Studio Reflection: Probing into Services, Systems and Infrastructures
Introduction
In the recent “Probing into Services, Systems and Infrastructures” Studio at Srishti, our team of students in the M.Des in Human Centred Design Programme looked at the relationship between domestic help and employers within the context of gated community management apps.
We then helped to develop a tool that we called the “care rubric” that helps designers find opportunities and gaps within the structure of services to incorporate “care” as a value. In this context it meant how to create opportunities for mindful interactions between customers and employees in a service that fostered kindness, mutual respect, understanding, and diginity. We then tried to apply this to the MyGate mobile application.
You can read more about our project in our Proposal, Process Documentation, and Final Output here on this publication.
Defining Service Design
The Service Design Network defines it as
The activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers
As a student of the HCD programme at Srishti, I was initially a bit confused. Till then I had thought that what I was doing fell under the domain of Interaction Design or HCI. But I came across a great article by Jared M. Spool with a passage that really helped to clarify my thinking:
We’re no longer in a world when we can design for just a single isolated online interaction, not thinking about what happened before that interaction or what happens after… We’re now in a world where digital and non-digital are merging. And we need to be prepared to design in that overall experience.
Our Process
We were given a fairly open-ended brief — to look at the design of gated community management application and see what we could do. In the beginning, we did a lot of things - we interviewed maids, residents, security guards, analysed the conversation log of a Whatsapp group of a gated community, and then we established our research question as follows:
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?
Our single-sentence definition of care, based on reading multiple papers is:
Being actively mindful about the wellbeing and preservation of the people, things and processes in our lives that affect us and how we affect them in turn.
We found a paper that was a proposal for a workshop that wanted designers and researchers to envision the future of care in design. We mapped out the themes from the paper and found two important learnings.
First: whatever we made would have to be careful not to erase or trivialise the existing pathways through which care was conducted,
Second: we should acknowledge how care is implicated in everyday interactions.
The list of activities that it had also provided a direction for us to proceed towards, which was great for us because it gave us a concrete scaffolding to structure our thought process.
We then started ideating on ways to get more information — and used the principles of Research through Design or RtD to develop an activity where we handed a “care package” to domestic help that worked in gated communities as a way to get more insight into their lives and attitudes and expectations towards care. You can read more about our activity and what we learned here.
We mapped out what we learnt from our interactions, and then developed what we called the “Care Rubric” : a framework by which we can identify and assess various opportunities or gaps of care in a service ecosystem.
We then applied that rubric to the MyGate app-platform-service and identified “gaps in care” as well as ways to possibly engage with them.
What I Learnt from the Studio
Service and experience design is not a silo.
We cannot design services without at least acknowledging the effect of larger patterns and processes that have shaped the context around which the service exists.
In our literature review above, we had identified a whole host of historical and macro trends that fed into the rise of gated apartment complexes and community management apps. This helped us look at the work we were doing and the contribution we were trying to make as part of a bigger whole, and not an end in itself.
The unique contribution that designers can make to understand the world
Multiple times, Naveen asked us to ask ourselves — what is the work that we are doing, and how is it different from what a sociologist or ethnographer would do? The answer lies in what Nigel Cross calls “Designerly ways of Knowing” — where we create new knowledge about the world by making things and seeing how people react to them. We made a lot of things and we showed them to people — and through their reactions we learned more about the larger processes and dynamics that were at play.
This also gave me an appreciation for the process of physical, tangible
making - which gave me, as Jon Kolko puts it in his article,
a respect for the medium I was using, an understanding of how important details are, a pattern language of design problems to draw from, an intuitive sense for how to go about solving a problem
I cannot emphasise how important this was. The act of making, of physically and visually mapping the processes we saw and the stories we heard, helped to make these concepts clear in our heads in a way that nothing else could.
How I grew as a Designer from this Studio
This studio was not like any other educational experience that I have been through before. During the course of studio, I found myself grappling with fundamental questions about what design is, what it does, and the role of designers in society today. While part of that was because of the vast scope of the problem we had chosen, a larger part came down to the fact that for the first time I was forced to think in terms of “systems” and “processes” instead of users and interactions. And that changed a lot of things.
We now live in an era where, thanks to the amplifying potential of digital technology, a designer’s work can affect the lives of not just tens or hundreds, but millions and billions of people. Designers today are in a position to dictate the ways in which people use technology — and in turn the ways in which they access their money, go to work, talk to their friends and family and myriad other things — and over the course of the studio, I have now come to feel that the nature of design practice needs to radically change to incorporate not just material, aesthetic or commercial considerations, but also moral and ethical concerns. This leads me to my next point.
Forget about the Future of Work. Pay Attention to the Right-Now Instead.
Building on that, the kinds of labour practices and patterns and processes we establish early on, in the services that we design, will in an age of increasing automation and digitalisation will become the norm for a majority of workers 10 or 20 years from now. While in a sense it pertains to that much bandied-about term the “future of work” — I would argue that designing with care as integral value has real immediate relevance to the “right-now” of work. When I say that I refer the emerging set of labour practices and “unwritten rules’ that are being created by gig economy platforms and services (Dunzo, Swiggy, Uber etc).
Within them, I see a worrying tendency for the creators of these digital technologies and platforms that are steadily expanding and employing ever-growing legions of people, to try to box human interaction, with all its messy complexity and potential to spark joy and solidarity — into impersonal, give-and-take transactions mediated by a swipe on the screen. I think this is a big problem and that we are not paying enough attention to it.
Conclusion
There is more to living and working conditions than simply the give and take of wages. Barack Obama said in a speech last year:
“It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose.”
Can these gig economy platforms and services be designed to incorporate the everyday interactions and kindnesses that make work not just bearable but meaningful?
I think the answer is yes, and that our care rubric has made a contribution towards the discussion around this.
I end with a quote from Shannon Mattern from her amazing article “Maintenance and Care” who says,
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.
