Care Rubric- The First Iteration
What would be the implications of using a care rubric while designing service systems?
By Shreya Chopra, Baishnabi Monger, N Chandrasekhar Ramanujan, Gopika Varma
This is our output out of a 5-week long studio on Probing into Service, Systems and Infrastructures in the context of the gig economy where we were briefed to look into gated communities of Bangalore and what implications apps like MyGate have on them. (See problem identification [A1] and work in progress [A2] for work leading up to this post)
Shannon Mattern said that If we apply “care” as a framework of analysis and imagination for the practitioners who design our material world, the policymakers who regulate it, and the citizens who participate in its democratic platforms, we might succeed in building more equitable and responsible systems.
What is the Care Rubric?
The Care Rubric is a framework by which we can identify and assess various opportunities or gaps of care in a service ecosystem.
To design our care rubric, we have identified opportunities for actions or “care gaps” across various levels and stages of a service blueprint. The gaps identified are of overtly explicit care as informed by Korth’s framework, and are also informed by our primary research on the day to day life of domestic help in gated communities. We have represented these care gaps as green colour horizontal and vertical lines in the diagram below.
Following is the criteria for the lines or gaps in the care rubric. The definition of these lines are shown to be informed by-
- a literature review of various authors and scholars that have worked studying the meaning and impact of care in various contexts.
- anecdotes during our RtD activities with domestic help.
Criteria for Horizontal Lines
1-Care relationship experienced between stakeholders in between two levels of the service blueprint
Anecdotes shared during RtD activity: The domestic help spoke about how they get paid during bereavement and illness. They also spoke about how some houses don’t reduce their salary and give the full amount when they do not show up for work due to illness.
Attributed Definition- Laura Forlano defines, In caring for myself, I am enlisted into a practice of actively participating in, maintaining, repairing and caring for multiple medical technologies (rather than using them passively). Is it really possible to empathize with things, to see the world from their perspective? With respect to my insulin pump and glucose monitor, often, I am not really sure whether I am taking care of them, or they are taking care of me.
Criteria for Vertical Lines
1-Where internal customer prepares to enter the service system
Anecdotes shared during RtD activity: The domestic help said that some of the houses are open to giving gloves while doing work. They get paid extra when they have holidays like Diwali.
Attributed Definition- Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”
2-Opportunity to facilitate ethical use of existing human resources in the system
Anecdotes shared during RtD activity: The domestic help reported that sometimes the residents ask them to cook and eat the same food they make for the residents. Sometimes, domestic help also gets breakfast and coffee in their residents’ houses.
Attributed Definition- Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that caring involves an “ethico-political commitment” to the neglected and oppressed and a concern with the affective dimensions of our material world. We care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value.
3-Where an intervention would facilitate the work of internal customer (hassles free, seamless)
Anecdotes shared during RtD activity: The domestic help suggested that they want Sunday’s off and no micromanagement on their work.
Attributed Definition- Annemarie Mol defines care not as a transaction in which something is exchanged (a product against a price); but as an interaction in which the action goes back and forth (in an ongoing process).
4-Looking for communication gaps where the internal and external customer interact
Insights from the RtD activity-The domestic help believe that they will be cared for if they care for the houses they work in. Care is an expectation of reciprocity.
Attributed Definition- Laura Forlano defines “Care includes collaboration, cooperation and support as well as care ethics that “engages with the ethical, moral, and value implications of care”.
Our discussions at the studio have led us to agree that care can also be viewed as a process of collaborative, mutual tinkering between two parties that goes on over time and place.
Process and Learnings
The following diagram shows the process that led to the development of the first iteration for our Care Rubric and a mock implementation of it.
This first iteration led us to identify certain gaps in our process which need further research before working on the second iteration of the Care Rubric:
1- How might we define who facilitates care in the care rubric?
2- How might we design guidelines for the care rubrics on how to fill the gaps?
3-How might we collect necessary data/info to create guidelines that would help services to come up with care based intervention in the gaps identified by the care rubric?
4- How might we input data from secondary research in the care matrix?
The process as shown above:
1-Research Through Design
We conducted Research through Design(RtD) activities with the domestic help to understand their expectations of care from residents in a gated community.
The artefact introduced was a “care package” in both activities. We observed how they received it. We also talked to them about their work and life and how the quality of one impacted the other.
Key Inferences from these activities:
Role of Class and Caste- Activities were designed to measure expectations of care, but the major finding was the impact of the class divide on how one allows themselves to be treated.
Expectations of treatment are directly proportional to the class divide despite the economic divide.
Major inferences to inform this inference:
- Nepali domestic help sits on the couch first thing upon entering without hesitation — this showed that she expected respect from everyone. Later, we found out that she belonged to the brahmin community from where she hailed.
- The Kannadiga domestic help sat on the floor by default and went out of her way to show how well she was doing — used to expectations from her caste set by society.
2-Care Matrix: only taking in primary research
Refer here to learn more about the care matrix.
3-Service Blueprint and Identifying gaps of overtly explicit care
Using Insights generated from RtD activities, we created a service blueprint of a day in the life of a domestic helper where we identified various gaps in the service blueprint as informed by our RtD activities and annotated definitions of care, all overtly explicit in nature.
4-Generalizing gaps to rubrics
Then we moved on to construct a care rubric based on the above.
Mock implementation exploring implications of 1st iteration of care rubric
We took the care rubric to analyse a facet of ecosystem chosen for analysis: Security and Management of Domestic staff of MyGate App.
Mock implementation:
1- Identified horizontal line: Relationship between stakeholders
100 acts of kindness- It’s a game to encourage care behaviours such as — making tea for domestic help for a week
2- Identified vertical Line: Looking for communication gaps where the internal and external customer interact
Maid passcode- Prompt to share how she is feeling at entry/exit (introducing the human element to passcode).
Cost-benefit analysis of care rubric based on mock implementation
Through the mock service blueprint, we were able to derive the above-shown stakeholders' map as insight and an aspirational output. We observed that when care is incorporated into the service blueprint the dynamics between the stakeholders change and expand.
The speculative shareholder map shows that in the context of MyGate the stakeholders gain equal importance during the design process. This insight could be applied to other aspects of the gig economy, therefore, unintended consequences of their labour practices could be anticipated by applying the care framework.
How would this work? The frame of reference would expand to encompass people that we wouldn’t normally consider stakeholders — like in our case, the domestic help’s families, friends, and community.
Conclusion
The scope of what we have set out to accomplish is huge and the implications of our proposed system cannot be easily anticipated. We, however, want to take this project forward and start by mapping out the service infrastructure in relation to the other ongoing social processes through a Giga map. This map will also help us identify the various contexts in which this Care Rubric could operate. It will also help us understand the role that domestic worker’s rights, existing labour laws and unions play in the existing systems of care.
We are planning on creating more defined RtD activities with other aspects/ players of the gig economy such as ridesharing and on-demand delivery services. The RtD could range from different kinds of participatory activities to placing tech/non-tech artefacts in the immersive context.
This process will help in making a meticulous set of guidelines that will enable different services to come up with ideas for more care-centred design approaches for all the stakeholders involved.
The Team
To connect with us for further discussion, feel free to reach out:
