For the Human centered design(HCD) exercise, I feel like it’s a good way to get know people especially when you are conducting some kinds of surveys or interviews so that you can truly know/understand what your partners are thinking about. And if you are doing a mutual Human centered design exercise, you can help your partners to build up their own design and share what’s your intersting ideas about the projects.
And I think one of the most important part of this exercise is we can truly get feedbacks from listeners/audiences so that we can have a more holistic view/perspective about the projects we are trying to construct. And this is normally hard to find or get when you are doing the “solely” independent study/researches. So with the help of human centered design exercise, we can lead the scratch of projects to the completeness of great constructions.