The need for evolution in Indian design pedagogy
Being a design student in India is a very strange thing. We are told that we are supposed to solve the problems of the world, but are never taught about the people we are designing for. In the rare event, we are, the pedagogy dictates a very one-sided relationship with the “users”. A design student is shut between the walls of the institution, and rarely ventures into social sciences; the lifeblood of understanding communities. And then the student graduates, almost with the arrogance of someone who has figured out all the secrets of the universe. This arrogance shields the person from learning or understanding fatal flaws in their perception, and they go on to design things- from buildings and metros that destroy ecosystems, to advertising campaigns that do nothing but uphold hegemony; thus, designers become the antithesis of what they originally set out to be.
“It is easy to sit in a cosy studio environment, carry out carefully controlled and planned ethnographic studies, build your prototypes out in well-equipped labs, and keep your politics and ethics out of what you make. But the world we live in, and the world that the great majority of designers work in, is not a tidy, neatly ordered, apolitical, closed environment. Furthermore, no product lives in a bubble, divorced from other products and services and people and environment — no product lives outside an ecosystem. No product lives outside of politics or ethics — everything we make and plan and deploy changes and manipulates the way people live, what they can do, who they are. We cannot, as the people who construct these material systems, ignore or avoid this.” (Ansari, 2016)
For people who casually throw around words like impact, human-centred design, design thinking, research, et al., we sure spend very less time grappling with the definitions of these terms. Which begs the question, how can one accurately assess their impact on a community if they don’t understand its political history, geography, the relations of the people, or the pre-existing power structures within the community? And here the blame cannot be pinned onto the students alone, because if the students are never allowed to think critically, let alone question the education they receive, how can they ever hope to break the cycle of passing on harmful dogmas?
Another crucial aspect of this problem is the assumption that every problem has a perfect solution. This mentality could easily be broken if only one cared to step out of their bubble of privilege, but I digress. Design institutions embed into their students a vague sense of a saviour complex (Nussbaum, 2010). This is harmful not only because it is a false vanity, but also because it establishes a hierarchy in our minds. We start viewing our audiences as passive, monolithic entities. But humans are complex creatures, and their lives are intertwined in innumerable, myriad ways. If a person is to design something for a “target audience”, the “target audience” needs to actively be involved in the synthesis. Participatory design should not be a niche in design thinking approaches, but the norm.
There also needs to be space for evolution because when we design to solve one problem, we most definitely might end up creating another (Costa, 2020). Communities are like intricately woven tapestries which have overtly visible aspects, like humans, families, schools, etc., and the lesser visible aspects like the ecosystems of habitat, the flora and fauna of a place, the colonial and patriarchal influences (if any) on the social hierarchies, etc. A pebble thrown in a large pool of water causes the pool to ripple irrespective of its size. Rightly assessing our impact, therefore becomes a question of constant evaluation and assessment with the involvement of stakeholders. Only when we rethink do we stumble upon important questions, which on a normal day, will not have simple answers.
But can there be simple answers? The human experience is not black and white. We can simultaneously hold several contradictory beliefs and still function normally, a phenomenon popularly known as cognitive dissonance. We live our lives navigating through multiple narratives, and truths and so our attempts to solve these problems also ought to reflect this multiplicity and diversity of thought.
The only way this mentality can be imbibed into design processes is by increasing transparency and breaking the wall between the “user” and the designer. And on a personal note, I even find calling people “users” or “target audience” very discomforting because there is an implication of passivity and hierarchy. Furthermore, it reduces people into convenient numbers and allows us to take the easy way out by giving them half-baked products and marketing them as fully researched solutions.
The more I read about accessible, equitable and ethical research and design, the more I feel that everything comes down to laying out information in a manner that helps us spot patterns, correlations, contradictions and gaps, and draw insights from these. Here again, come the roles of critical thinking and positive feedback loops, which should constantly remind us that correlation is often mistaken for causation (O’Neil, 2016, p. 232). The only thing worse than designing without insights is designing based on primitive assumptions because then it gets harder to spot the mistakes.
Finally, comes the humble acknowledgement that we, as designers, will never be able to cover all our bases. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “If you can do no good, at least do no harm.”
But for us to start thinking along these lines, design pedagogy itself needs to become more holistic, flexible, inclusive, accommodating and inquisitive. This pandemic, with all the grief it has unleashed upon the world, has also provided humanity with the space to create radical change. The world is stalled, and everyone is reassessing beliefs they previously thought were unquestionable.
The onus falls upon us; whether we choose to reinvent our infrastructure and mend our communities, or do nothing and inevitably reinforce public faith in broken, unethical and destructive systems.
References
Ansari, A. [Ahmed A. (2016, August 16). In Defense of (Changing) Design Education, not only in America, but in the Rest of the World [Blog Post]. Medium. https://medium.com/@aansari86/in-defense-of-changing-design-education-91edbb12bbd7
Nussbaum, B. (2010, July 6). Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/1661859/is-humanitarian-design-the-new-imperialism
Costa, D. (2020, February 27). How to Build an Ethical Algorithm. PCMag India. https://in.pcmag.com/news-analysis/135229/how-to-build-an-ethical-algorithm
O’Neil, C. (2016). Conclusion [E-book]. In Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (1st ed., pp. 232–233). Crown. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28186015-weapons-of-math-destruction
Vonnegut, K. (1999, May 11). Slapstick or Lonesome No More! Dial Press Trade Paperback.
