Ahead of the beginnings of this pandemic, we had first-hand opportunities to investigate life with constrained electricity access in Peru, imagine how informal supply chains could be digitised in Indonesia, explore ways to empower adolescents with sexual reproductive health knowledge in Madhya Pradesh, and traversed notions of mental health amongst youth in India.
The common thread that runs across our work has long been about bridging the ground realities of people, cultures, and the places within which they operate, with a larger awareness of their context. This begs the question of what it means to be attuned to the ‘local’, and how this might be oriented towards more global relevance, especially when we talk about emerging markets — where information is often incomplete, processes and systems are informal, multiple layers of socio-economic realities exist, users are often skeptical about disruption and the most valued currency is trust and local partnerships.
Each project we undertook presented a new context, challenge, opportunity and a wide number of learnings. While a single post might not fully capture the range of experiences our work has given us, this is an attempt to share some anecdotes that have stood out.
Developing a holistic view of a new, emerging market’s context has been a longstanding challenge. There is a need to account for cultural nuance, on-ground constraints and unexpected limitations — something one can only get a flavour of, if experienced first-hand.
With N-Frnds, we are in the process of developing a Consolidated Digital Distribution Network Solution to digitise informal supply chains, making them easier to track, more efficient, and hence more amenable to inclusive growth.
For as complex a system as last mile supply chains are, our process of sense-making involves a live and agile prototyping approach, wherein we are constantly researching, designing and deploying a functional product (comprising both digital and offline operations) on the ground in order to understand the multiple levels of stakeholders, transactions and hence motivations that exist in these ecosystems. In a short span of six months, we have encountered several situations where the initial conception of a feature had to be radically simplified because the needs of users on the ground were far more straightforward than what the team had assumed. Building a rhythm for an iterative loop of research, design and delivery between local and global teams has been invaluable.
How might we build the capacity of a cohort of “users- cum- researchers” who are deeply embedded in communities, to critically reflect on the needs and requirements of the people they represent?
As an interdisciplinary design research practice, collaborative co-creation has become a powerful method for us to learn and find synergies with various stakeholders. In 2019, in partnership with Tandem Research and STBY, we put up HUM.2035, a multimedia exhibit depicting the future of humanitarian work in India, at the Barbican as part of Life Rewired Hub. Using ‘Speculative Design’ — the practice of creating alternative futures as a way to reflect on present-day realities — we used fictional scenarios and artefacts to tell the story of future humanitarian workers in a world where socio-technological catastrophes amplify the effects of climate stress. This sparked a conversation with the innovation team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), leading to a series of workshops exploring how Speculative Design could be employed as a starting point for innovation and internal change within their organisation.
We found that Speculative Design allows diverse stakeholders to find a common language and engage in constructive dialogue about the future, while discovering relevant pathways from the present. This becomes especially crucial in studying aberrations in the normal trajectory of things — something that we are also witnessing in the current public health crisis.
How might we trigger the imagination of individuals and organisations through speculative design to be more future-ready?
With the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, we created new forms of learning for humanitarian professionals in the form of gamified experiences, immersive films and chatbot-based interactions.
One of the immersive films — aimed at inculcating empathy in viewers — shone through as an example of the power of local collaboration. While making a 360° film in a post-war context in the Philippines, we worked closely with local partners to build the film’s narrative and identify key locations. Their involvement was also instrumental in finding a protagonist whose lived experience of war and a subsequent natural disaster informed the eventual narrative of the film.
This engagement ensured the film retained an authenticity that would be almost impossible to achieve without an insider’s view and truly highlighted the importance of local partnerships for storytelling.
How might we empower global change-makers to better relate to the realities of geographies and cultures that will remain less accessible in times to come?
With the Public Engagement team at the Wellcome Trust, we attempted to uncover people-centred opportunities that could enhance future clinical trials in Low and Middle Income Countries, particularly in situations of public health emergencies. Through work spanning clinical trials and epidemics, we looked into what it takes to share potentially technical, seemingly irrelevant information, in an easy, bespoke manner. While a snake rescue may seem quite far removed from a clinical trial, one such episode we witnessed was an accurate picture of how panic, anxiety, fear, rumours, and misinformation can affect a community during a public health emergency. We observed that the snake rescuer — a locally trusted and important stakeholder who falls outside the formalised health system — was an embodiment of engagement; providing the crowd with appropriate medical information, and at the same time displaying an investment in their wellbeing by putting himself in between the people and venomous snakes. Public engagement, we saw, was ultimately a story of building trust.
How might we conceptualise a community-led model to epidemic and disaster response that compliments top-down, techno-centric approaches?
Each of these experiences and questions broadens our vision — of translating the nuances of everyday life to relevant, feasible and sustainable opportunities for innovation. As we move ahead, we hope to adapt our approaches to the constraints of these trying times, and engage more deeply with the things that arouse our curiosity — leveraging design research to understand the hopes, aspirations and fears of diverse stakeholders and tailor future frameworks that accommodate each of these.
Quicksand is a design research and innovation consultancy based in India, facilitating the creation of meaningful experiences. Over the years, our work has embedded us in sectors as varied as finance, public health, water and sanitation, consumer goods, education, new media and technology.
