To create a better society: The 2020 MP Ranjan memorial lecture

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November 20, 2020

To create a better society: The 2020 MP Ranjan memorial lecture

Design for India

Design is a powerful force that shapes culture and it is a professional
activity that is beneficial for both community and business alike. This blog
is for all those who are interested in exploring these wider manifestations
of design as a critical human activity and would like to shape its
application across all human cultural and economic activities.

The header to M. P. Ranjan’s blog “Design for India.”
The last entry is June 2015. Ranjan died in August 2015.
http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/

Note for readers

This article was presented as a memorial lecture on “Design Guru Day,” November 9, 2020, when I awarded the title of “Design Guru” in memory of Design Guru M.P. Ranjan by the Institute of Design at JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur, India. The major points are about the role of designers in the 21st-century that apply for all designers who wish to attack the critical societal issues facing the world. Also published on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/create-better-society-don-norman

I am honored to receive the designation of “Design Guru” for 2020, most especially as it is awarded in memory of M.P. Ranjan. I am proud to say that we were friends.

The word Guru has a long and honorable tradition in India where it is applied to great teachers, especially those who impart spiritual knowledge. For me, teaching is what I do: the accomplishments that I am most proud of are my students and my books.

Today I am on a campaign to rethink the education of designers. The great spiritual and humanistic power of design has been lost in its current emphasis upon business and industry, on the making of products and services. Yes, these are parts of design, but design can be much more powerful than that: Design is a way of thinking that can be applied to almost any issue, but most importantly, to the major societal issues facing the world.

This talk is a memorial to my friend M.P. Ranjan. He created a powerful blog, “Design for India,” that started with the statement that forms the opening to this paper. Here are the key phrases. “Design.” he said:

“Is a powerful force that shapes culture”
“Is beneficial for both community and business alike”
Can be applied “across all human cultural and economic activities”

Design, the profession, is unique in encompassing all forms of knowledge and skills. Industrial designers must understand materials and methods of fabrication. Service designers must understand the entire sequence of activities that people go through (their journeys) while receiving or supplying the service as well as the many different layers of infrastructure hidden from sight. All specialties of designers must work with subject matter experts, with programmers and engineers, with market and sales, and with the teams that provide customer support. And because the role of design is so central, we should be the leaders in these efforts, determining what shall be made, how it shall perform, who the people for whom the effort is directed should be, and how they should be taken care of. Today, many design students are only trained in the craft part of design. As a result they do not have the necessary skills required to tackle the most critical problems, nor do they have sufficient breadth of knowledge to be viewed as leaders of the projects.

Many proposals for large-scale, societal projects optimize their recommendations for efficiency, productivity, cost, or reliability, not recognizing that these measures often take a toll on the people involved in the system which in the medium- to long-run reduce the efficiency and productivity while increasing cost. Many disciplines are good at problem solving, but few ask whether they are solving the correct problems.

The design philosophy called “human-centered design” focusses upon the skills, abilities, and needs of the people, both those for whom the design is intended and also those who must support and operate the resulting design systems. The training of human-centered designers combines the emphasis on people, with question finding as well as problem solving, the better to ensure that the correct problem is being solved. And the philosophy also requires small incremental proposals that can be rapidly tested and refined. Couple this with the traditional design training that develops the ability to create novel designs that are understandable, require a minimum of instruction, aid people in recovering from unforeseen events and errors, whether through failures of technology or inappropriate actions, and that give delight and pleasure. No other discipline combines all these features. The focus upon the entire system while optimizing for the abilities and needs of the people make design unique.

We can use these skills for the benefit of humanity. Designers, moreover, are in a position to consider the ethical implications of the system, for degradation of the environment, climate change, dangerous side effects, and the privacy, rights, and well-being of the people who interact with the system.

To realize the great potential of design, students need a broader training then is common in today’s design schools. Students will need to learn about people and society, about technology and its impact for good and for bad, about economics and commerce, and how the political forces over the past millennia have shaped the world as it is today. About the roles of power, prejudice, privilege, and the ethical responsibilities that result. These skills will enable today’s students to be tomorrow’s leaders, creating a new discipline of design that can create a better society.

The world of today is complex, for it is an entangled web of history and tradition, of new technologies and ideas, of complex interconnected systems and relationships, of many different cultures and belief systems. The story of history is the story of many wars, of the colonization of nations by foreign forces. It is important to recognize this history if we are to change the world for the better.

We should be the leaders in tackling problems such as poverty, hunger, lack of resources like clean water, sewers, electricity, communication, healthcare, education.

Designers need different skills to be able to make this move. A number of talented designers have already done so. Some did it by teaching themselves. Some were initially trained outside of design, and when they entered the field of design, they were able to combine the skills and knowledge of their other disciplines into novel and powerful ways of shaping design. That is what I have done, for example.

We need more designers with a diverse set of skills and knowledge of a variety of other disciplines. For this, we need to change the nature of design education so that students of design learn enough about other disciplines that they can work harmoniously with the practitioners of those disciplines. Understanding how multiple issues and disciplines come together, provided by the unique general education for designers, provides them with the ability to grasp the larger picture of how everything must come together for a successful result. The ability to view the entire project, not just the specialized components, is what is required of those who lead.

No single person can master the wide variety of disciplines and skills required, but each designer should have sufficient understanding of a few disciplines other than design as well as a general understanding of the major themes of the critical disciplines: science, technology, humanities, the arts, social and behavioral sciences, business, and politics. Designers will also need to develop skills that enable them to be fast learners, able to acquire an understanding of new topics and requirements sufficiently that they can work comfortably with experts in those areas.

To change the way that designers are educated requires a world-wide revolution in the teaching of design. The leaders should come from everywhere, not just Europe and the United States. India should be a major force: from schools such as the multiple campuses of the National Institutes of Design. I am pleased to say that I am co-founder and co-director of an initiative that is working to do just that: we have roughly 600 people from across the world who have volunteered to help, including students, professors, and senior executives in academics and industry. This is a multiple-year project: we are now in the first year (Future of Design Education, 2020; Meyer & Norman, 2020).

There are many problems facing the world. In addition to the well-known issues of providing high-quality water, food, healthcare, and education are the historical prejudices, racism, and dominance of European and American ways of thinking and behaving.

Consider the standard way design is taught today in many institutions. We start by establishing a deep understanding of the needs of the people we are designing for. We do this by sending teams of anthropologists and design researchers to do field research. They return with wonderful stories, essays, photographs, and videos. This drives the thinking of the design team, who eventually build and test their recommended solutions. Then designers go back into the location they had studied and present people with the solutions to the problems they probably did not realize that they had. The solutions are elegant and wonderful. They win design prizes.

But they are often useless to the people who receive them. They do not fit their lives. They often require technological support that they do not have. The designers have tried to force their ideas upon others.

I have been wrong in teaching this method of design for all the variety of things that designers do. This way of doing design works well for the traditional set of consumer and business needs, but not for attacking the major issues facing society today.

One of my favorite books is “The tyranny of experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor” (Easterly, 2013) that describes the failure of foreign aid, where experts go into a country, do their studies and propose huge, expensive long duration plans to solve the problems that they have identified. The plans are often accepted (after all, these are world-famous experts from major international foundations and foreign aid programs. by major nations, or major international foundations and NGOs). But the projects invariably fail. They did not take account of the true needs, capabilities, and resources of the people.

Both the traditional application of design methods and the development of foreign aid programs suffer from a form of arrogance, created in part by the belief that Western Civilization has developed the methods of science, technology, and governance that should be applied all over the world.

Consider the colonization of the world, including India, by the countries of Europe. The colonization was arrogant, forcing the occupied countries to obey the customs and traditions of the colonizing countries. In India, England changed the government to the British style, led by British soldiers and politicians, only allowing Indians to play subservient roles (Beckert, 2014; Dalrymple & Fraser; Tharoor, 2017). The worldwide impact of colonization destroyed many existing cultures all over the world. In many countries, the indigenous population was ignored, enslaved, or massacred. Different peoples and cultures have different ways of viewing the world. These differences lead to a rich, diverse set of views and ways of being: a pluriverse. Instead of subjugation, we should encourage diversity (Escobar, 2018).

Many disciplines in the West, including design, have a milder form of arrogance, often subconscious, delivered by people who truly wish to improve the lives of people in what is often called the lesser-developed sections of the world. But because this attempt to help is based upon the belief that the methods of the West are superior and appropriate, it is a form of arrogance to believe we can go into a community and tell the people who live there how to live better.

Yes, we need to go into communities. But we should be looking to find the creative people in those communities who are already addressing their problems. People who live in the community don’t need anthropologists and design researchers to figure out their needs. They know the problems and they often have creative ideas. Moreover, they present practical solutions because they understand the culture, the capabilities, and the resources of the community.

The difficulty is that the community members often attack the symptoms, not the underlying causes. Moreover, they do not have the resources to attack the causes, even if they have identified them. Complex problems are almost always part of a complex system. Once again, community members do not have the resources to tackle the problem. This is where designers can help. We can tutor and facilitate. We can help bring in the resources to attack the core issues, not just the symptoms. And we can start to tackle the system (Manzini, 2015, 2019; Norman, 2019; Norman & Spencer, 2019).

We must transform ourselves to be educators and organizers. We must be politicians – politicians in the good sense of the word. Bringing together people with different points of view and forging a way of working together.

Let me end by quoting from the design website of the JK Lakshmipat University of Jaipur, India (https://www.jklu.edu.in/course/b-des/):

The design curriculum at JKLU sits at the crossroads of technology, business, society, culture, and people. Students are fostered to understand technologies like AI, IoT, and automation that are transforming the nature of Design. They are enabled to develop a deep sense of empathy with design’s role in building society.

That’s a great description, but it doesn’t go far enough. Design needs to be even more ambitious. So I suggest that it sets higher goals. Suppose it said:

The design curriculum at JKLU sits at the crossroads of technology, business, society, culture, and people. Design is unique in encompassing all forms of knowledge and skills. Students will learn about people and society, about technology and its impact for good and for bad, about economics and commerce, and how the political forces over the past millennia have shaped the world as it is today. These skills will enable today’s students to be tomorrow’s leaders, creating a new discipline of design that can create a better society.

Yes: The field of Design is located at the crossroads of technology, business, society, culture, and people. We need designers who can lead us to a better society, designers who can bring together the disciplines of technology, business, society, government, and culture.

The skills of 21st-century designers will enable them to bring together all disciplines, focusing upon the needs of the people, attacking the core, underlying problem, recognizing that almost everything is a system, and recognizing that because we are creating for people, we need to be designing with the people. We need co-design, participatory design, and community-driven design. We will become partners and facilitators, mentors, and teachers. Who better to approach these difficult issues than designers?

Readings

Beckert, S. (2014). Empire of cotton: a global history. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Dalrymple, W., & Fraser, O. The anarchy: the relentless rise of the East India Company.

Easterly, W. (2013). The tyranny of experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor. New York: Basic Books.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Future of Design Education. (2020). Retrieved from https://futureofdesigneducation.org

Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Manzini, E. (2019). Politics of the everyday: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Amazon.com services. Kindle edition).

Meyer, M. W., & Norman, D. (2020). Changing Design Education for the 21st Century. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 6(1), 13-49. doi:10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

Norman, D. (2019). 21st Century Design for Societal Problems. Combining Community and Domain Experts. Paper presented at the World Government Summit, Dubai, UAE. https://jnd.org/community-and-domain-experts/

Norman, D., & Spencer, E. (2019). Community-based, Human-Centered Design. Paper presented at the 2019 World Government Summit, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. https://jnd.org/community-based-human-centered-design/

Tharoor, S. (2017). Inglorious empire: what the British did to India. London: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.

My History with Community-Driven Design

Abstract

I have written and taught a standard form of human-centered design: we start by sending out the design researchers to understand the target audience. Then we study the reports and videos until we understand the issues. After that we develop repeated prototypes of possible solutions to the issues, testing all the time, and finally deliver the result to the customers. Today, I believe that I have been wrong in teaching this method of design for all the variety of things that designers do. This way of doing design works well for the traditional set of consumer and business needs, but not for attacking the major issues facing society today.

Both the traditional application of design methods and the development of foreign aid programs suffer from a form of arrogance, created in part by the belief that Western Civilization has developed the methods of science, technology, and governance that should be applied all over the world. It is time to develop with people, not for people. Design by the people for the people, or what I am today calling “Community-driven design.”

Part of this abstract is taken from (Don Norman, 2020).

After I published my talk to the National Institute of Design at JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur, India it created considerable discussion, especially around the theme of Community-Driven Design (Don Norman, 2020). Community-centered design has a long history, starting with cooperative-design, co-design, participatory design, etc. I learned about these approaches to design early in my career as a designer (in the 1980s), but it has only been relatively recently that I have started practicing and teaching it. Why the delay? This brief note gives my history with the concept starting even before it was named while I was working at Apple in the mid-1990s, some 25 years ago. Yes, it has taken a long time for those early lessons to take hold. Call me a slow learner.

I was introduced to the concept by Rao Machiraju when I was VP of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG) and Rao reported to me as director of one of our research groups. The Indian government was concerned about the large delay in reporting diseases. Health care workers would visit villages and work with families. They would write their observations into their diaries and every evening, they would transcribe their notes into a logbook. Then, each month they would visit their home office where they would copy their notes to another hand-written ledger. Eventually, these notes from all of the many health workers were compiled together (still handwritten) and set to a more central location. It could take many months before the individual records were tabulated. When a disease outbreak occurred, it could be detected in the records, but the extreme delay in getting the information to the appropriate authorities often meant that it was too late to stem the epidemic.

The Indian government asked Apple to install a computer system to solve this problem. Rao said no, just throwing technology at a problem is seldom the proper answer. He insisted on starting by understanding the conditions in India, and so he dispatched a team from Apple to do what today we call Design Research or Applied Ethnography. The ATG team of Sally Grisedale, Catherine de Santis, Jahar Kanungo, David Land, and Kent Boucher produced a short (7 minute) video, Padma’s story, that provides an excellent illustration of what life was like in many rural areas of India and the laborious hand transcription process of the medical records (Grisedale, Santis, Kanungo, Land, & Boucher, 1995).

Note that a traditional computer system of the mid-1990s would not have worked: no electricity, no infrastructure, and even in places where there was power, there were not people who could maintain the systems.

Eventually, Rao’s team recommended using the newly developed Newton, one of the very first small portable tablets (we didn’t have the word “tablet” then) to record the information. As the healthcare workers walked from village to village, the Newton was inside a shoulder-bag covered on its outside with solar cells so that the Newton would be recharged during the walk. This was necessary because the villages had very little or no access to electricity, or even running water and sewerage. The use of the Newton meant that once the information had been entered, it never had to be manually entered again, eliminating the need for manual transcription and the resulting delays and errors. This simple tool would give much more immediate results to the government. Except that the project was never implemented. The work was documented, both in the YouTube video and in a conference paper (Graves, Grisedale, & Grünsteidl, 1998; Grisedale et al., 1995).

A little after the video was made, Rao took me on a tour of India, starting with the Apple facility in Bangalore and a research center in Gachibowli, close to Hyderabad. Then we visited remote areas, very similar to the ones depicted in the video. We visited a textile weaving factory Doddaballapur (where the workers were locked into the factory with padlocks accessible only from outside the building) and medical facilities with no water or electricity. We visited parts of India that many of my Indian friends (who lived in the major cities such as Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, or Bangalore) had never visited.

This was my first experience of community-driven design. I credit my current championship of this method to my learning’s from Rao. I have been learning more and more ever since, hence the talk at JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur, India. Although Rao was my employee, in actuality he was my mentor and teacher, or in Indian terms, my Guru. We are still good friends today, over 25 years later.

Community-drive design today

I am fully aware that many of the ideas I discuss here are modifications or even copies of work done by many other designers. The philosophy has been called by many names, participatory design, co-design, and community-based participatory research, among other terms. In this brief note I have not tried to give a historical reckoning of the concept. But I will give credit to all those who were – and are – working with these methods, which I have known about since the early days of participatory research in Scandinavia, particularly at Aarhus University in Denmark, where I did visit in the 1980s: see, for example (Bødker, Ehn, Kammersgaard, Kyng, & Sundblad, 1987).

As my history in the above sections indicated, I was first exposed to the ideas in 1995, and although I have written a lot about design since then, I have not discussed community-driven design. Sometimes I am a very slow learner. But here are my recent writings on the topic: (Hekler et al., 2019; Hesse et al., 2020; Meyer & Norman, 2020; Don Norman, 2019); Don Norman (2020); Don Norman and Spencer (2019)

References

Bødker, S., Ehn, P., Kammersgaard, J., Kyng, M., & Sundblad, Y. (1987). A Utopian experience. In G. Bjerknes, P. Ehn, & M. Kyng (Eds.), Computers and democracy: A Scandinavian challenge (pp. 251-278). Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Graves, M., Grisedale, S., & Grünsteidl, A. (1998). Unfamiliar Ground: Designing Technology to Support Rural Healthcare Workers in India. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 30(2), 134-143. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/279044.279174

Grisedale, S., Santis, C. d., Kanungo, J., Land, D., & Boucher, K. (Producer). (1995). Padma’s Story. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xul91zbCdXk&t=20s&ab_channel=DigitalWellBeing

Hekler, E. B., Taylor, J. C., Dow, S. P., Morris, M., Grant, F. J., Phatak, S. S., . . . Lewis, D. (2019). Exploring, Defining, & Advancing Community-Driven Design for Social Impact. Paper presented at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), University of California, San Diego.

Hesse, B. W., Ahern, D., Ellison, M., Aronoff-Spencer, E., Vanderpool, R. C., Onyeije, K., . . . Norman, D. (2020). Barn-raising on the digital frontier: The L.A.U.N.C.H. Collaborative. Journal of Appalachian Health, 2(1), 6-20. doi:https://doi.org/10.13023/jah.0201.02

Meyer, M. W., & Norman, D. (2020). Changing Design Education for the 21st Century. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 6(1), 13-49. doi:10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

Norman, D. (2020). To Create a better society. LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/create-better-society-don-norman/also https://jnd.org/to-create-a-better-society/

^{^[1]} Don Norman [email protected] Design Lab, University of California, San Diego. www.jnd.org Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial 4.0 International License.