Abstract

Human-centered Design has become a central tenet of many design disciplines and practices. The stated mission of such practice is creative change toward the goal of enhanced quality of living. While this sounds good in casual conversation, it can be difficult to implement, assess, and defend in practice. The problem is that human problems are complex and dynamic “wicked” problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973). To further complicate matters, the concept of quality of living has in general been poorly communicated beyond the academic cognoscenti. This article proposes a qualitative and quantitative structure, the Personal Resource System Model and Matrix (McFall, 1998), to (a) tame wicked human problems for rational assessment and (b) support human-centered design solutions to realize enhanced quality of living.