The Five Principles of Humanity-Centered Design are an invitation to rethink how we perceive, and create better realities together.

1. Solve the core, root issues, not just the problem as presented.
2. Focus on the entire ecosystem of people, all living things, and the physical environment.
3. Take a long-term, systems point of view.
4. Continually test and refine designs.
5. Design with the community.

These principles invite us to examine the narratives we bring into design. The way we frame a situation shapes the possibilites we perceive, and the futures we make possible.

To illustrate what these principles offer to design education, research and practice, let’s consider human-elephant interactions in tea plantations in Assam, India. One narrative frames this as a problem to be managed: keep elephants away, protect crops, minimize damage. This approach addresses a partial need, but remains tied to the language of conflict and exclusion.

An alternative narrative, rooted in Adivasi (Tea Tribe) worldviews, poses the situation as an opportunity for co-learning. Here, the goal is not to separate species but to create conditions where soil health, biodiversity, human communities, and the tea industry can all flourish together (Banerjee, Nayak, and Sinha, 2024). Elephants don’t eat tea, they eat what we consider weeds, helping avoid the use of chemicals while fertilzing the soil.

What designers, researchers, teachers and students perceive and frame as a reality is key. Some might see the reality as the exploration of methods and the development of strategies to keep elephants away from their fields. Others instead might see the possibility for learning to interact with elephants so that the soil, and other species can all flourish. Words like conflict and ownership give way to cohabitation, collaboration, and co-learning. This shift in worldview is exactly the kind of narrative transformation the Five Principles call for.

Educating attention and curiosity to change perceptions

James Gibson (2002) referring to occlusion, said: “Any hidden surface may become unhidden by a change of the point of observation…” (p. 81). He explains that when we shift from one “vista” of the world to another, some aspects fade from view while others come into view, a continual tradeoff of occlusion and disclosure (Gibson, 2002, p. 82). Changing how we attend to the world changes our perceived reality.

For the designer, this movement requires encountering diverse perspectives and open to them. Encountering another person requires a particular kind of know-how: making space, perceiving the other, staying present to the relationship. In this sense, the classroom becomes the arena to practice, a place where students learn to meet one another, spaces for care, and shared responsibility.

It is well known that “prior knowledge interferes with the ability to appreciate the unique, novel distinctions of new situations” (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010, p.872). For researchers, and teachers, “the brain faces a fundamental challenge: the sensory information available at any moment vastly exceeds its processing capacity” (Brewer & Giommi, 2025, p. 4). The brain resolves this challenge by using expectations and predictions; generating internal models, comparing them with incoming signals, and updating only when there’s a mismatch. This reduces uncertainty while staying efficient.

Perceiving things outside of our regular patterns requires to practice openess and curiosity. Openness is linked to flexible thinking and behavior, without it, we fall into intolerance of uncertainty, and close (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010, p.873).

Shifting ways of knowing and habitual narratives

Paulo Freire (1996) reminds us that a critical perception is an active unveiling of reality (p. 84). Curiosity is central here: a refusal to accept the world as it is handed to us, and the drive to ask, Could it be otherwise? In design classrooms, research, and practice, attention and curiosity are ethical practices.
This is not exclusive of design. Teachers, therapists, doctors, and care workers need to cultivate openness. Designers, researchers and educators need to learn to attend to their own experience in the process of unveiling the world. This includes noticing when one says “no,” “I know,” “I understand,” or other similar phrases. We need to notice even when our muscles contracts, these moments can signal when we are closing to new perspectives, holding to previous ideas and beliefs, not allowing our realities to update.

The world current crisis demands such a shift. Like the social sciences, design is not defined solely by its methods but by what we choose to care about. It is in the act of attending to people’s vocabularies, practices, and contradictions that design knowledge emerges, from a shared effort to perceive differently and imagine collectively.

Here Hanne De Jaegher’s (2021) call for a new, engaged epistemology of human knowing becomes essential. Our most profound forms of knowing are not neat or linear; they are saturated with uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction. Western scientific traditions often marginalize these qualities, but they are what open the possibility for transformation. What matters, then, are the narratives and commitments we bring to the classroom and the process of design research.
We even carry “habitual narratives” about what a designer is and what designers do. Designers are often presented as problem-solvers, forgetting that most disciplines solve problems. Practing design today, particularly in the context of the Five Principles proposed by DNDA, requires recognizing that roles are varied and constantly changing. It depends on the capacities designers enact and cultivate.

In one context, the designer might be a learner; in another, a sense-maker, a participant in a community, a strategic facilitator, or a systems steward. The key is to remain flexible, to step into the role that best serves the situation we are working within.

In the educationanl context Gert Biesta (2023) notes that “teachers engage in acts of pointing in order to focus the attention of students on something worthwhile, with the hope and expectation that this will contribute to how students will direct their own attention in the future” (p. 254). This “pointing” includes what and how we notice, and these become the raw material for design.

Humanity-centered design invites us to examine these narratives and actively choose the capacities that strengthen our collective ability to design for flourishing; for humans, non-humans, and the environments we share.

When we take the Five Principles seriously, design is more about refraiming the stories we live by. It becomes a practice of cultivating roles, relationships, and perspectives that allow human and non-human worlds to thrive together.

For professionals, this means engaging with the patterns we carry. Shifting perception is not only about reframing external challenges but about becoming aware of the narratives, assumptions, and blind spots that guide their thinking.

For teachers, this implies pointing attention toward what is worth noticing. Shifting perception in education means making classrooms places where students learn how to stay open: to one another, to ambiguity, to what initially seems irrelevant. It means modeling curiosity as an ethical stance.
The real question is not just What will we design? but also Who will we become in the process?