Lessons from Service and Experience Design Workshop
Our design brief during the workshop on Service and Experience design was about understanding the life-journey of persons with disabilities and come up with a service-system for one of the phases in that journey. Our group focused on the phase of Learning for children with disabilities (CWDs) and came up with a possible service-system to address some of the issues pertaining to this phase. We took the scenario of inclusive education in an Indian context to understand the complexities involved around inclusive education for the many stakeholders involved in the system.
Through this workshop I was able to understand the complexity of a service system and that it is very dynamic and unpredictable. Some of the key lessons from this workshop are discussed below.
Disability and Inability
Through our visit to Enable India I learnt that disabilities need not define a person. Just as abled-bodied persons cannot be merely defined by any one ability or inability, so why do we focus on just the disability of a PWD? We, the able-bodied people, end up comparing them to ourselves and automatically conclude that they are lacking in many ways. Everyone has their own abilities and inabilities; it’s just that for PWDs their inabilities can often be more visible. But that does not mean that they are less capable — only that their capabilities are different.
We find workarounds for our own inabilities to navigate through our lives, so do people with disabilities. If we design systems that focus on the different capabilities of various people, we could have a more inclusive society. But we try to fit people in the ‘normal’ category and limit our designs, and thus the contribution of PWDs in the society. It made me realized how universal designs can help cater to the needs of various kinds of people and fully utilize their capabilities.
It’s a cycle
Another important lesson I learnt was that everything is interrelated in a service-system. The context generates the idea of ownership which decides the stakeholders who create the system which shapes the service. These are in turn affected by so many other parameters like socio-economic factors, politics, motivation of various stakeholders, experiences at various stages of the system, etc. Some of these are mapped in the diagram below.
The services that these contexts result in also affect these very contexts and reshape outcomes at every stage. I would like to believe it is a never-ending cycle where it is trying to reach some kind of equilibrium — always evolving to reach a possible ideal situation. But, since it is a cycle, the question that arises is whether it is vicious or virtuous?
In an ideal situation a service could work towards the betterment of the community. But since there are so many variables and factors that determine the effectiveness of the system at every stage, it becomes very fragile. This was evident from the stakeholder mapping we did to understand their roles, responsibilities and motivations. Apart from various internal and external variables affecting the stakeholders themselves, there can be various factors like politics, socio-economic, cultural, religious, bureaucratic, etc. that can affect the system on the whole. Thus it becomes imperative to understand how a design affects stakeholders as well as their interrelationships.
Sustainability and Responsibility
The overall sustainability, social or economic, of the system would depend on the participation of the all stakeholders and the value they bring to it at various levels of the system. For example, if the only involved groups are able-bodied persons, then the PWDs get marginalized and the service-system fails. It is not a progressing cycle any longer but a system that spirals down into inequality and marginalization, a spiral of silence. Hence, systems usually fail, despite our best efforts, because not everything can be controlled in a live system.
The stakeholders, from the most immediate to the most peripheral, each have their own impact on one another, affecting their own ecosystems and in turn affecting each other’s ecosystems. Thus to create a sustainable service-system it becomes imperative to involve all stakeholders so that they can improve their own ecosystem and subsequently each other’s; and this can be done by empowering them so that they can make informed decisions to manage and improve their own ecosystems. We as designers also need to be aware of the implications of the solutions we propose. If we choose to intervene in one area we must also think about its possible effects in other areas of the service-system. Through our designs we are capable of empowering people or denying them a voice — we need to be more aware of our own biases and assumptions and be more honest about who or what we are aligned with. Through this we could strive towards creating a system that is self-sustainable and equitable.
