Studio Reflections
This is the reflection of the 5-weeks long design studio on ‘Probing into service, system, and infrastructures. The focus was to look into the functioning of the gated societies. At the start of the studio, we looked into some of the design methods which were new to some of us, including me. I learned about methods like Research through design, understanding the difference between Experience design and designing for experience, and participatory design methods.
We dived into the studio topic by reading an article titled ‘On Maid-Rating Apps India’s Entitled Baba-Log Hit New Low’. The article talks about the problems faced by the domestic workers in gated societies, the power that the residents have over the domestic workers, and also the biases against them.
We also looked into the Zomato controversy where a delivery guy was caught eating food out of the customers’ orders. This led us to question the functioning of the system. Was it Zomato’s fault, was the delivery guy to blame, are the customers at fault at any point? This was our start to understanding what probing into a system means.
I, along with my team, looked into the topic of the rating and recommendation system for domestic helpers in gated societies. We went through a lot of iterations before arriving at the topic of recommendation for domestic helpers. But I learned that there was a lot more that we could do but were not able to because the brief required us to talk to domestic helpers and gathering their opinions, which was difficult as most of employers did not allow us to talk to their helpers. However, talking to the residents and looking into the myGate app gave us a lot of insights. I also realized that your service or system might not always benefit both of the ends of a hierarchical system, even though it should, in an ideal world and that your design might affect them in negative.
Understanding of the service design tools
The studio also gave me an opportunity to learn the service design tools. I learned how to map my thoughts, finding stakeholders, generating interview insights, etc. While creating system flow and system map, I came to know how we can find interactions between all the components of the system and how the flow of information happens in the entire system.
Studio sessions
We also worked a bit on the language R and the R-studio and learned how to analyse and visualize any data.The feedback sessions after every milestone, where we tried to present our ideas within 5 minutes, were very helpful in shaping our problem statement. Even though we couldn’t gather much information about the lives of domestic helpers, the participatory activities done by other teams gave us a lot of insights about their lives.
Conclusion
To conclude, the studio helped me to discover how to probe into a bigger system and the wide array of service tools that are present out there.
Process followed: Initial Proposal | Process Work | Final Concept
