Towards Analyzing Care Through A Multistep Framework
By Shreya Chopra, Baishnabi Monger, N Chandrasekhar Ramanujan, Gopika Varma
Over the past few weeks, we have been probing into the dynamics between the residents and domestic help through the lens of care as an integral value. Moving forward, we have devised a plan to evaluate care in the system through a multi-step framework.
Revised Problem Statement
How is “care” practised and experienced between residents and domestic help?
Multi-step Framework to Analyse Care
We are conducting an activity with the maids based on which we get information on care through the kind of stories that they tell us. Based on these stories we are mapping insights on what the care activities are and how they can be classified into the care matrix and into the service blueprint of domestic help — household employee.
Our outcome then is a set of insights from the service blueprint as to what constitutes a care activity in this setting and what are the activities and where and when they happen. Based on these insights we plan to manifest it into some kind of service map, movie or interactive role-playing game which will be the output.
Step 1- Activity: Scriptwriting
Time required: 1–2 hours per session
Number of sessions: minimum 2
Key Considerations while doing the activity:
- Comfort and Context: We shall build a rapport with the maid while making her feel comfortable.
- Consent: We will seek verbal consent before starting the activity.
- Trust: To create a safe space for her to share while inducing trust.
- Ownership and Agency: The domestic help will have complete agency over the narrative of the story.
Building a narrative
We are facilitating a space for sharing the stories of domestic help through cues (curated videos). These curated videos will range from ads, documentaries, sketches, etc, being 30 seconds to 1 min each.
Care package
A care package of items that contains items she might use for home, place of work (residents’ houses), and self-care and noting how she reacts to them. We are also looking to follow up and understand her interaction with those items.
These items can be the following, with a maximum budget of Rs. 250/- per package-
Towel, Chappals, Hair clip, Cups/set, Soap/sanitiser, Bangle/bindi, Dettol, Bag
Step 2- The Care Matrix
The Care Matrix is derived from Korth’s typology of care that talks about three types of care that can be measured. They are as follows-
- Overtly Explicit
- Overtly Implicit
- Covertly Explicit
The care matrix will map out the findings from our activity and help us identify the different types of care that the domestic help experience in their workplace, and at their home, it also looks into if they care for themselves and how. It generally captures the latent expectations they have about their life.
Step 3- Service Blueprint For Care
The service blueprint comprised the extended journey of the domestic help, and we plan to map out the various rituals and instances of care across different levels in the service blueprint.
This will give us the insights to come up with a speculative service blueprint for gated communities with care as a framework.
Expected Output And Outcomes
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 — that whatever we made would have to be careful not to erase or trivialise the existing pathways through which care was conducted, and should acknowledge how it is implicated in everyday interactions. The list of activities that it also has provided a direction for us to proceed towards.
This was great for us because it gave us a concrete scaffolding to structure our thought process.
Our outcome as we have said earlier is a *set of insights* from the service blueprint as to what constitutes a care activity in this setting. Building from these we plan to manifest it into some kind of service map or a movie or RPG game which will be our final output. We have explored the directions that our final outcomes can take in the diagram below.
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
To connect with us for further discussion, feel free to reach out:
