The Design Council (UK) affirms the need for human-centered design
The Design Council document on the seven tenets of human-centred design are very helpful and are completely compatible with the ideas being expressed here.
At the same time, they are rather dogmatic and they carry the notion that if you follow these seven tenets your design will be the best … whereas in fact they probably assure you that your completed design will be better than not following these seven tenets.
In order to really improve the quality of the finished outcomes then one needs to find the optimal way to follow each of these seven tenets given your context.
This quotation from the document probably gives a good flavour of the alignment we share.
This is a point often missed by new designers, who focus too hard on one defined primary user. There are many other people that will interact with your product – the factory-workers that make it, the courier that delivers it, the technician who installs it, the mechanic who fixes it, even the person who disposes it at the end of its life. All of them might also be your primary user, but many won’t be.
You need to be open to the fact that there might be many other potential users out there that you aren’t aware of yet. “