1.7 Relevance of Design to Tackling Social Integration
Herbert Simon (1996) espoused the ability of design to transform “current situations into preferred ones”. According to Kolko (2015), design was no longer just applied to make physical objects only, but also to solve “complex, intangible issues such as how a customer experiences a service”. Designers had to work alongside experts from various disciplines to solve the complex problems. Tools and techniques that helped form a shared experience were developed, to make it easier for them to feel greater empathy for users’ experiences together (Buchenau & Suri, 2000). For example, design artifacts such as “customer journey maps” began to be used to understand users’ emotional highs and lows during their experiences (Kolko, 2015). The focus was on users’ experiences to design touch points based on delivering great experiences than achieving internal operational efficiencies only (Kolko, 2015).
At IDEO, Brown (2009) described how empathic design had been effective in addressing systemic challenges such as in areas of healthcare, education, and organizational efficiency. Battarbee (2014) defined empathy as the “ability to be aware of, understanding of, and sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts without having had the same experience”. When an organisation was able to feel empathy for its customers, staff felt a sense of purpose and they did better work (Battarbee, 2014).
Therefore designers could now not only apply design knowledge to make tangible products, but perhaps also to solve complex social problems like social integration. Design empathy would come in handy in seeing the situation from the views of immigrants and locals to come up with empathic designs.
The refugee crises had led to mass migrations and exposed people’s attitudes towards helping others. Other than to seek refuge, immigrants moved to new lands for other reasons as well, such as to seek skilled or unskilled employment, reunite with family etc. In the new environment, immigrants would encounter other immigrants who arrived before them, and local people who had been living there. Immigrants brought along new cultures, needs, and behaviours, which might result in tensions with others in the new environment in the short term. This brought about the importance of social integration in putting things right in the long run.
There was no universal definition for social integration, though most definitions revolved around providing equal opportunities, inclusivity, and fair treatment. Short term challenges need to be overcome when getting people to help others in need and bringing together peoples of diverse cultures. However if these challenges could be overcome, and immigrants and locals became well integrated, then there would be long-term benefits for the socially integrated community.
In such diverse cities as New York City, there should exist more opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds to interact. However this was not necessarily the case, as immigrants could end up integrating along ethnic boundaries with their own ethnic community, or with other immigrants of other ethnicities, and not so much with the locals, as experienced by the Bosnians in Astoria, Queens.
To get people to look past the short-term difficulties and recognise the long-term gains of social integration, an altruistic mindset that encouraged behaviours in the natural world of sacrificing oneself in benefit of others would likely come up short in achieving that; an Ubuntu philosophy which emphasised inclusivity and interdependence between peoples appeared to be a more relevant approach. A co-creation strategy was concluded to be advisable for research design, as a more inclusive, effective, and ethical way of conducting research and coming up with solutions.
In recent years, the design discipline had been moving towards championing the importance of user empathy when developing solutions to tackle wicked problems. The methods employed to create human-centered designs thus placed humans at the centre of the design process, an emphasis and priority which mirrored the principles of Ubuntu in order to achieve social integration.
Therefore there existed potential for applying design to tackle the issue of social integration between immigrants and locals. The design challenge could thus be reframed as “How might experience design promote social integration between immigrants and locals through co-creation?”
