Activating a space and a community
As I continue my explorations in navigating the streetscapes of Zamrudpur, I can’t escape the garbage problem of the community. While there seems to be a slight improvement in the municipal corporation’s role with our last week’s meeting and the realization of the community towards its power of proactive engagement with the government, and the slight initiative by food venders and shopkeepers to provide dustbins after our weekly community meetings, there is still a major gap in the way the households dispose of their personal waste.
In my master’s thesis, I had explored the potential of urban farming in another urban village of the city involving the strategic reclamation of parts of the Delhi green zone. Though at a larger, more practical scale, I was already warming to the idea of its potential in Zamrudpur. Despite Delhi having a number of optimum conditions for urban farming like the presence of a good soil, adequate sunlight and excess of flat surfaces in the form of waste plots / flat rooftops, not many people are engaging in it.
Along with all the navigation and attractor strategies in the village, I felt that urban cultivation could be the vital ‘activator’ for the community. Moreover Adhyayan with its students could be the perfect demonstrational and teaching set up to empower the rest of the community to accept its practice. Most households in the village, though live in tiny one-two room apartments, have access of the large roofs of their buildings that are currently used as spillover spaces. Moreover, the presence of a few families still engaging in dairy production provides the community with free excess manure. In short, they have the perfect set up to start growing their own fresh food, a lot, of which they can’t afford to buy too often from the market.
Additionally, some of my earliest exercises in the village with the children regarding mapping of spaces had brought out the jarring absence of a recreational public space within the community. While there was one small fenced green area, it was being used as an open dump by the surrounding buildings and the residents were accessing the neighboring colony’s municipal park outside the community for recreation. One couldn’t fathom why the community wasn’t actively claiming the park. It wasn’t just about cleaning up the space, there needed to be a conscious programming of the space to prevent its degradation into a dumpsite again. I wondered if a community garden could be that activity.
I came to Adhyayan with the basic idea for this project but once on site and with better understanding of all concerned elements, these 8 weeks have seen a lot of trials, errors and rerouting of strategies. The times when I’m not at Adhyayan I’ve been contacting my ex-professors of architecture, colleagues and friends, discussing the project with them and getting valuable feedback and suggestions. Ravi Gulati is the founder of Manzil, an organization working to empower youth from under-privileged communities to supplement their education beyond academia. Amit, the founder of Adhyayan was in fact a student at Manzil himself many years ago and started Adhyayan wishing to pass on the lessons he learned to the children in his village. Ravi has been a wonderful mentor and guide throughout the inception and duration of this project helping me evaluate and overcome many of the hurdles I faced.
On my mention of my interest of introducing urban farming in the community as another strategy of making them take ownership of their spaces and become an example to the outside city, offering an active and valuable demonstrational attractor, he introduced me to Kapil Mandawewala, founder and CEO of Sanjeev Fresh, an organic farming consultancy service based out of Gujarat, India. One of the key projects that Kapil is engaged in involves educational workshops in urban cities on urban farming. Kapil was kind enough to offer his services to hold a workshop with the students at Adhyayan. I wanted to have these children to initiate the practice in their community and become the tools of teaching the rest of the residents.
A few weeks ago, along with our explorations in way-finding markers and street art we started the process of reclaiming the ‘mandir wala park’ (park next to the temple). I had been in contact with Kapil who was guiding us on how to set up the space and the beds in preparation. Despite being a softscape, the main concern of urban farming here is that raised beds are needed. We procured the soil from nearby construction site’s excavation pit and the manure from one of the community’s cowsheds, all for free. Kapil then came and held a daylong workshop with a few students about urban farming, its practice and benefits.
One of the most important components of the workshop was the teaching of the compost creation. We are engaging in ‘Anaerobic composting’ of own kitchen waste – composting of household organic matter in the absence of air, in small containers. This allows for households to compost and dispose of their kitchen waste within their own homes as the container sizes are very small, and cause no unpleasant smells as it’s a closed system process, working with an absence of airborne bacteria. Since this was our first attempt, we worked on only one bed to test the outcome. We planned and planted a variety of spinach, red saag, gourd and Indian radish (mooli) in our community lot, and the children took many seeds home to plant on their rooftops. Our choice for round one was governed by choosing nutritious food sources that had the smallest growing cycle so we could see their progress within my stay and amend any errors for the subsequent planting.
In the following Sunday’s community meeting, we held a presentation and mini workshop for the rest of the community, and handed out different seed packets. Truthfully, I was very pleasantly surprised at the degree of the positive response. There started an interesting discussion that many residents took part in. Actually it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, since almost all the family have rural connections and still have family and agricultural lands that they are connected to outside of Delhi but are separated from in the urban city.
village elders engaged in discussion
post meeting tea in ‘our’ park
It’s been pretty amazing to see our seeds grow so well! This week we’ve started the process of setting up a few more soil beds!
the spinach
compost bins in Amit’s house
– Zoya
Some reflections on synthesis
-Allison Wong
Wow – I can’t believe we’ve made it to the penultimate week of my fellowship. (What!) Though it feels like I just started, I’ve been wrapping up my research activities and am starting to synthesize what I’ve been learning into a final report. Since I’m interested in design research – and my project this summer has been focused on research – something I’ve been struggling with is understanding the valley between hard observations / data and meaningful insights. To me, what’s unique about doing research as a designer is that the results are actionable. You’re not seeking to build public knowledge, but to help shape future decisions on what/how something looks like, feels like, and functions in the world. But how do you get there?
All the thoughts! (i.e. my sketchbook)
Because design is so hot now, writings on methods for productivity, how to spark creative thinking, versions of the design process, and the psychology of creativity exist in abundance. I’ve explored them looking for answers, but I never usually find satisfying ones. I don’t mean to discount the many tools designers (and people in related disciplines) have developed for synthesizing research. There is an arsenal of charts, matrices, and maps that visually lend structure and value to research findings. But I believe there is some element of individual trajectory and intuition that these can’t address, since the creative process is so divinely personal. Perhaps it can only be honed through practice. What I really want to understand is how creative individuals create their magic, mojo, secret sauce – what happens between absorbing the mess of everything around them and the action of turning it into something new.
So many tools! (servicedesigntools.org)
As a design student, it feels really silly asking the questions, “Where do good ideas happen??” It feels kind of like watching one of those Discovery Channel TV where a crew of explorers very earnestly goes on an expedition to find Bigfoot.
I’ve been exposed to quite a few different processes while at RISD – and during this internship – but in my experience, it’s not something we actively talk about or reflect on very much on in the studio. Something that I love about RISD is that we learn how to navigate challenges rigorously through making, building, and creating. We respond to questions by making. Yet, I think deliberately reflecting on the process – rather than just doing – is a critical part of learning to craft our own practices as designers.
This has led me to question: What is my personal process? How have I learned to develop ideas, to synthesize valuable insights? And how does that relate to what other people do? I don’t think I have an answer to that question yet. My education has given me a chance to try things out, however, with relatively low risk. In reflecting on process, I wanted to share a few methods I’ve learned in practice while at RISD:
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In a course I took last spring with Cas Holman, we experimented with integrating play into the design process. Play became a platform to ideate as we engaged in games to spark ideas and conversation. Moving and doing translated into thinking and making.
This is a design studio!?
In a project I worked on with the awesome Allison Chen (making us Allison^2) – we did some making to think to get unstuck. Our project focused on the relationship between gender and wearable technology, and our process took us on a detour exploring gendered toys. It took hacking at some toys with a saw and screwdrivers in order to get back to our real project: wearable technology. The toys didn’t really have anything to do with the result of our project, but we wouldn’t have gotten there without some physical creations and a few detours.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find our actual pictures, but you get the idea.
Sometimes (or often) the process can be painful. I’ve been in many 3hr+ long meetings with partners and project teams where we seemingly smash ideas together until something happens. The process is also often obsessive. In a research project I did with Liz Connolley on aging and cooking, we spent many hours documenting, post-it-ing, mind-mapping, writing, asking questions, revisiting, testing new angles, until we reached clarity on our key insights.
An artifact of an obsessive research process
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I realize that in the examples above, I’m lumping together things that seem more like synthesis of research findings and concept generation. Perhaps it would be more clear if I separated parts of the process in my mind. Yet, I’ve learned that there really is no clear distinction between research and making, creating and reflecting: the creative process is supposed to be messy.
One thing I’ve learned about myself is that the other people I’m working with make a huge difference to how my design process looks. I’m used to going deep with a team or a partner, so doing the work of my fellowship as a singular designer has been really challenging. (That is not to say that I don’t have great support in my work!)
My mentors have been encouraging me to be consistently writing and reflecting in order to process what I’ve been seeing, experiencing, and learning. Reflection has been a big part of this process this summer–both in my housing research and in the broader context of my fellowship–and it’s been great to be given space to think about design on a more meta level.
Although I’m describing this synthesis process as an often painful one, this is what I love about being a design student. It’s facing that blank sheet of butcher paper head on, learning to be embrace not knowing, and organizing ideas into something elegant. Something I’m growing into as a designer (and a person) is being comfortable with being uncomfortable. It takes a lot of messiness to get somewhere.
(And hopefully since my last day is next Friday, I will get somewhere!)
Navigating physical streets and bureaucratic dialogues
After the setback of last week’s attempt at generating way finding clues within the village, we took a step back to evaluate what were the key issues important to us, the children and Adhyayan, and what strategies could we realistically implement in our limited time without unnecessarily antagonizing the community.
All these past weeks of interactions with the community and specially the kids, it’s become clear that Adhyayan, the organization and the space holds a special place for them. They like to spend their maximum time after school within its environment. With the lack of recreational public spaces in the community, this offers a safe and comfortable environment for them to hang out.
We decided to try reinforcing its presence as the ‘heart’ of the children and the community. This is also helped by its physical location, though deep within the neighborhood, but at a prominent square.
Though, being old, organically grown communities, there mostly exists a mixed land use. However there are many lanes deep within the village, which are purely residential. This led to the question of distinguishing between the public and the private, how deep within the community would they like outsiders to enter. Thus a decision to work on the movement through the streets having mostly commercial ventures and institutions was made.
We tried to delineate the streets throughout the community through color.
There are 5 different entrances into the community, each from a prominent point on the periphery of the neighborhood like a metro station, next to major city school, and near the surrounding residential communities offering a different meandering path to reach the small square “choti chawk” at which Adhyayan is situated. Some of these streets are lined with commercial ventures; another passes through the neighborhood cow stable, while the others are residential lanes. I decided to highlight these different paths with different colors to make color-coded way-finding clues. The younger kids had been feeling a big left out these past few days when we were working on the community map, and I thought it would be a good idea to get them involved in this project. We started hand printing the walls of these different streets, with each path being distinguishable by its own color.
It was really interesting to witness the residents’ reactions to a bunch of kids parading up and down the lanes hand printing different surfaces. Even more interesting was the dialogues that this initiated. Many adults have started recognizing me as the ‘teacher’ to their children at Adhyayan or from our weekly community meeting and take whatever we seem to bring to their streetscape in a positive light. Many times we as designers come up notions of how certain things should be or how they should be read by the others without realizing that not everyone is so intuitively immersed in design thinking. It was a reading of the markers’ seeming success that most people’s immediate response to our “we’re just hand printing these streets” was “Oh! To make different lanes distinguishing by color? That would make giving directions so much easier!”
From this week, a few volunteers from the neighboring college who want to work with Adhyayan on this “art” project join us. Usually whenever an outsider comes to the NGO (including myself), one of the kids always comes out to one of the entrances to guide us in, it even took me a couple of days to find my way in one go. To test out our markers, instead of going to receive the volunteers, we’ve been telling them to follow a particular color depending on where they inform us that they’re entering from and no one seems to have got lost so far! (Or maybe most people just have a better sense of direction than me)
As a possible critique of this experiment and on further development, we’re toying with the idea of adding the NGO’s logo or something, as I’m still not convinced about its success or access to an accidental outsider or someone who isn’t invited in. I’m hoping that our next step of installing installations and murals as “attractors” in lanes that seem more narrow or unfriendly might affect the general foot traffic in the village.
Though we’ve been working our hardest at making the streets more “navigable” the daunting problem of the excessive trash on the streets would deter anyone, outsider or otherwise to wish to traverse the lanes of the village. Though we clean all the areas where we make an intervention, its not a sustainable step as the it requires a multi-tiered addressal from concerned government departments and conscious efforts by the residents. While we are targeting the community awareness through our weekly meetings and personal interactions, we’ve been having meetings with the sub-departments of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in the past weeks. This Tuesday after weeks of attempts, we finally managed to hold a meeting with the Chancellor for the zone within which our neighborhood lies along with his officials to discuss the policy changes that need to be implemented for communities like these urban villages. Communities, whose narrow streets do not allow for larger municipal trucks to operate in and who require a greater attention by the personal working with smaller equipment and on foot. This also, allowed us to create a bridge of dialogue between the community and the authorities that had been lacking and made the residents take our work and us in their community in a more serious light.
Though seemingly a promising series of conversation, existing as a part of the (in)famous Indian bureaucracy, we will need to maintain constant pressure on the MCD, the scope of which will extend way beyond my stay with Adhyayan to see a concrete impact. However, getting the dialogue started was a huge step and I will make sure to maintain the pressure for however long I can.
– Zoya
‘Kitne Kadam’ (How many steps)
This week I hit my first major set-back, and it was a disheartening yet learning experience. Working in Zamrudpur, a village in the heart of Delhi, with its many caste and cultural nuances, is the first time I had to work in such a capacity on ground, even in a place I call home, and I’m learning that its far trickier to navigate a socio-political landscape that the physical one.
In India, especially in small neighborhoods, open markets or communities, close knit units and narrow streets, force most of the movement to be pedestrian. Here, distance measurement and way guidance gets simplified beyond actual dimensions and the human body becomes an important tool itself. Distance is most often measured in steps (‘kadam’ literally translating to feet) and directions would be given in the form of “take the first left, and about 30 steps from there is my house” or “the shops are tucked away in the alley barely 10 steps from the temple entrance”.
The greater Delhi city has existed since the mythological period of the Mahabharata and over time, its many rulers have left marks of their rein in the form of forts, walls, tombs, gateways, mosques and pavilion. Currently there exist over 300 such structures, ranging from the Sultan Ghari tomb, the oldest tomb in India built in 1231 to the Qila-i-Mubarak (Red fort) built in mid 1600’s. When we realize that this is just one city in a country the size of India, logistically, it has been near impossible for the concerned bodies, the Archaeological Society of India (ASI) and INTACH to catalogue or maintain each and every one of such structures. Their current conditions range from those incorporated to UNESCO World Heritage site and well maintained, to those semi protected by fences, to many nameless remnants scattered around. Though the jurisdiction ruling states that no constructions can take place within 200 meters of any historical monument, it is often overruled either by illegal encroachment or by certain loopholes in the city byelaws.
Zamrudpur is home to seven 14th century tombs located throughout this small community. During the past two weeks I’ve been hunting the archives of the ASI and INTACH to find more information about them. Unfortunately there’s no historical record of these tombs, the only mention being that of a Maulvi Zafar Hasan in a record of the city’s historical monuments in the first decade of the 20th century, who also attributes them to being of unknown origin.
Owning to the village’s status as a lal dora urban village, there were some byelaws that it got exempted from and many that offered grey zones of interpretation leading to encroachments. In its growth and expansion in the heart of prime real estate of the city, its buildings and structures grew such that they’ve almost completely engulfed these historical monuments. Buildings have sprung up next to, around, and through these tombs, all but hiding them from plain sight.
As an experiment in way finding, I wanted to try calling out the location of these tombs through the winding lanes of the community. The small size of the community and the nature of their presence mean that the tombs are 15-20 meters at most off any of the main streets in the neighborhood. Expressing this in a layman’s anthropometric measurement understanding, we decided to paint markers exposing the nearby tombs and the number of “steps” that they were away from that spot.
I created the stencils, with which some of the children started painting around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, we had barely started, when a few residents created a commotion regarding our project. Many families have illegally encroached upon these tombs, using them as sheds for their cows, or extensions of their homes. They got afraid that our project was trying to raise the issue in the municipal corporation’s eyes. They’ve already been in court battles with the ASI for years regarding the status of these tombs. Despite our best efforts, and to try maintaining an acceptance of the NGO and our project in the community we had to abandon it mid way.
My personal opinions on the situation and the legalities notwithstanding, (I am personally against historical monuments becoming passive, caged relics, with my own thesis project exploring the possibility of establishing a weekly market in the another monument complex in the city – Hauz Khas monument), we understood the futility of trying to press this strategy in such a short duration of my stay and instead try another avenue to explore way-finding in the community. Way-finding clues, which would be visually engaging and provoking, instead of being mere signage guiding movement.
Abandoned incomplete stamp
SIgns of disfigurement on the incomplete stamp
(This post was written at the end of last week, being uploaded now thanks to my ongoing struggle with the available Internet connection. This week, we’re trying a different strategy, that seems to be getting a good response and I’ll be able to critique better it once its finished completely.)
– Zoya
Immersion in Utilities
–Allison Wong
Last week I ranted a little bit about how I still don’t know how to deal with the question “what are you doing this summer?” (even though I’m already going into Week 7 – oof). So I thought it would be worthwhile to write a bit about some things I have actually been doing.
As you may remember, I’m working with the law firm DeLuca and Weizenbaum in their efforts to launch a new public interest law center in the state – the RI Center for Justice. In its beta year, the center will be focused on housing broadly defined. This could encompass landlord-tenant issues, evictions, code enforcement, discrimination, homeless rights, etc. This year, there have been several community meetings to start conversations about what housing issues could be addressed, and one of the areas that came up as a potential focus was utility shutoffs.
As a design researcher embedded in the early stages of the law center’s formation, my big picture research questions include: 1) How do individuals currently deal with their particular housing issues? 2) What are people’s current points of housing-related interaction with the legal system? But in order to focus my activities in the short amount of time I have, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about the experience of energy insecurity.
This has brought me to the George Wiley Center (GWC), an agency that organizes for policy change on issues including utilities. Though they reach people from across the state, their office – marked by the giant affordable energy lightbulb in the window – is in downtown Pawtucket:
Though their core mission is organizing for policy change, the GWC in April began holding twice weekly “utility clinics” with a new consumer advocate from National Grid. When people call in with an urgent situation, they can now come meet with the National Grid representative face to face to try to work something out.
The George Wiley Center’s theory of change: GWC is a statewide group actively committed to local community organizing for the purpose of creating social and economic justice through changes in public policy.
The folks at the GWC have been really accommodating in letting me observe the work that happens at the center. I’ve been sitting with Roxanne – the woman from National Grid – at the utility clinics, listening and watching during the clinic’s half hour appointments. I’ve also had some great conversations with the GWC staff and their community organizer, Camilo Vivieros, on topics ranging from utilities, the tension between direct service and policy change, and capturing people’s stories for advocacy.
I’ve been trying to challenge myself to visualize what I’m observing and learning, so over the last week I’ve been working on creating a journey map to plot the experience someone goes through when their utilities are shut off. I’m hoping this will be a valuable tool for talking both with the GWC and the law center team. In making this journey map, I’ve thought through more questions and am sure there are things I’ve missing – but it’s a good step in starting to discuss people’s access points to services and where the law might fit in.
A rough sketch
A cleaned up graphic
This coming week, I will be going to interview a woman who recently contacted the GWC. After having her gas shut off for a few months, she’s now at risk for losing her Section 8 voucher. She needs legal help in her corner, but I really don’t know what will happen with her situation. It’s an incredible privilege to be invited into someone’s home…and I’m hoping that capturing and sharing her story will help the law center help others with similar situations in the future.
This is a bit of what I have actually been doing – more to come soon.
Community Sundays
This Sunday we had the first of our bi-weekly community meetings. This was a chance for us at Adhyayan to interact with about seventy senior members of the community including community leaders, the local political representative and the parents of the students at Adhyayan.
Though I had been exploring the neighborhood and talking to people on my own these past weeks, this allowed us all to collectively meet and communicate, as well as for us to show the adults some of the work the children had been working on and engage them in an experiment whose success lies in the active collaboration of the whole community and not just kids at Adhyayan. We have been lucky to secure space in the community hall Chaupal, which will serve as the venue of our meetings, screenings and exhibitions in the neighborhood.
Through the meeting, we explained some of the goals of our project – making the neighborhood more accessible and safer for any outsider, from a guest to a potential customer and business, and thereby breaking some of current stereotypes and prejudices that Zamrudpur village faces. By introducing the adults to the initiative, we hope to involve them in the upcoming weeks’ work in which we’ll take to the streets – painting, installing and scattering graphic markers throughout the neighborhoods.
Most importantly, the aim was to address the urgent and immediate issue of community ownership and neighborhood pride in the form of tackling the garbage and hygiene issues in the area. “We ourselves are the perpetrators and we ourselves have to live in the conditions that we create. Why is that we understand the importance of cleanliness and hygiene and thus take great pains to clean our homes, but don’t recognize the street outside as being the forecourt, the ‘aangan’ to the home.” Instead of us trying to preach about systematic cleanliness, we showed the children’s’ work where their capture of the everyday conditions from watching their own parents throw out trash to their choice in mapping the ways to their homes showed their astute observation and impact of the actions of their parents.
Movement through street submerged in water because of clogged drains, health concerns brought from unhygienic conditions and the loss of potential business from neighborhood communities due to unfavorable conditions harms the residents themselves. Therefore addressing the issue has direct and immediate consequences on their own lives and livelihoods.
An important consensus that came up was the need to include the shopkeepers in understanding the potential of our project in directly affecting their businesses. “Why is that kids from neighboring schools and Lady Shri Ram College don’t just walk up to their stationary and sweet shops? Why don’t residents of the next-door Greater Kailash and East of Kailash colonies frequent their grocers and corner stores? All of them harbor certain biases and instead choose to walk or drive a greater distance in another direction.”
The food and party afterwards was a good way to chat with some of the ladies who seem to have finally stopped eyeing me as a suspicious outsider and for the amazing kids to have an afternoon of fun. There’s nothing like samosas to get us Indians in a good mood!
Though we received a positive response from the community, there wasn’t an impulse for active participation from the adults yet. I hope that in the coming weeks, once people start seeing the installations come up in the streets, that there will be a greater interest and engagement.
– Zoya
Mapping a space, a neighborhood, a community
My arrival in Delhi and Adhyayan takes place after most of the other fellows are half-way through their projects and its been really fascinating reading about their experiences while getting ready to start my own.
My first fortnight at Zamrudpur has been quite an overwhelming experience, getting to know the neighborhood, its residents and the fantastic group of children studying at Adhyayan, who are the core group of individuals I will be working with over the next two months.
These first two weeks I spent walking around the village, getting to know its streets and its residents, my personal mapping of its physical spaces and stories. At the same times, I was introducing the concept of “mapping” to the children at Adhyayan, through a series of design charretts aimed as ice-breakers and to understand their feelings and hopes for their community and village. Each day we drew, sketched, wrote and narrated to each other on a variety of topics ranging from what was someone’s favorite spot in the village, how would we invite a friend to our house or give directions, what was our least favorite space on our walk home from school or a route that was avoided. Through these, we explored graphic representations of way-finding tools and a much deeper study of our everyday surroundings that we often oversee or ignore but in fact are extremely important stimuli for an outsider, unfamiliar with this space. This concluded with the children creating directional maps to their own homes, which will be taken forward in the coming weeks to collectively map their whole neighborhood.
One of the toughest and most important things I had to learn early itself, is that as a designer, conceiving and executing an idea individually might be a challenging enough experience, but it requires a completely different strategy to instigate and inspire someone not constantly immersed in design thinking to explore for themselves.
A major problem that came to light through both the interactions with the children and my personal experience was the huge amount of garbage and trash in the streets, which was leading to un-navigable paths, clogging of drains and thus water logging during the ongoing monsoons and the general unfavorable conditions of a public space caused by sight, smell and flies induced by such waste. When this is factored to the community, which comprises mainly of low-income tenants, who find it easier to through trash out the windows of the houses they don’t own into a street that they don’t feel any ownership towards rather than walk a long distance to dispose of weekly garbage in the municipal dumpsters far away.
But the solution to this is not merely a cleanliness drive, that the NGO and its students have engaged in, time after time, but the lack of ownership of common public spaces and the inaccessibility of a systematic garbage collection system for the community. Our steps going forward need to address this vital need of community ownership, making the public spaces and accesses usable by the community itself first.
– Zoya
Beyond the Buzzwords
– Allison Wong
The unrecoverable situation we’ve all faced
Being thrown into a new environment (the law) has forced me to think a lot about communication, specifically – how to talk about design. As one of my mentors from the NuLawLab, Dan Jackson, was telling me today, it’s probably an extreme environment in which to practice talking about design, because for lawyers, words are really, really important.
As you can probably imagine, I am frequently faced with situation inside and outside of my internship:
Me (right), at my Fourth of July potluck.
Other variants of this question: What are you doing at a law firm? So what are you actually doing? You’re studying design – so what do you want to do with that?
Although I consider myself to be pretty knowledgeable about design and practiced in bringing design to different contexts, this question and the subsequent conversation still tend to make me stumble. It’s been especially hard since a lot of my work so far has been trying to define a set of parameters for what I can actually accomplish. And I still have a lot of questions about the role of design in law. If I was more quantitatively-minded, this internship would be a great opportunity to collect some hard experimental data about successful communication. What words work? What explanations leave people confused? How frequently are certain questions asked? Nonetheless, it has been a great testing ground for me to hone how I talk about design: what am I doing, what is the role of a designer, why should anyone care.
Why should we care so much about language? Isn’t the product of our work – its physical existence in the world – the only thing that matters? While words are superficial, I’ve learned the superficial can be very important. Striving for clarity is important in itself, but language can easily turn people off. As a first entry point into deeper discussion, surface explanations can either make people excited and invested in hearing more – or confuse and alienate.
Especially since design has become so visible in popular culture, the risk of using design buzzwords is substantial. It’s great that a wide range of people have heard about “design thinking.” I love when people ask me, “Do you know about IDEO?” However – while I think designers should capitalize on this excitement for new approaches, I’ve learned firsthand – through Design for America – that it can be really hard to earn someone’s trust and respect if you aren’t communicating on the same wavelength. Buzzwords get in the way more often than not, but they can be very hard to avoid.
So, what AM I doing this summer? Here’s a version of the words I’m currently testing out (it’s a work in progress):
I’m bringing my point of view as a designer to the formation of a new public interest law center in RI. As I see it, designers are skilled at understanding how people interact with the man-made world around them: services, products, systems, and institutions. We discover what’s not working, look at what’s working well, and think creatively about how things could be improved to better work for people. To do so, we try to deeply understand people’s needs, desires, and experiences.
In the context of the new law center, I’m hoping to do research that builds a greater understanding of housing related needs (the law center will be focused on housing in the first year). To do that, I am observing community work and legal proceedings already taking place, and I will be having conversations with individuals about their experiences. My work can inform the future work of the center and show a process for how similar work can occur in the future. I believe this kind of design approach can create a legal system that is more responsive and accessible.
Here are some of the key things I’ve been learning so far about communication:
1. Tailor to different audiences.
If at all possible, relate what you’re doing to the experience of the person you’re talking to and gauge how much they already understand. For some people, I have to start by explaining what industrial design is. For others who already somewhat get design – but might be confused about the legal context – I like to throw out something like: “So it’s become a popular thing to put designers in hospitals to come up with creative solutions to making the hospital a more patient-centered place that works better for humans. What do patients see when they arrive? Where do they wait? How do they take home information? Instead of designing for health care, I’m looking at how the legal system can be a more responsive environment.”
2. Use concrete examples whenever possible.
Most people will not understand when I say “observational design research methods.” They will understand if I say, “I’ve been sitting in on utility clinics held at the George Wiley Center. Individuals who are falling behind on utility payments come in to meet with a woman from National Grid. I’m watching and listening to learn more about people’s experiences with utility issues – how they arrived at the Center, what other issues they’re dealing with, and where they’re directed to go after. Are there similar opportunities for me to observe the work of your organization to better understand the needs of the people you work with?”
3. Design is not new.
Some people get confused because what you’re describing has been happening for a long time – but just hasn’t been called design. Perhaps it is a new application of tried methods, or a new bridging of people who didn’t used to work together. But people have been engaged in creative problem solving for forever, and it’s important to respect that when communicating. It might look more like policy, or ethnography, or public health – but we need to consider where our practice fits into a history of people who understand, challenge existing structures, and critically make. In being passionate, optimistic innovators, we risk sounding like we think we can use design to solve everything fast, or that design is always the right answer (it’s not).
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Though I’ve been thinking a lot on this matter, I think social design as an emerging field still has a lot to work out about language and framing. I certainly, am no expert. When I worked on A Better World by Design last year, I helped plan a panel titled “Beyond the Buzzwords: Examining the Limits of Social Design.” Clearly, you can see a lot of people were as excited about engaging in this topic as I still am –
Awesome panelists included Briony Hynson, Kyla Fullenwider, Joe Zinter, and Gilad Meron
If you’ve conquered the design jargon pitfalls, mastered the way of communicating elegantly about design within other sectors, have other thoughts on this topic, or just want to ask me what I’m doing this summer, drop me a line! I’m always down to talk about talking about design.
Getting in the Field
Allison Wong
Since my work this summer is focused on taking a designer’s approach to understanding local legal needs, I’ve been eager to get out and start doing things in the field. While the past 3 weeks have mostly consisted of reading, listening, and planning – I want to report on a few activities that have given me a taste of the work to come:
1) Can I take 30 seconds of your time?
The weekend before I started my fellowship, I did what makes the most sense for a slightly awkward, bad-at-smalltalk girl to do: I went canvassing. (Seriously, if you want to get better at chatting with random strangers, go knock on their doors.) The context: With two weeks left in the RI state legislative session, it was looking like the Just Cause bill might get shelved. The bill would protect good, paying tenants from getting evicted by banks from foreclosed properties – people couldn’t be evicted without just cause. Though similar legislation has existed in Massachusetts for 4 years, this was the 6th year Just Cause was up at the State House. DARE (Direct Action for Rights & Equality, an organizing group in Providence) had planned this last-ditch effort to canvass Cranston neighborhoods in Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattielo’s district. The goal: make as many phone calls as possible to the speaker’s office in support of the legislation. After a short training, my canvassing buddy Lilia departed to our turf, clipboard in hand.
Hello? We’re not asking for any money or trying to convert you, I promise!
The expected: many people didn’t answer their doors. We met some angry people. The unexpected: We actually got a lot of calls made – 7 in about an hour and a half, though we had projected a rate of 1 in 10 houses. There were lots of encounters with small dogs. Some people were really nice. Someone offered me a soda.
I canvassed again with DARE the following weekend, as the bill hadn’t moved. Since the last week of the session was approaching, a direct action was planned for mid-week. As Wednesday came, amazingly something shifted – and Just Cause passed both the House and the Senate. Pending the governor’s signature, it will be finally official.
Canvassing reminded me that the local political process is really important. As a designer, I think that technology has the incredible potential to support civic engagement – and there are so many examples of where technology has allowed new forms of participation and communication to occur. Yet, it can also supplant and dissolve the power of people coming together – showing up and communicating in the flesh – with undesirable consequences. How can arts, design, and advocacy work best together? So, next time a stranger knocks on your door, please hear them out, if only for 30 seconds.
2) Introduction of the Community Safety Act
Last week, we went to a city council meeting to support the introduction of a new bill: the Community Safety Act. Some of the pieces of the act include requiring police officers to document information each time they stop someone, including race and ethnicity, age, and reason; protecting the right of women and transgender people during searches; and guaranteeing the right of civilians to record police activity. In a press conference prior to the council meeting, several individuals spoke on their experiences being victim to racial profiling. The meeting itself was pretty straightforward, and though this was the introduction, it will take time and much work for a bill like this to pass.
Erin Kelley (who is interning at the Center for Justice with a Liman Fellowship) and I in the City Council Chambers at City Hall
3) Going to District Court
Yesterday, I got to experience my first dive into ethnographic observation since beginning my internship. Needing to spend a day out of the office, I went over to Downtown Providence to the 6th District Court! I want to write more about the experience later – after I have some time to process what I observed, and after going back again – but here are a few immediate thoughts:
Court is a confusing place if you don’t know what’s going on – which I assume is most people if they haven’t been to court before, and especially if you have to represent yourself. I was definitely confused. The building itself is designed to appear very institutional and imposing. Inside the courthouse, I observed many different kinds of transactions taking place. Physical forms, directions, documents facilitated flows of people, who need to have particular things and show up where they need to be at the right time. Private conversational transactions between (who I assumed to be) attorneys and clients happened out in the open in the bustling hallways – possible to be overheard by anyone. People literally come to the courthouse to pay for things. There were many children being wrangled into order – or not. Some transactions were very clearly disrupted by language barriers – and I observed various routes around that. Authority is very clearly worn in the court.
The Garrahy Judicial Complex, home to Family, District, and Workers’ Compensation Courts. Built in 1981.
I didn’t even make it into any actual courtrooms (though I hope to do that later), but it was fascinating to see what kinds of things I could observe happening. I also realized very clearly while I was jotting down notes that my interpretation of what was going on could be, in fact, really far off from what was actually happening. It’s easy to observe – a tall white guy wearing a suit and holding a briefcase while chatting to other guys (and some women) in suits – and think attorney. Or to see several people clustered together and talking, all wearing street clothes, and think family. Yet, maybe they are just friends. Maybe the guy in the suit is a social worker – or someone representing themselves.
I hope this gives a better idea of what I have been doing, and what I will be doing through the summer. Onwards!
Trying to find information on the RI courts website prior to visiting…also kind of confusing!
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WARNING: the following is a long, pretty self-conscious, and potentially self-indulgent footnote to this posting reflecting many things I think about, which you can decide to skip should you be satisfied with looking at my cool pics above. (Blocky courthouse architecture from the 80’s is so fun, amiright!?) But, should you somehow be interested in a foray into Allison’s introspective meanderings, forge ahead. I guess it’s kind of a blog post within a blog post, if you’re into that. Only now we’re in italics, which means I don’t have to be as coherent. Do people actually read these things?
Note: Though I am very excited by the things I have been doing and plan to do this summer, I do not mean to represent myself as having any true authority on the issues I’m writing about here or will be writing about. I am very aware that while I have been a resident of Providence for four years, and involved in this particular pursuit for a mere 3 weeks, many people work in the trenches every day. And have done so for years, and years. So, while I hope I conveyed my excitement about the activities above, I can in no way say that I am deeply engaged in any of this yet. A common theme of my education has been investigating the tensions between theory and practice, university and community. And I’ve realized that even those things are not distinctly defined – or in direct opposition. Even the concept of engaging in communities can be problematic (what do we even mean by that?). In the some of the more applied work I have gotten to participate in while in school – with Design for America, Brown Arts Mentoring, A Better World by Design’s challenges, the TRI-Lab at Brown – I’ve seen many different models for engagement and have wrestled with many questions: what makes for a successful partnership between students, universities, and communities? How can the needs of different parties be aligned – if that’s possible it all? What is the role of design within all of this? How do we talk about social design without making gross assumptions about people? (In a panel I went to at the Ashoka U Conference on design thinking and social innovation, one of the speakers made this statement: “There’s hubris in social design – people’s lives are not problems to be solved.” To me, that was spot on and totally resonated with my ambivalence about some of the projects I was working on. And since then, I have been thinking a lot about language and approach in regards to my work.)
Students live on an artificially short time scale defined by semesters. With students, there is a definite danger of getting into things on a surface level and then failing to follow through with promises when you get busy. I have certainly been guilty of that in the past. People are rightfully skeptical of students’ intentions and abilities. The institutions I belong to have bad historical precedents of disrupting communities and using them as subjects – as many universities do. Yet, as students to totally remove ourselves and never interact with people in a real way would be a mistake. While I have sometimes been uncomfortable with the positioning of projects I have worked on, I continue to work on them in the hope of learning as much as I can in order to correct the course and incrementally make things better. Going into my work this summer, I am definitely aware of the position I am coming from. And I’m hoping that my work can benefit the Center for Justice and that the knowledge and connections will continue to grow within the organization – that it’s not solely for my educational benefit. That said, I’m trying to set my expectations low for how much work I will actually be able to achieve this summer. Something I’ve learned about students (often myself included) is that we expect change to happen *really fast.* Reality check: change is really hard and slow. Aligning expectations and mission at the start of a project I think is a critical piece that’s not given enough attention at the beginning of building a relationship – and I’ve seen that cause student-run projects and university-community engaged work to run astray. And that is a difficult process to do right (-which is why it’s been three weeks and I’m just working through my research plan!)
Since you made it down here – or maybe you just skipped down here – bonus pictures!:
I went to the the Harvard Natural History Museum this past weekend as part of a Harvard Metalab workshop about museums, and I think this little guy’s expression shows pretty well how I feel when faced with a situation like canvassing.
Also, I relate very much to this guy. C’mon, look at those little teeny legs on that round body, that tiny tooth sticking out, and those what-am-I-doing-here eyes! Nature is funny. (Or maybe just taxidermy is funny).
Know Your Audience
Mariya Sitnova
My first project at the National Museum of American History was to review the ibook the Smithsonian intends to publish to introduce 3D technology to the classroom via the story of Abraham Lincoln. (Two of the first 3D scans of the collection included life masks of Lincoln.) The ipad format has opened up a lot of room to create various interactive tools (maps, timelines, 3D viewers, etc.) that create a much more dynamic experience than a printed textbook. As a life-long science and math nerd, I have to admit I find history pretty intimidating. Surprisingly, this has become a bit of an advantage these past couple of weeks. I am much less immersed in the historical content of the book so I think about the application of this tool in very different ways than the creators.
My first encounter with this was trying to distill the audience for the book (and some of other tools we are working on). There are various layers of complexity that make this a difficult task not just for the Smithsonian but for others working to incorporate 3D tools in education. 3D visualization technology (scanning, printing, etc.) has been hailed to be the ultimate resource to capture the attention and imagination of students who otherwise would turn away from STEAM fields. The technology affords a feeling of ownership of your own tangible creations. However, these tools are still relatively expensive and require a high level of competence in the field. So they typically end up in schools that already have high-end resources (technology and staff) and in the hands of students who already STEAM-inclined. As the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, the learning tools will need to be adaptable to the changing environments in which they are presented.
Also, there are a lot of nuances of proposing “multidisciplinary” learning in traditional schools where engineering, history, and art are taught during three different time blocks, by three different teachers who are teaching to three different types of skill assessments. A choppy transition between any of the disciplines undermines the benefits of multidisciplinary learning. Part of my work here is to create a various interactive elements for the book that would mitigate some of these issues.
One of the ibook activities involves re-creating Lincoln’s life mask using the 3D scan data and paper-craft.
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