Designing for Care
Towards more mindful relationships with our everyday services and ecosystems
By Shreya Chopra, N Chandrasekhar Ramanujan, Baishnabi Monger, Gopika Varma
Research Question
How is “care” practiced and experienced between residents and maids in gated communities? How is this changed by the app? Is it better or worse? What can we as service designers do about it?
What is Care? A framework of analysis and imagination
When we read a lot of articles we found it important to attribute the definition of care by scholars who’ve interpreted and described care extensively in their research.
Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define “care” as
“Everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can continue to live in it as well as possible” (Source)
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa says that “Care” is something we experience and believe in — a commitment “to think how things could be different”. (Source)
Annemarie Mol in her book says-
“Care is not a transaction in which something is exchanged (a product against a price), but an interaction in which the action goes back and forth (in an ongoing process).”
She further says that care “stands for a signifier of necessary yet mostly dismissed labours of everyday maintenance of life, an ethico-political commitment to neglected things, and the affective remaking of relationships with our objects”. (Source)
Korth’s typology of care says that there are 4 types of care, typified by whether they’re overt/covert — i.e immediately recognised as care or not, and implicit/explicit i.e whether the meaning of the care changes if it’s acknowledged.
Through these definitions, we started questioning. When we say “care”, what do we mean? Care for whom? Care for what?
Our single-sentence explanation of care is being actively mindful about the people, things and processes in our lives that affect us and how we affect them in turn.
Why is it important to probe into this further?
We’ve interviewed some residents and service providers as part of our initial primary research. There were several themes that came up as follows:
- Attitude towards domestic help — people don’t treat them well, think of them as interchangeable
- Exacerbated by the app — through the app, the domestic help can be rated and they have no power to see or contest the rating
- Employers inflexible — Unwilling to budge on matters concerning small raises in salary, and leaves etc.
We believe that this relationship can be seen across emerging platform economies such as Amazon, Swiggy, Dunzo, Zomato etc — large armies of low-paid and low-skilled workers toiling away across the nation, their every interaction with their employer mediated by the impersonal hand of the algorithm (Indian Express, Huffpost.in, inc.com)
Adopting a framework of “care”, we feel, is a means through which we can better understand employer-servant relationships, and also speculate at better possible futures for domestic help within the existing apartment-complex-mobile-app scenario.
Process (How we arrived at this)
Methods and Timeline
Expected Outputs
In addition to the output from our RtD intervention, we will be preparing journey maps and service blueprints for our proposed “care-sensitive” service that we will be building based on our learning from this. Our outcome is greater familiarity with Research through Design practices which we plan to add to our toolkit as designers and researchers, as well as a better understanding of the factors involved in designing, creating and providing services to people, which will help us be ultimately better Human-Centred Designers.
Note
This article is part of a three-part series:
1-Probing into the system and identifying the research question: Defining care and planning how to study it
2-Planning a probe into the research question: Planning RtD activities and how to document and gain insights from them.
3-Output: First iteration for a care rubric to evaluate service systems with the lens of care as an integral value. Taking gated communities as an epicentre, we are probing into the dynamics between the residents and the domestic workers, specifically the domestic help through the lens of care as an integral value.
The Team
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