The previous section provided the need for and basis of HCD in defence. The current section will highlight some significant challenges and barriers to engaging with HCD. In all, twelve challenges that beset the Indian defence sector are provided. These challenges will serve as the basis for the policy recommendations for supporting HCD to ensure usability, productivity, safety, and international competitiveness.

1) Everyone is a Human Centred Designer and a Human Factors Expert in Defence:

A challenge with the prominent perception of design is that it is “obvious”, “simplistic”, and “common sensical”. Often it is given low value and priority with the claim that anyone can do it as it is not “technically” or “mathematically” sophisticated. At times, the design disciplines are swept aside under the label of “aesthetics” or “surface treatment”.

Similar to design, human factors, specifically the aspects that involve qualitative human experience, is relegated to the status of being obvious, in contrast to the technically sophisticated quantitative measure of human performance. One reason is that the Indian education system is prominently driven by science and technology, the other reason is that the design disciplines never reached a critical mass similar to that of engineers in the country, in order to assert their epistemic distinction for that of engineering.

Further, design output is seen as “obvious” after the act of creation. People may have seen various designed artifacts elsewhere and can replicate them. However, the process of form-giving through creative imagination, as taught to designers, is not adequately valued or given the same accord as the technical prowess of engineers. In other words, people do not recognize that replicating is easy after being creatively visualized. However, the process of creative envisioning still remains a major challenge and is not always obvious to non- designers.

A similar issue exists for Human Factors as a discipline. People, in general, think that they have a grasp of “factors of the human” because they can think and reason about themselves and others. In this perception of human factors, it is not recognized that human factors is a scientifically rigorous discipline. Similarly, anyone who has gone to through an undergraduate education in design will recognize exercises in training the hand and the eye or of visualization strategies. Therefore, in a technology-dominated sector and with a reduced public perception of design, it is not surprising that technologists can brand themselves as human-centered designers despite not having the proper rigorous background training in design. Therefore, the first key barrier is that HCD needs to be recognized and institutionalized in the defence sector to be a viable generator of value.

2) Lack of awareness of the role of HCD and the value of a designer, along with the prevalence of “silent design”:

The defence sector is a technologically dominated sector with a primary emphasis on the functioning of engineering products. As a result, avenues for HCD in the form of Human Machine Interaction design or industrial design is considered as an afterthought; primarily, the emphasis is on getting the technology “right”. As a result, the end-user interaction is often created by engineers who may have limited or negligible knowledge of HCD principles, tools, and techniques. As a result, while an interface or a product may be created, it will not be human centered. This is because of the prevalence of “silent design”. In the late 1980s, Gorb and Dumas (1987) conducted a study on design activities in organizations in the United Kingdom. They found that oftentimes, “design is by people who are not designers and are not aware that they are participating in design activity” (Gorb &Dumas, 1987, p.150). They labeled this phenomenon as “silent design”. Silent Design is quite prevalent in Indian defence organizations where the prominent design work focusing on humans is conducted by engineers. In the defence sector, due to a lack of awareness of the differentiated role of the human centered designer as opposed to the design engineer, the final output results as a manifestation of “silent design”.

3) Lack of HCD offerings and capabilities for providing business value:

Along with the lack of awareness of the role of a designer, there is a lack of awareness of the range of HCD offerings and capabilities for providing value. The traditional sub- disciplines of design have been in terms of communication design and industrial design, with newer sub-disciplines of service design, system-oriented design, and strategic design opening up avenues for designers. These various newer sub-disciplines are widely adopted in multiple sectors globally. These include design inputs in informing product and organizational strategy, such as in the case of Samsung (Yoo & Kim, 2015). However, in the Indian Defence sector, traditional sub-disciplines such as industrial design have not been able to make headway into the government laboratories involved in the design for the end- user. The real problem is that in the defence sector, someone commissions the product, and someone else uses it. As a result, a design that promotes usability and end-user satisfaction may be lost in the plethora of final designs that are cheaper and may not be conducive to the work activities. As a result, there is a need to create awareness of best practices and return on investment for the services of a designer in the defence sector. Currently, multiple studies conducted globally (e.g., Schwartz, B., & Dodson, 2021) have attested to the value of HCD in defence projects, but they have not circulated into the conjoined psyche of the stakeholders in the defence sector in India.

4) Lack of separation of design from development and its subsequent HCD-based integration:

In most systems development in the country for defence, engineers have been the prominent workforce. As a result, they have aimed towards the creation of working prototypes and scaling it up for development. While this approach promises results for technological components, the HCD prototypes are not provided in a similar accord, partly due to the previous two challenges. In addition, due to the lack of awareness of HCD principles, tools and methodologies, learning to use tools such as computer-aided-design (CAD) software or GUI programming frameworks (such as QT) is equated to human-centric design. This serves as the barrier to HCD in the engineering-dominated defence sector, and there is a need for separating design from development as separate phases. However, at the same time the design should be created with a view towards the ultimate development. This will ensure that HCD-oriented outcomes are retained without being confounded with engineering design-dominated outcomes.

5) Lack of awareness of understanding of the approach of user engagement (user studies, work analysis, activity analysis, and understanding the end-user mental models):

This challenge is related to the first two issues and deals with the lack of understanding of the fundamental orientation of HCD and how it is used in practice to design for the end user. Designers use a plethora of techniques to qualitatively grasp the end-user viewpoint and mental models. This whole approach falls under the class of techniques known as user studies, work analysis studies, and other related avenues. The designers then use these insights to create forms that support the end user’s thinking process. These user studies and work analysis studies cannot be simply reduced to “asking the user”. Asking the user is not enough. Users are not typically trained in creative approaches or lateral thinking techniques that create the final form of the design. Therefore, even though the end-users have been asked about their opinions and insights, human centered outcomes may still not manifest.

6) Lack of understanding of HCD and its impact on innovation and international competitiveness:

A lack of HCD affects the creative manifestation of the final end product. This results in sub-standard innovation. For example, consider the following case where there is a lack of Human centred designers. Due to this issue, the onus rests on the engineers and the “end-users” to design a product. For example, in case of the cockpit design of an aircraft, pilots may provide inputs or even design the HMI of a cockpit, which is then given directly to the engineers for development. These engineers can easily code whatever the pilot has created in the form of HMIs. Due to a steady reliance on defence imports in India, pilots who are trained in various other internationally-created aircrafts would end up deriving insights from those other HMIs. As a result, when feedback from several pilots operating different aircrafts is taken, then the good features of other aircraft HMIs enter into the to- be-designed HMI. However, in this case, the innovation and international competitiveness suffer, as one will always have to wait for the other aircraft designers to innovate on their HMIs so that these designs can then “inspire” the design of the target HMI. As a result, while the target HMI will have the best features of all existing HMIs, as an innovation, the target HMI will always lag behind. In addition, user experience is not only limited to the development of what appears on the screen of an HMI but also requires a total conception of the interaction of humans and technology. The lack of HCD in the technology development process results in a lower standard product from the viewpoint of HCD and affects its international competitiveness.

7) Lack of understanding of basic knowledge-based concepts (crucial for the defence sector) and their application to achieve value from HCD:

This challenge stems from the manner in which the design professions are currently manifested in the country and the lack of a comprehensive development of Human Factors approach in India (Kant, 2022). The main issue is the need for comprehension and operationalization of basic concepts from human factors, into the currently exisiting design profession as it has developed in the country. While physical and physiological ergonomics is prominent in the design of products, a similar claim cannot be made about cognitive and organizational human factors. A prominent example is the concept of “Situation awareness (SA)”. SA and the Design for SA (Endsley, Bolte & Jones, 2003) is a prominent area of research in the defence sector that is well-established globally in the defence sector. However, a designer from Indian design universities may not be aware of these basic concepts as it does not enter their vocabulary when they are designing artifacts for civilian use. Therefore, there is a need for designers to comprehend the basic concepts to use for design in the defence sector as it has developed globally in order to ensure user-centricity and maintain international competitiveness.

8) Need for HCD for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety:

Engineered systems in the defence sector involve issues of technical reliability as well as ease of maintenance. In addition, the system should be available-on-demand (based on failure rates), as well as be safe for operations. Within this highly technical milieu, HCD can play a very important role that is currently not widespread in the defence sector. For example, HCD principles and industrial design processes can be used to create easy-to- reach maintenance ducts, accessible door handles, or modular equipment. This will ensure that anthropometric measures and workspace design principles are adhered to, resulting in less fatigue, safe usage, and a general decrease in musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). In addition, human factors and environmental design will help in the design of workspaces that are not overly noisy, humid or present detriments to the end-users due to how they have been created. Similarly, HMIs can also be designed for Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) of tasks and other large equipment. Using HCD principles can help us in information design for analytics and insight discovery. These aspects of HCD have still not percolated in the defence sector in India and remain a vital need.

9) Lack of Human Systems Integration (HSI) and Human Readiness Levels (HRLs):

Currently, due to the lack of a strong base of human factors, there is a lesser uptake of Human Systems Integration (HSI). HSI is a technical, management, and design-orientated discipline that takes into account all human-related considerations during the design, development, testing, production, deployment, and decommissioning of systems. HSI is a well-developed approach taken up by various defence agencies in the international arena. Typically, HSI processes involve addressing not only the personnel but also survivability and habitability, amongst other vital concerns. Currently, these aspects are not addressed in the existing design discourses in India. In the future, there is a need for addressing and supporting humans in the entire systems lifecycle in complex sociotechnical systems such as defence. This is possible through accounting for Human Readiness Levels (HRLs). The HRL scale is designed to complement the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). The main focus of the HRLs is to recognize and account for the artifacts in human-centered teams. Therefore, while a system can be technologically- ready, it may not achieve maturity for human use. Therefore, in order to make systems that are human-ready, incorporation of the HRL scales helps in program management and provides categorical level-based understanding for the design for the end-user. These aspects of HRLs for supporting end users and program directorates need to be incorporated into various system design and development organizations catering to Indian defence.

10) Lack of widespread use of metrics for usability in the defence sector in India:

Due to the lack of sensitivity towards HCD, there is a need for usability metrics that can be used widely in the defence sector. The traditional usability metrics that are present in UI/UX are geared towards civilian applications. There is a need for usability heuristics and metrics that are required for comprehending the operator experience. Cognitive engineering, a sub-field of human factors, provides heuristics and metrics for humans in complex systems. In addition, several systems usability scales (e.g. Lewis, 2018) have been developed by human factors researchers, and they can be imbibed by designers in India to strengthen the human-centric evaluation, verification and validation of systems in the defence sector.

11) Lack of understanding of the effort required for the design aspect of HCD and incorporation in the systems life-cycle:

Due to the emphasis on getting the technology to work, there is often the desire to leave the HCD considerations to the very end. Two problems occur due to this issue. First, the effort in terms of human-hours is not adequately accounted for, resulting in budget overruns. This occurs typically when the various iterations of the human interface/product/service need to be considered towards the end of the development. Thus, programmers and engineers are left with the technically completed product, but at the same time, they change it to accommodate the human at the very end. This results in unaccounted expenditure that was not completely accounted for at the beginning of the project. Second, there is more design flexibility and less system development cost at the beginning of the project. As a result, technical design and HCD can be adequately and jointly optimized to ensure that various HCD iterations are possible and fit in with the technological conceptualization of the problem. Once the design is finalized, significant development efforts can be initiated without radical changes to both the technical design and the human centered aspects. Thus, the relation between HCD and systems development lifecycle needs to be articulated for the defence sector.

12) Lack of institutional basis of HCD for defence:

The final barrier involves the lack of an institutional basis for HCD for defence. This institutional basis is due to differences in engineering design and HCD programs that provide design education. For example, HCD is provided by traditional design schools such as the National Institutes of Design (NIDs) and design departments of various other institutions, including several Indian Institute of Technology. In contrast, engineering design is the province of the engineering departments of various IITs and comes under the guise of Design engineering or engineering design courses. As a result, there remains a gap between the merging of HCD and engineering design, especially when it comes to large-scale systems design for defence. The HCD-oriented design departments in various IITs have also remained aloof from engineering design (for e.g., Department Designs at IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, and IIT Hyderabad, which typically cater to HCD).

Along with the academic institutional rift, the lack of institutional link continues at more mundane levels outside of academia. This is manifested in terms of business organizations (both private and public), as well as defense research organizations. Thus, there is a need to institutionalize HCD principles, techniques, and methodologies. This institutionalization is needed so that the everyday functioning of design in technological teams incorporates HCD right at the inception. Due to the heavy orientation of science and technology in various funding agencies, HCD and its research and practice still take a backseat. An embedding of HCD into the various civilian business and military agencies is needed to support HCD at a more strategic level of engagement in the country's defence sector.


[Image source]