On Legacy, the Pursuit of Knowledge and Design
‘‘Education will set you free. It will set you apart’’, Baba told me as he shut the door to the car that would take me to live with my relatives in the city. ‘‘All of this is for your education, never forget that’’.
That made as much sense to 8-year-old me as taxes or quantum physics. Freedom from what? I wondered. Could you liberate someone that was already free? Open fields to frolic in, empty streets to play on, affable folk everywhere, my village was my utopia. The city, in contrast, was bleak. I was an outsider in the city, struggling to find my identity in an alien place. I rarely looked up to meet gazes but on the rare chance I did, it was as if everyone was privy to secrets I wasn’t.
Where I come from, everyone gets a say in your life, whether you ask for it or not. By the time you’re ready to graduate high-school, every adult is a self-certified career coach. One day at the bank, the clerk looked at my education loan application, up at me again as if to make sure, then back at the papers. Snickering, he made a show of narrating to his colleagues that I, a girl, was going to study ‘Industrial’ design. Through his gold-rimmed rectangular glasses, he looked down his nose at me and mockingly inquired, ‘‘Don’t you feel guilty, putting your father in a debt like that? You will be married soon and this education will never be of any use to you. Maybe an investment in gold would be appropriate or if you’re that intent on studying, consider applying to a Home-Sciences diploma.’’ I was barely 17 then.
My father is a feminist, I don’t know if he realizes that, but he is. And I’m a proud daughter. Bedtime stories in our household were those of strong, powerful women. A staple was one about my great-grandmother, Radha, or Radhaai as she was lovingly called by everyone in the village, the suffix Aai standing for Mother in my native tongue. Radhaai had all of her maids’ children enrolled into the local gram-panchayat school. In a society rife with a rigid caste system, she was convinced that education could be the great equalizer. If every child got the same education regardless of their caste, it could be a way out of the draconian system. For decades strangers would show up to our house, regaling tales of their childhood, how Radhaai would send them all to school and how that helped them succeed in life. She ferociously believed education was freedom. That is what she inculcated in her son, my Baba. The pursuit of knowledge is as much part of my family’s story as our name. I’m a product of this pursuit and my mere writing of these words is a testament to my ancestors’ commitment to it. ‘‘You are her legacy,’’ my father would say with pride, ‘‘cherish that.’’ These are the lessons I inherited. Lessons of strong women, of people whose belonging in society was a function of suppressive societal structures beyond their control, of a culture that treated a woman’s intellect differently than a man’s, and of co-existing paradoxes. These are the lessons I carried to design school.
Design for me, like many of us, has always been more than a profession. It was how I believed I could make change happen with the skills I had been gifted with. Understanding people came naturally to me. Design School, however, quickly taught me of the superficiality of some in our profession. Words were thrown around till they ceased to mean anything. Empathy. User-Centered Design. Human-Centered Design. It was almost like we wanted to be caught trying. Trying to care. But did we? Do we still? Our ‘users’ exist in realities beyond the token ones we study or seek to understand. Their daily existence is a function of decades, heck, centuries of systems that they have inherited. These socio-cultural, political systems are perpetual, and in flux at the same time.
Mike Monterio says in his book, ‘at the scale we’re working, when we fuck up, we don’t just break code, we break people. We break relationships. We break civil discourse.’ I would add that we also break trust.
Trust, I believe is the most expensive and widely used currency in the world. Trust is why you don’t hesitate to ask a neighbor to plant-sit and trust is also what ensures democracies are kept running. We have seen a slow erosion of trust in institutions in the last few years, the ramifications of which span every aspect of our lives. There’s a reason why skin whitening is a multi-billion-dollar industry in my country, a former colony with a collective Stockholm syndrome & cultural PTSD that still deems white skin to be the epitome of beauty for millions of its children. There is a reason why platforms like Facebook have become festering grounds for conspiracy theories and the basis of anti-democratic sentiment. These crises are products of design, focussed on profiting from a fractured societal code and lack of trust. There were designers, people who apparently ‘know better’, who signed off on algorithms that suggest extreme content & misinformation to people. Designers who thought broadcasting to millions of young people that somehow they can change their skin color in a week and be ‘fair and lovely’ or ‘fair and handsome’ was a great idea. An economy is being propped up on the basis of this distrust, of our insecurities, propagated by exploiting our trust in institutions and I wanted to make some sense of it.
When I started my masters’ degree in Design & Citizenship in the UK, I had not anticipated learning such an intimate lesson on identity, belonging, and citizenship by the end of it. As graduation drew closer, naively confident in my skills, I started applying for jobs. I kept getting rejections after rejections stating that even though my background was ‘interesting’ ‘fascinating’ 'suitable for the role’, I could not get the job because of my immigration status.
Always looking for a lesson, I learned an important one through this ordeal. Here I was, stuck in a reality that I had inherited with no fault of my own. It took me back to the stories from my childhood. Where we were taught that we could get rid of our labels if we just got the right education and worked hard enough. Many of the people we design with & for, much like the people I grew up with, are stuck in similar, illegible realities. Realities that afford us all access, avenue, and agency based on the color of our skin, age, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, or nationalities notwithstanding our skills, experience, or the expertise that we have to offer. Recently at work, we consulted with experts who spoke about their experiences as refugees. Many spoke about the narratives that had already entered the room before they did- the preconceived notions of what they would/should look like. This is Citizenship in action. It is the tales and perceptions that surround us. It’s the identities that we are assigned by those with power. Ones that are built on and invigorated by social constructs and perennial injustices. It’s the boxes we are reduced to, the numbers we represent, the devaluation of our individualities. I learned this as a village girl in a city school, contending with the labels I was given and as the only non-European student in my class, struggling to explain the stories from my world, realities of post-colonization, histories that manifested themselves into systems of chaos, oppression, and insecurity, all of these things, yet citizens that were hopeful, bubbling with talent, chasing excellence and progress.
I believe that we did not create these inequities by accident and we cannot dismantle them by mere chance. It has to be reversed by design. As a relatively young designer in experience and as a citizen with things to say, this is my penny’s worth on how we can make this happen.
Contextualize design. And do more of it.
One critique I have of Human-Centered Design is that it assumes that the design process itself is neutral. The assumption that all users have a common baseline, to begin with, proves to be a false notion. The paradox lies within the fact that we seek to understand certain users in order to create universally usable products/services. Design needs to be contextual, not universal. The rise of digitization, the exacerbation of the climate crises, and fraught socio-political dynamics in this century have made the contexts in which we design, hyperconnected and interlinked. The narratives of the last couple of decades have been full of examples of how one or all of these changes have changed not just our individual lives but our collective memories. I propose that we position our research in hyper-contextualized spaces to fathom how, when, and why any one of these phenomena influences the evolution/devolution of the other(s).
One way we can ensure we are aptly situated is by incorporating diverse voices in our research design and by decolonizing our discussion space. Rely on the deep knowledge of those with lived experiences, identify academics that have close proximity to our users and their problems, involve users in every step of your process, encourage disrupting pre-existing power dynamics and allow people to tell their stories and build their own narratives instead of succumbing to ones that exist already because chances are that these narratives are colonial, westernized, male-focused, homophobic or all of the above. Design isn’t something we do ‘onto’ our users rather it should be what we do collaboratively with them. I recently came across the Participatory Narrative Inquiries approach by Cynthia F. Kurtz which allows users to express themselves in their own words through storytelling. This erodes the jargon-laden walls we often find ourselves buried within when conducting research, which would otherwise translate into product-services that are unapproachable, inaccessible, and exclusive. Cultural probes are another effective tool that helps us understand our ‘users' in their world.
Understand the WHYs. Even if they disrupt the process.
One of the rules I follow when designing is asking for reasons. As I mentioned previously, Design can never claim neutrality. Not truly. Nothing can be changed until we stop feigning empathy and nonpartisanship onto our ‘users’ or understanding our role as one not of being saviors but of someone seeking to collaborate on problem-solving. In design research and thinking, we identify ‘pain-points or patterns & insights in the data we collect, both qualitative and quantitative. People believe things for a reason. And I always like to ask why. Even though it is a small point a minority of respondents make, and even though it does not fit into the process of mapping opportunities, ask why.
My civics teacher, speaking of successful democracies, would advise us that progress, in its true form could only be achieved when we leave no one behind. For that to happen we can only go as fast as the slowest among us. As impatient beings, we have almost always put in jeopardy gradual equity for everyone in society in order to gain immediate, short-term progress for some. The illustrations of oppression, pain, and suffering brought on by those that gained power, as a result, are countless. Colonialism, Slavery, endless wars, massive wealth gaps, the global north/western savior complexes are just some manifestations of this inherent inequality. After multiple iterations of choosing to go alone and fast, we have perpetually left the same or overlapping groups in our society behind, stacking inequities over inequities. And the dismantling of those will require asking tough questions and challenging the status quo. One question at a time. I propose that we ask the whys. Something anthropologist Anand Pandian recently said piqued my interest- one way to know more about a thing is to study the areas of our life it affects. Knowing why a particular situation works for a small number of people can shed as much light on our inquiry as knowing why it doesn’t work for a majority and vice-versa.
Redefine. Study the trends.
What is a ‘design problem’? I believe that we need to broaden our definition of what a design problem is and consider this problem through the 'users’ lens as well as the context in which it resides. As an example, Studies have shown that Facial Recognition software by IBM, Microsoft was able to accurately only identify 35% of Black women as compared to almost 100% accuracy in White men. The use of this facial recognition software to identify and surveil marginalized communities came under scrutiny after the George Floyd protests led IBM & Apple to end or pause sales of their facial recognition software to police in the US. Anyone who would have sought to understand the context in which the product was about to be situated would have recognized how ill-suited, irresponsible and unethical this practice was. Problems do not exist in a vacuum and we need to broaden our consideration for what constitutes a ‘design problem’.
Artificial Intelligence software not recognizing black and brown faces isn’t then just a technical glitch to be fixed by design, but a deeper, socio-cultural issue in design research which necessitates the need for designers to understand and study the sociological, anthropological issues that are perennial in our society. We are seeing how sensitivity to both politics and polarization are manifesting themselves in the world. People, their identities, their sense of belonging in the community, their experiences in life are what make our services diverse and there is very little that is being done as part of design practice to address these important overlaps. I propose that as part of our process we closely study societal dynamics, propose models that eased the strains in those systems. Design should be humble. Design should be diverse, so should our designers. Our products fit into an already existing framework and understanding these frameworks can help us better speculate the impact of our work.
As someone just starting my design journey, this is my introduction, my story, my values, these are my thoughts about the new world I am now a part of and look forward to growing in. When I think of design, I think of the bank clerk in my village who believes everything he sees on the internet, of my Kaki, her confidence eroded by decades of mansplaining, hesitant to engage with new services, of the little boy looking at social media, the algorithm drawing him into rabbit holes of toxic content, aspiring to be anything but himself. Many great people have been practicing the things I mentioned above, from whom I have learned and have massive respect. This is as much a guide for my own practice as it is for others to read and comment on. Design, I trust, doesn’t end with a deliverable. It is much like a story that continues building, layers upon layers, and it eventually takes on a life of its own. And like my family instilled in me as a child, my pursuit to learn and understand this new lifeform continues.
