My learnings from the service and experience design workshop

After an intensive workshop on service and experience design, my learning kept changing as the workshop was progressing. Workshop topic concentrated on “People with Disabilities” where we were suppose to design a system for PwDs to gain livelihood and be active part of the Country.

I had people with disabilities around me in college and even I have seen some travelling using public transport but I was never involved so closely with them in my life until now and I always had these questions in my mind like why we don’t see them in public so often? Why don’t we have inclusive schools? Why can’t they travel easily using public transport? Why do they have stigma of getting out of the house?

Involving with or I should say working for PwDs gave me a different vision to look at our existing system. It gave me a different perspective to look at their abilities than looking at their inabilities.

Learnings for this workshop

1. Engaging with PwDs

We gathered information on PwDs majorly on secondary research which was also an overload for us because we never had so much of information about them before which affected us in some way or the other. The only primary research we did was on the day of visit to Enable India an non-profit organisation for PwDs. It was a lot of information we had in those two hours and an enlightenment of looking towards them in a different way.

The major change in my perspective was that how we should concentrate on their abilities than looking at their inabilities. We all have some or the other inabilities within us and we all overcome them by using our different abilities. This works in the same way for PwDs, they overcome their inabilities by using the abilities they are gifted with. Then why do we see them exclusively? We should design a system that can concentrates on abled as well as people with disabilities instead of doing the patch work later on the existing system just so that they can use it.

2. System and Service design

System does not always work the way we expect it to work. They keep evolving or they keep changing as per the need of the people, stakeholders, technology etc. I use to think that once a system fails there is no scope for improvement and the thing that it has failed completely. But in this workshop what I realised was that it is okay if we fail while designing a system or a service because then it makes us realise that what exactly we need to improve or concentrate on. I along with my group thought of a system which was not fulfilling the needs and after which that failure gave us a clearer picture that where should we be exactly heading.

Moreover, the major learning for me was that how important it is to design a service or a system that would be sustainable. Just designing something for the present problem is not enough but we need to criticize and speculate or designs so that it would be sustainable in the long run.

3. Social and Economic sustainability

Social sustainability is an often overlooked aspect of sustainability. It is a process for creating sustainable successful places that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the places they live and work. Social sustainability combines design to support social and cultural life, systems for people engagement, and space for people and places to evolve.

These are factors to be considered in determining if a service or a system is socially sustainable:

• Equity
• Diversity
• Quality of life

Whereas, economic sustainability is the ability to support a defined level of economic production.

As a group, our focus was on providing accessible transport for college student. So our system at first concentrated on exclusive buses which was a failure because it was not socially and economically sustainable. We failed to think from the perspective of equity, equality and also from the point of view of economic production. That failure made me realize that how important it is to think from social as well as economical perspective while designing a system or a service.

These were some of my learning from this entire workshop which surely has changed my view towards approaching a problem.