders and use this empathy and understanding to produce solutions to address problems of poverty and development around the world. Despite the emerging proliferation of human-centered design for development (HCD+D), there has been no systematic review conducted which aims to describe the current research landscape. By utilizing metadata analyses of the critical researchers’ locations, interests, and practices, of critical researchers in the field, this report contributes to the emerging HCD+D field by beginning to describe the history, the participants, their activities, and the geographic characteristics of the projects to paint a broad picture of the current HCD+D landscape. In particular, we also use choropleth-based analyses to investigate where researchers conduct research and from where they hail, to further describe the breadth of the current research landscape