These and many more are the kind of questions that I am encountering these days. I am doing a course called Ideas to Experiences which is part of S.Lab.
The initial brief was to create our concepts surrounding the well being of the elderly or ‘grey nuclei’. After multiple brainstorming, we are now on the final visualization.
The initial work started with interviews of the elderly, their family members and those who live with them. Alongside we tried to understand what well being means, the extended circle of people who are related to the elderly, their stories, emotions and their pain points. We delved on the importance of joint family.
With joint family, we mean to highlight the intangible experiences that help learn a family about each other, start a communication and care for one another, when the members stay as a close-knit family.
After multiple brainstorming, we have finally narrowed our theme on few broad topics which is: Presence and micro-communication among the elderly. We are trying to understand the way an elderly deals with their regular activities and the communications that occurs to facilitate such activities.
Example 1: Take the example of Shree who lives with her son, daughter-in-law and grandkids. Her son and daughter-in-law are a working couple. So in the morning, when her daughter-in-law arranges the house, Shree prefers to just observe. Her daughter-in-law is normally in a rush and directs the maid for all the activities. Shree would sit in the courtyard and follow the hustles. So the sound of the pressure cooker signals to her that the food is ready while the bangles give her the sense that her daughter-in-law is leaving for office. It is through these mundane signs that we often sense our surroundings.
It has been observed that the elderly are often the inactive group in our society. At times, as few of our interviewees proved, try their best to keep themselves active but new technology; generation gap; lack of company often makes them secluded.
Example 1: Now what Shree does is look for clues, to grasp the activities surrounding her. This helps her be updated about her family without physically interfering. The need for Shree is markedly different from Lalitha, who stays alone and her sons live abroad. For her the most essential part of her life is spent on gathering updates as minor as the daily temperature where her sons are putting up.
The need for micro-communication arises where the absence of a person leads someone to look for them, often through indirect channels. So it is through these mundane ubiquitous mediums that helps fulfil the goal of learning about someone’s presence.
To design is not just about solving a problem but also to recognize that we are dealing with real individuals and not just a user in a statistical graph. It is about empathizing that people have emotions, desires and stories. So the challenge is not so much as to solve or create a product but to create mediums that can be integrated into one’s life.
This brings me to the next question, what kind of values are we creating, and what exactly does one mean by value? Also when we design, are we questioning the ground on which the design process is itself based? Do we take the very brief for granted or do we cross-question and redefine the brief?
I think that it is all about asking the right question. Empathizing is the primary need without which it will only solve a very mechanical task, but might not really give any value to the people. The work of Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1978, acknowledges that the world we inhabit is increasingly artificial, created by human beings. For Simon (1981), design was not restricted to making material artefacts, but was a fundamental professional competence extending to policy-making and practices of many kinds and on many levels:
‘Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences.’ (p.129)
Economics, he stated, works on three levels, those of the individual; the market; and the entire economy (p. 31). The centre of interest in traditional economics, however, it is markets and not individuals or businesses (p. 37). A serious problem is thereby raised at the outset: two important considerations relating to design—how goods and services are developed for the market place and how they are used—receive scant attention.
As I read through multiple philosophers, I am a flux. I am trying to multiple things: understand context, the value of insights and the difference between insight and observation; how to understand a brief, where and when do we question the brief itself; how to pick up the specific elements to solve a design problem, and when to know where to stop etc.
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