If you live in a city where people get around in cars, you might be familiar with a peculiar feeling that happens in a parking lot. Alert. Aware. On-edge. If you’re from the Midwest, like I am, you might even feel like you’re in the way. Why? Because you’re a human walking in a space designed to accommodate the movement of 2,000 pounds wheeled metal vehicles. Ironically enough, just moments before you experienced this feeling, you were likely piloting one of those vehicles. Why does the design of parking structures consistently fail to account for the fact that people emerging from the exoskeleton of their cars become pedestrians?

Parking lots are a tangible instance of a much larger tendency in modern life. In an effort to maximize scale, improve consistency, or remove friction, institutions often fail to address some core human need of the very people they intend to serve. This often happens for three reasons:

1. Human needs were deprioritized in the design. The layout of a parking lot prioritizes space for vehicles (either to maximize revenue or to minimize door dings) over pedestrian feelings of safety.
2. Human needs weren’t understood. Cal Newport recently described the paradox of email in an Ezra Klein podcast. Modern productivity tools, designed to provide humans synchronous access to information and to speed up decision making compared to paper mail or fax machines, actually undermine the brain’s requirement for deep thinking and trigger chemical responses similar to an addictive “hit” that causes distraction and disruption from higher-level cognitive function. “This way of working makes us miserable. It just clashes with our fundamental human wiring to have this nonstop piling up of communication from our tribe members that we can’t keep up with. And that hits all of these deeply rooted social networks in our brain to take this type of thing seriously. No matter how much the frontal cortex tells us it’s OK, we don’t have to answer these emails right away. There’s a deeper part of our brain that’s worried. And so it makes us miserable, and it makes us terrible at work.”
3. Human needs could not be prioritized because the system arose without individual intent. U.S. agricultural subsidies following World War I were intended to support families and secure the supply of core grains (barley, corn, upland cotton, oats, rice, sorghum, and wheat). Over time, market shifts and over-availability of corn dropped its price and prompted food manufacturers to introduce it into processed food at a higher rate, in the form of corn syrup and other compounds. The overabundance of corn in the American diet has well-documented health and environmental impacts. The CDC studied the contrast between nutritional recommendations for vegetable consumption and the types of crops subsidized by agricultural policy. “The US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasize consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, protein, and moderate amounts of dairy, while recommending limited consumption of saturated fats, sugars, salt, and refined grains. At the same time, current federal agricultural subsidies focus on financing the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy, and livestock, the latter of which are in part via subsidies on feed grains. … A large proportion of these subsidized commodities are converted into high-fat meat and dairy products, refined grains, high-calorie juices and soft drinks (sweetened with corn sweeteners), and processed and packaged foods.” They concluded, “Among US adults, higher consumption of calories from subsidized food commodities was associated with a greater probability of some cardiometabolic risks.”

Meeting human needs more intentionally

You probably already know when human needs aren’t being met, without attributing it to poor design. Have you ever felt creeped out or anxious in a situation and wondered why? Or griped about there being so many steps in a seemingly straightforward process? Have you observed other people and wondered why they weren’t behaving the way they should? Discomfort and unexpected behavior are outcomes that could be prevented with more intentional incorporation of human needs.

From a business perspective, meeting core human needs transcends the mere competitive advantage of a better product or offer. Delving deeply into human needs and motivations can more efficiently turn strategy into value by taking into account and promoting value-driving behaviors. No matter how well-intentioned your initiative, if you don’t find a way to give people the clarity, belonging, and incentives they need to follow it, you will lose value. In civic life, meeting human needs can serve the long-term health of our communities and societies by smoothing over the hundreds of annoying and irritating product and technology experiences that add up to depleted willpower and apathy at the end of a long day. Maybe if the person who cut in front of you in the supermarket line had felt seen by their employer, they’d see you.

What if the work of a designer is, ultimately, reinjecting human needs back into the construction of our physical spaces, technologies and strategies or policies?

Design makes explicit the implicit steps we need to make something accessible to humans. When we go back to basics and design for humans, we have a better chance to turn our well-intentioned business strategy, product or government policy into something that has a higher chance of success and that helps, rather than hurts, the humans involved.

We can do this in four steps.

01: Understand human needs. Reinjecting the human into everyday life requires understanding and aligning on human needs. We need to go back to cognitive and emotional basics, and this is much harder than it seems. What someone needs is heavily context specific; based upon that person and their prior experiences, as well as the environment they’re in. User researchers and other members of a design team are equipped to ask the questions needed to distill human needs into the most useful, actionable framework. If you’re just getting started, here are a few good examples:

Daniel Pink distilled the fundamental needs of a human working in a problem-solving role to autonomy, skill mastery, and purpose. When employers and organizations fail to recognize these motivators, they incentivize people with money, which consistently fails to improve performance on creative tasks.

Brene Brown synthesized decades of research on shame and resilience to uncover core human needs of belonging and connection, which are fueled by vulnerability. She found that many core problems, from institutional racism to lack of innovation in a corporate environment, could be traced to failure to meet the core human need to connect and to be seen.

Tracy Brower, a sociologist and currently head of applied research at Steelcase, led her Human Dynamics + Work team at Herman Miller to identify six core human needs that should be incorporated in the design of work and life spaces.

• Security — We desire health, safety, familiarity, and competence.
• Status — We seek recognition of our contributions.
• Achievement — We strive for excellence and take pride in our accomplishments.
• Autonomy — We seek freedom in our actions and decisions.
• Purpose — We want to make a meaningful difference.
• Belonging — We want a meaningful connection to others.

02: Prioritize human needs. Not every need can be included, and tradeoffs must be made — for example in the case of sharing data with an app in order to receive recommendations (deprioritizing privacy in favor of convenience). Sometimes it’s a case of failing to identify a substitute mechanism when the context has changed. For example, when my team moved to our brand new office in the suburbs, employees went from a metal-clad building in the inner city where people measured their relative status by counting the asbestos ceiling tiles in their individually-assigned offices into an open concept single desk around a common work table, adjacent to an all-glass huddle room. For the purpose of collaboration, space was beautifully designed. And yet it was a hard transition. People could openly acknowledge it was difficult to get accustomed to the noise and food smells. They didn’t recognize they were also struggling to meet the human need for status. No substitute mechanism was devised to confer rank or respect on senior professionals once their ceiling tiles had been removed. The glass offices went to people based upon work need (managerial, confidential) rather than seniority. The need for status went unmet for some, and people felt uncomfortable. Isolated incidents arose where people taped passive-aggressive signs admonishing neighbors to be quiet in common areas. The noise wasn’t the (only) culprit. It was the failure of the designed system to meet their human need for relative status.

03: Reframe and recreate. Occasionally, human needs cannot be prioritized, or weren’t prioritized originally. When that’s the case, it’s a perfect time to reframe. A traditional manufacturing approach to safety has been to eliminate incidents by adding regulations, procedures or guidelines to ensure human compliance. Unfortunately, people still got hurt. This required a reframe to a human factors approach, which seeks to understand incident prevention from the perspective of interactions between habit, expectations, and even the way facility design contributes to safe behavior. Instead of asking, “Why did the person fail to follow the guidelines?” we can ask, “Given the time of the task and the configuration of the valves, what’s the most likely way a person will perform the work? Is that way safe?” With this reframed question, many more solutions to incorporate human needs become possible. Even if you can’t redesign the physical environment, reframing allows you to find additional mechanisms to meet human needs and drive safer behavior.

04: Keep trying. The conversations and debates involved in incorporating human needs are not easy, and the tradeoffs are never straightforward. But change is possible, especially with a clear value proposition. Recognizing that traditional corporate structures prioritized shareholder return above all else, B Labs now provides a public mechanism for companies to be certified as B Corps, business entities that transparently declare to shareholders and stakeholders that they will prioritize social and environmental good, and provide “more high-quality jobs with dignity and purpose.” A system like U.S. investor regulations had to be gnarly to crack, but they hacked a back door by designing something completely new that transparently set expectations for companies, shareholders, and stakeholders alike. Since 2007, more than 1700 B Corps have been certified globally.

It’s time to make it so.

Core human needs didn’t disappear just because we fly in tubes, order food on a screen, and earn wealth by sending our money to global stock exchanges. We can’t let these miracles of large-scale organization detract from serving the humans they serve. It’s up to all of us — with design as our framework— to create the future that supports human dignity and belonging. Anything is possible; after all, a design group in Australia recently published their recommendations on human-centered parking.