Whenever I come across the term “human-centred design”, I think of an anecdote that an architect friend likes to tell. It happened years ago but he is still incensed about it. He was invited by a well-known “global design and innovation company” to a workshop in Berlin discussing how cinemagoing could be “disrupted” (that buzzword is a good cue to turn on your heels and run). The company had gathered a talented panel of experts, including a computer scientist, and the director of a film festival.

For three days, the group explored how the experience of going to the movies could be improved for people. But at the end, they discovered that the exercise had been rigged all along. The workshop leader, flown in straight from Silicon Valley, concluded out of the blue that what cinemas really needed was – surprise, surprise – a new app.

The story highlights the common gap between the stated intentions and actual outcomes of design approaches that call themselves “human-centred”. Often used in the same sentence as that other modish phrase, “design thinking”, the term is tossed around by corporations and consulting firms to describe a principle of putting people at the centre of innovation. They often endlessly quiz potential users and customers about their motivations, pain points and hopes for particular products or services. While in Berlin, the consultants might have also visited cinemas for “observations from the field” or organised “jam sessions” with a consumer panel.

The methods, laid out in flow charts that are studied by management-science undergraduates, seem quite innocent but produce outcomes that can be cluttered and confusing (the adage that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” rings particularly true here). The result is that these so-called human-centred design thinkers often end up filling the world with unnavigable steering boards, maddening touch-screen light switches and apps, apps, apps. How could such an inoffensive idea lead to so much digital faff?

The popular use of the term “human-centred design” can be credited to Stanford University’s design programme. The school was founded in 1958 by John E Arnold, a professor in mechanical engineering and business administration who (slightly ironically) is best known for tasking students with designing household items for an alien civilisation. At the time, homes and workplaces were inundated with novel technologies that mostly made life more difficult, à la Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle. The aim of the new programme was to teach the country’s top engineers to think more about the people using their inventions. This notion of considering people’s wants and desires was thought to be groundbreaking and today it has swelled into a sizeable body of academic literature on “human-centric design” and even has an official definition in the iso Standards (an internationally recognised process guideline).

But, in reality, it isn’t that novel: Stanford’s design school is founded and attended mainly by engineers, so they could be forgiven for having only coined a word for a concept as old as architecture itself. As historians Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina lay out in their book Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, even Vitruvius, the father of architectural theory, dedicated the beginning of his magnum opus to how human wellbeing can be improved with buildings – “healthfulness being their chief object”. From William Morris to Hans Hollein, so many designers have thought deeply about the topic that the adjective “human-centred” sounds like a truism.

In his book Architect, Verb, Reinier de Graaf, partner at oma, gives human-centred design the drily sarcastic definition of an “atypical approach to design where products adjust to people instead of the other way around”. Only to someone who believes that people adjusting to products is the norm would the methods of human-centred design – observing people’s needs, asking for feedback – seem innovative. For most professional designers, they have always been a given.

Still, designers and architects do not typically assemble the consumer panels and questionnaires that are associated with the Stanford-inspired human-centred design approach. Why? The classic example of the futility of market research comes again from Silicon Valley and that oft-quoted quip of Steve Jobs – “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” – and, indeed, nobody had thought that it was possible to carry 1,000 songs in your pocket before the iPod came along. By taking the approach of assembling a group and democratically noting down everyone’s views and requests, there is a risk of ending up with a device with so many buttons that nobody can figure out how to use it.

When I think of design that really puts humans first, the best examples lie far from Palo Alto. There are the Amsterdam playgrounds of Aldo Van Eyck, which were inspired by the way that children were playing with the rubble left over from the Second World War. Or Brazil’s Orelhão telephone booths, which are shaped like an eggshell on a pole instead of a cabin. Designed by Chu Ming Silveira, they save sidewalk space, don’t attract litter and improve acoustics, with the bonus of making anyone using them look dashing. Both designs were adopted by the masses after literally and figuratively putting people at the centre – no surveys or brainstorming sessions required.

My architect friend’s anecdote also has a happy ending. At the workshop, the imposition of an app was disruptive, indeed: the group decided to stage a small insurgency and kicked their leader out of the room. Then they spent the rest of the day drawing up and prototyping objects such as furniture, ticket booths and a headset. Like decent design always has been, it was just people making things for people, buzzwords be damned.