My learning from the studio “Probing into the systems and services”
The design studio “Probing into the systems and services”, a five week of time filled with enthusiasm, eagerness, excitement, anxiety and a sleepless night was an intense learning experience for me.
Coming from a design background in Architecture, I was always more focused towards the final outcome and designing a solution. However this studio gave me the ability to think beyond my comfort zone. The idea of ‘Probing’ actually made me dig in and research more on the topic rather than coming up with solution in its entirety. It made me probe beyond just a typical idea of ‘App’ to thinking of the entire system and finding loopholes into it. Thanks to our felicitators Naveen Bagalkot and Venkat Chilukuri for giving us this opportunity, accepting our failures, guiding us through it, motivating to do better and sometimes tolerating our tantrums and downsides.
Time in studio
The studio gave me a friendly and interactive learning environment where I extended my efforts, desires and knowledge that helped me come up with the best possible outcome. Moreover I found the ambiance of studio very live, friendly and full of energy which encouraged me to work more each day. Thanks to Venkat who took all the efforts to make sure we reach studio in the morning (It was not an easy task, I have always been a night owl) and work till the next half in the afternoon. This made studio interactive and it created a space where we spread our knowledge and learn from each other.
During the course of this journey, some of the few sessions from Naveen and Venkat threw a light of immense understanding and knowledge on me. Some few insights from the talks of Naveen will be helpful throughout my journey as a designer. I always wished to learn data visualization in my life, Thanks to Venkat who introduced us to the world of data visualization. I tried my best to incorporate all this knowledge from them in our studio project. Also, I highly appreciate the absence of PowerPoint presentations for the reviews in studio. This made me scribble, doodle, think, brainstorm and be more thought provoking apart from our presentation wall that looked so vibrant and appealing.
Probing
The topic that our team decided to probe in was “Understanding the perceptions of residents towards surveillance in a gated community”. Working with group for this studio project was a fun time with lot of learning from each other. Working together is part of life. A family is a team, work is in teams, and some people need to be in teams.
For initial phase in research, our team went to a gated community to get a basic idea of surveillance. We mapped all the visible methods of surveillance. However there on we realized the hardships and efforts it would take to actually know the intangible factors of surveillance that affects people’s life. Our focus group was residents in a gated community. We designed a game as an approach to research through design which helped us in gathering information about the perceptions of residents towards surveillance. During this phase, we realized our own shortcomings and difficulties that we faced and tried to overcome that.
Journey
Further to our journey, we designed first iteration of the game which unfortunately turned out to be a failure as it lacked the essence of game strategy as well as we failed to gather the appropriate insights from it. Overcoming these shortcomings in the game, we further updated the game and brought in some level of game play and complexity that develops interest for players as well as help us gather more information about their perceptions.
We played game with 12 residents and it was so amazing to know about their different ways of thinking and behaviors in a particular scenario. Also some of the residents responded so thoughtfully and gave us feedback and suggestions to further update the game.
After gathering information from the residents through game, we classified and sorted out all the information in the tabular form and started figuring out ways to conceptualize different methods of information visualization. Initially we sketched several abstract way to draw out patterns on the piece of paper. And then to further detail out the patterns that it forms from the obtained data, we used digital tool “Tableau” to visualize the patterns. It was indeed so interesting and easy to work with that tool especially for a starter like me who is novice with coding.
Learning
While looking at the iterations,gathering insights, listing the threats and limitations of the project also become important to expand the further scope of the system design. Also the primary learning from this studio was that even if technologies are so advance, but to some extent they cannot replace humans. For an instance, in case of emergency in a gated community, any stakeholder in a gated community can only rely on an immediate surveillance e.g taking help of security guard.
Key learning : Surveillance in a gated community can be segregated into three parts:
1 Immediate surveillance
2. Slow surveillance
3. Systemic change in surveillance
End note
The participatory approach in the studio made me more sensible as a designer and also to some extent it helped me break through my sensitive and shy nature, made me bold; which allowed me to interact with more people and gain better understanding, insights about design research and design process. In the end I would say that this was not the end of our 5 week journey but is just the beginning of an another cycle of probing further into it.
