Week 4: Idealistic Design versus Real Design
As authors Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås point out in their paper, Social Means Do Not Justify Corrupt- ible Ends: A Realist Perspective of Social Innovation and Design, much of social design and innovation literature focus on design processes rather than outcomes. They suggest that designers can prevent the corruption of social outcomes by shifting from idealistic questions to more realistic questions. I agree with the authors’ views that while designing for social innovation, products or services do not thoroughly account for the social implications it might have. They rather focus on the processes and claim to engage in social design by the mere inclusion of the users and stakeholders in the project while failing to address more important questions. Most of the time this inclusion is only at a superficial level and manifest in the form of surveys, questionnaires, workshops, etc.
A project I worked on, called the Folding Foropter, a low cost paper-based refractive error screening device is a good example of a design for social innovation. The aim of this project was to bridge the gap between the access to primary eye care in between the urban and rural areas of developing countries. For the project we employed “social means” as authors von Busch and Palmas mention in, In Social Means, do not Justify Corruptible Ends. I worked on a team that had engineers, designers, and optometrists. We tried our best to constantly involve the users and stakeholders at every stage of designing the device. We tried to get a good understanding of the primary users of the device, people who might not have had access to formal education and people from low-income backgrounds.
The stakeholders for this project were also very important as they provided the funding needed for this project and they would help spread the word. The stakeholders involved were the various business that funded this project as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR initiative. We had to keep them in mind as well during the different design stages of this project. Factors such as the number of devices that would be a part of a single kit, the packaging of the devices, cost of production of the device, the materials and the process involved in making the devices and most importantly the credibility of the device that was determined after several intensive clinical trials were important to the stakeholders who would associate with this project and fund it.
As one of the lead designers on the team, I was faced with challenges of various forms. The success of the project hugely depended on making it as accessible as possible which required scaling of the project. Firstly, the project had a highly multi-disciplinary team working on it, with each team member contributing a very unique skill-set to the project. Given the diversity of backgrounds, it was necessary for me as one of the designers to mediate a conversation between them and make sure everyone had the same vision for the project. Secondly, we had to keep in mind various design constraints like the drawbacks of the material we were working with, creating a robust device while keeping the cost low, making the device easy to use while maintaining the functionality and accuracy of the device. As a designer, I did my best to keep the these constraints in mind while making design decisions and actively made sure to be respectful of these constraints. In the process I learnt how important it is to be respectful of both the users goals and the stake-holders’ goals in a project for social innovation because the project serves the former and the project is materialized by the latter.
