Building a World from Miles Away
Immersive world-building as a means to research during the pandemic
In the realm of Human- Centred Design, it is a common approach to understand the people you are designing for by immersing in their day to day lives and the social fabric of their communities. But how does one approach this in times of COVID-19, stuck behind zoom screens and endless WiFi issues?
As a fresh design researcher, I began my work in HCD with Project ARC. Amplifying Resilient Communities looked at learning from health seeking experiences of vulnerable populations across urban and rural settings in Bangladesh and South Africa, to inform global health systems, which face unprecedented challenges in the coming decades. As this project unfolded over 2 years, we took many experimental and immersive approaches, using platforms and methods that were available to us, to the best of our abilities.
We set out to build an understanding of the broad landscape of Bangladesh, the health system and dive deeper into our research locations to learn about the resilience of communities in the face of health calamities.
The initial few weeks included scanning through endless materials — research papers, newspaper articles, blog posts, organisation reports, documentaries, countless initiatives and even social media posts — to understand the complex lives of people and the nuances within communities. The by-product of this was a rich catalogue of 300+ resource materials, tagged, linked and clustered.
How can we use this to inform our research; how do we capture the important bits; how do we present this plethora of information without making it look so ‘cold’?
For me this was an opportunity to be conscious of the form and shape information visualisation takes. It became crucial to stop viewing these materials in boards and find better ways to represent the everyday lives of people and their stories.
The easiest way to begin was to take it apart, to start writing, to bring forth stories, to use rich media, to doodle and to make it all the more human.
From the point of view of research and information design, this allowed us to identify underlying challenges and the many ways in which people understand their own health — beyond just their physical health. Arranging all we had read in smaller, bite-sized stories and nuggets brought together our findings and allowed us to sense-make. We started seeing nuances within our research locations and identifying socio-cultural similarities and differences between rural, peri-urban and urban settings.
While this format was really useful to extract information, it did not allow the viewer to engage with it beyond just reading. We wanted to create a world for them to navigate, move around and discover interconnections as they read stories of people, organisations or general information about the health landscape.
We needed a different format, we needed to make it more immersive and engaging…
As a research team, we often used Miro to collaboratively synthesise the information we were coming across. Deciding to move away from the usual formats of information dissemination such as decks and documents, I turned towards Miro because of the interactivity and texture it provided to the stories we had collected.
Using Miro we created a socially distanced profile of Bangladesh, allowing viewers to discover the narratives and lived experiences of people. As researchers, this helped us build a deeper sense of familiarity and understanding with these spaces before we began primary research and synthesis.
As we explored this approach, we were met with hesitation and the question: Would this format appeal to “left-brained” thinkers?
To account for this difference in our audiences, we gave viewers two pathways they could choose from ; one was to read the piece cover to cover, in a linear format. The other was to simply move around, browse the postcards and zoom in and out of different sections.
When this interactive Miro board was shared with people from different streams of work, it was met with excitement at the opportunity to engage with information in new and more human-centred ways.
This allowed me to see how experimental formats of storytelling could allow both researchers and audiences to immerse in unfamiliar contexts, despite the constraints of the pandemic, enabling richer insights and synthesis.
Reflection : This attempt at world-building was a way to make up for the gap in my understanding of the context and space due to travel constraints imposed by the pandemic. I find myself turning back to this activity, every now and then, as a format to capture interactions, stories from the field and fly on the wall observations. I believe it is important to hold on to the texture and nuances we come across during field research as they often get buried under excel sheets of notes and analytical thinking.
