Design consulting in India: Notes from the field

The following are notes I put together to be read at a panel titled DesigNation, organized by Kavita Philip. I will post an update on my more recent thinking — these are impressionistic syntheses written in my fifth week in the field.

I’ve been doing fieldwork at this Delhi-headquartered design consultancy. In the last two weeks, I’ve been helping with several projects at various levels of intensity along the continuum from participant to observer. For the water filter evaluation project, I helped design the interview guides and design activities before we went to the villages and then filmed and facilitated a few interviews (through a translator) once there. For a more technology-focused project on employment e-education, the team needed more help so intense notetaking and jotting had to take a backburner as I got brain really twisted trying to make sense of their interviews and develop a structure to communicate our brainstormed technology concepts. During all this, I’ve been paying attention to a wide range of issues, from how some of the designer’s electronica act feeds into and out of their design practice and employment to detailed notes on language and sensemaking during designer-client meetings. As this is just an exploratory first trip to the field, I feel simultaneously energized and overwhelmed by what I’m learning and thrown into here. But, taking a note from my friend, I’m avoiding picking things apart here in the field, instead trying to let myself just be here and learn what is happening.

It has gotten really hot here and the power is out at the office. The power has been cutting out several times a day some days. Some places, like the office, have battery invertor backup but some, like the apartments I’ve been stayed in do not. This makes work that involves comptuers seasonally unpredictable and tenuous. This does, however, make for some relaxing sessions in the backyard when everyone knows that they cannot be expected to work. With the elections going on, the power outages seem to signify not only fragile, stressed infrastructure, but also the perceived disenfranchisement of the educated middle-class. Several times, I’ve heard people talk about how politicians are extra sure that their constituents get their water and power on schedule before they go to the polls. But my coworkers feel like they’re part of a minority in India that politicians don’t try to speak to or satisfy. (Many are frustrated because they want to participate in the process but cannot bring themselves to vote for anyone in particular.) The failure of the local politicians to placate them, then, manifests in the plugs and the taps of Gurgaon.

One theme that has been intriguing me is that of the designers here equipping themselves with various sorts of infrastructures and trappings — audio recorders, memo pads, particular kinds of cameras, design books, backpacks practical for various sorts of cultural and professional adventures. A few weeks ago, before a big research trip to villages, I spent several hours following Vijay and Nita, two product designers, shopping for Canon G9s – a camera that can produce time lapse photography that they use for a particular sort of documentary filmmaking. Unable to find more than one of this discontinued camera in Delhi, Vijay flew to 2 hours to Chennai to buy two of the cameras for the study. I’m fully participating in the transnational network of designer equipping. Chris is coming to visit me, arriving tomorrow, and he’s bringing a really nice camera lens for one of the Bangalore designers, two portable audio recorders that Vijay and Nita ordered after seeing the one that I was using (we used my recorder as a backup to video cameras in our village field research; my recorder was too expensive at 100 USD so they opted for the 60USD version), and a case for Nita’s iPod touch. Recently, Ram, one of the directors, asked another designer’s husband who was returning from the bay area to buy him a spirograph set for use for a sports-in-schools NGO logo design project here in India.

Not all the shopping is so directly work related. And this crew is REALLY knowledgeable about all these products that they order from friends Nita has a pairs of havaianas (a well-known Brazilian flip flop sandal brand) that she got from a friend traveling in London — “they’re 8 times the price of hawaii chappals but I live in them all summer and they’re so comfortable so I said I’d just pay” (they’re actually 18x as expensive). Abhishek recently was researching backpacks on his computer — he was looking for a “Quechua” pack that Chris might bring from the US when he comes to visit — and I saw Vijay and Nita descend on his computer, pointing out other backpacks he could order from abroad, detailing what they were good for, what kinds of equipment and possessions they might fit, and giving judgements on value. Their level of carefulness makes sense given that these items that cost a relatively large portion of one’s Indian income, cause a friend trouble, and come with no return policy. What is more of a mystery is what makes these particular kinds of cameras, flip flops, and backpacks so special.

Second, I’ve been considering the relationship between language and action in design practice. In the water filter project, the technical terms thrown around, especially by the client, are often “user”-centered and “cognitivist.” The client brief even cited human-computer interaction papers on usability evaluation. In conference calls, the client asks for villagers’ mental models of water and the team assents. However, the deliverables – or communication documents – the designers produce include networks of relations, rich descriptions of context, and films of embodied social practice around water from the field. The designers talk about user-centered design and end-user filter testing, but really they’re talking about households for the most part, and in conversation and in the field, they realize that even these terms are ambiguous and in some cases, it might be several households or a small village that gets touched by the product placement. It may be that the words shape practice in ways that I cannot yet see. But I’m not seeing practice as determined by language either. While user-centered language is legitimizing, I so far am not seeing forces that might enforce the cognitivist, representationalist accounts of technological practice that the normal language would suggest. This makes me rethink the limits of the sort of discursive critique of design that had so consumed me the last few quarters.

Third, kinds of knowledge being produced have been an issue in at least one of the client projects so far. In the water filter project, the design researchers have been producing extensive impressionistic video clips that they feel will be useful for future designers of the filter product. There is also a certain aesthetic quality to the design research documents produced that very much shape “being out in the field.” They describe themselves as trying to produce documents that are modular and “can stand on their own” – often short movies that suck the viewer in and tell a story without dictating the moral. This means people can be filmed in certain places, at a certain pace, and only in certain lighting conditions. In a recent conference call, the filter project clients in the US expressed confusion about what to do with the slideshows and movies being sent to them as immediate artifacts of field visits. They said they wanted to see “synthesis” and “bottom line” “take aways” spelled out in reports consumable by harried and distant funders and managers. While the design researchers wanted to created inspirational and empathy-producing fodder for future designers (perhaps themselves, if they’re awarded the contract), the client wants representations, reductions, recommendations.

Fourth, the contrast between craft and design is emerging as something I need to start paying attention to here. The design studio led a national workshop for village craftspeople who had been brought to Delhi by the Ministry of Tourism, backed by the UNDP here. The most obvious objective of the workshop was to help craftworkers expand their businesses by educating craftworkers about how brand, packaging, and pricing strategy could help them appeal to middle-class consumers and tourists. Two of the more in-depth cases presented were ones where designers from the National Institute of Design (NID) had collaborated with craftspeople to produce products designed to cater to middle-class tastes while utilizing craft knowledge and production practices as a resource. I’ve also learned that every NID student is required to live in villages for three weeks to document craft practices, many of which were synthesized and published by the institution in an encyclopedic volume (on sale in state craft emporiums) called “Handmade in India.” As one of my NID graphic designer friends explained, they have to foster economic aspiration as a way of keeping crafts alive because crafts are one of the things that “give India it’s warmth” and separate it from “the West.” At the same time, craft can seem design’s other. Craft is not described as a kind of design – it seems to be described as more habitual and historical. A professor at NID who in design theory told me yesterday that “if it can be automated, it is not design – design is about uncertain futures.” His definition flashed into my head when in a textile museum (recommended to me by many NID students), I saw a link between craft and automation: “fabrics are made of threads by purely mechanical maens, either totally by hand or using implements.” What kinds of hands are automated or mechanical? What kinds of hands design?

ICTs and Digital Culture: A comparative study of South Korea and the U.S.

Sung Jin Park and Raul Lejano
(Department of Planning, Policy, and Design)

The proposed research will investigate how communities “acculturate” around ICTs. Efficiency of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) usage as well as legibility of ICTs to potential users are the important aspects in implementing information policies. Recently, the digital divide has been highlighted as a critical issue in the cultural assimilation of ICTs.  In spite of limited government budgets, many proponents of ICTs, especially in developing nations, tend to focus solely on increasing physical availability of ICTs hoping acculturation, and economic and social benefits, will somehow follow as a matter of course. This overlooks the importance of information policies necessary for making ICTs culturally accessible, as well as the social-cultural adaptation necessary for promoting the efficient use of the ICTs. The research sees the quality of electronic information resources as a critical determinant of efficient IT usage at the individual level. The research will address how cultural differences act in concert with the degree of openness and quality of digital resources generated by the government, and how it influences individual behavior toward IT use by examining two leading ICT proponents, South Korea and the United States.

Phones displayed in a shop in Korea

Migrants and Microfinance in the Sudan

Crystal Murphy (Department of Planning, Policy and Design)

You Can't Spend What You Can't Touch

How do refugees coming out of protracted conflict and protracted tenure in a largely non-cash camp economy make sense of newfound access to banking services? This project looks at newly repatriated refugees in Juba, South Sudan, and explores the transition from settlement economy to that of mobile transfers of microloans. It uses the mandatory loan meetings as a point of departure for the study, and at this stage investigates the institutional discourse that advocates the new monetary mode of payment. I seek to learn: How do microfinance institutions discursively arrange solidarity groups around the commonality of having dwelt in similar settlements for two decades? How do microfinance institutions describe their obligations and the technology to their clients? How is the concept of trust employed by the institution and client?

Forex traders

The Qualities of Virtual Life: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Shalini Misra (Department of Planning, Policy and Design)

The proposed investigation into the qualities of virtual life introduces a new conceptual framework, typology, and constructs for the study of people-environment transactions as real and virtual components become inter-mingled in a single setting with the advent and increasing prevalence of the Internet. Four alternative modes of environmental experience with respect to individuals’ connectedness to real and virtual settings, the focus of their identities, and satisfaction of their socio-emotional needs are presented. The unique health, psychological, interpersonal, and societal level outcomes associated with these distinct environmental orientations such as information overload, stress, poor physical and mental health, and reduced sense of community and spatial awareness are examined.

Practices of Making Code Work

Marisa Leavitt Cohn and Susan Elliott Sim (Department of Informatics)

Too often the practices of software production are neglected in our investigations of the design and use of digital technologies.  While the notion of “design” has been contested, broadened, and blurred, coding remains strictly divided from both design and use, as mere “implementation”.  However, coding clearly requires interpretation and translation of system requirements and problems in the world. Even as much of new media practice remains visual, there are latent effects of the digital (or discrete) thinking that is required to code that make their way up the technological stack. Coding is also a practice that is continually changing as new programming languages and tools emerge. While coding practice and new media use are both forms of human-computer interaction we still tend to address the interactions with computers of people who know how to code and those who do not asymmetrically. Practices such as technical writing, documentation of code, quality assurance, and testing are marginalized as insignificant to technical authorship and knowledge production. This project seeks to frame coding practice more broadly and to understand it as a form of digital practice. What is coding practice and why are some activities considered coding while others are not? What are the ethics, cultures, structures and epistemologies of software production?  We will be conducting studies of Agile and Open Source software development in order to understand the work of computer programming. We be using a combination of ethnographic and STS methods to look at software production and how code, as an artifact, mediates code work.

Build Commandments

Cultural Meanings of Personal Networks

odnoklassniki.ru logo

Irina Shklovski

Although there has been a substantial amount of research on computer-mediated communication, very little has been said on the issue of cultural differences in assessing the uses and interpretations of current technologies. Advances in communication technologies allow people not only to maintain existing relationships but also to reconnect with ties that had faded due to relocation and distance. New communication technologies such as, for example, social network sites enable people to re-activate weaker ties that maybe share a collective history but little current context. Yet we do not know why people seek out such ties and whether they benefit from them. Focusing on environments where social relationships are paramount for survival and where computer-mediated communication applications are just entering the popular discourse can help us examine how cultural preferences, social needs and constraints of available infrastructure shape the use of computer-mediated communication for relational maintenance. This project will focus on people’s personal networks manifested as connections to co-located contacts in post-soviet countries and to the Russian-speaking Diaspora. Russian-language social network sites provide citizens of these countries with new opportunities to reconnect within the Russian Diaspora, to re-establish connections lost due to out-migration, and to revitalize local connections that have deteriorated due to higher levels of local migration in economically volatile environments. Studying such settings can give a novel perspective on how cultural preferences, social needs and constraints of available infrastructure influence user’s decisions and use patterns. Contextual study of Internet and social network site use is especially valuable in a culture that differs from the predominantly Western perspective that developed or provided templates for the majority of current computer-mediated communication applications.

First Person Sharpshooters: A Study of Console FPS Players

Morgan Romine (PhD student, Department of Anthropology)

The goal of this project is to expand the body of knowledge of sociality in online games to include the players and interactions of console games. Thus far, the majority of research done about online gaming has focused on massively multiplayer online computer games. Rather than investigating the online communities in PC-based games, this study focuses on the players of multiplayer First Person Shooter games that are played on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console using the Xbox Live online networking system. Players will be asked to participate in a web survey consisting of questions covering basic demographic information and their online play experience, and game companies will hopefully provide certain in-game statistics. Ideally, these player surveys and the associated research interactions will provide both quantitative data and ethnographic accounts that can be compared to results of other online gaming surveys and referenced for future assessments of online communities.

Xbox gamers

Facebook: Semiotics and Identity among Generation 1.5 Chinese Immigrants

Yen-Lin Chou (PhD student, Department of Education)

Participant’s multimodal representation on his Facebook profile page

The current study aims to better understand how the use of Facebook is interrelated with collegiate-level generation 1.5 Chinese immigrant students’ language development and identity formation. Recent years have seen increased attention given to the ways computer-mediated communication (CMC) affects language learners’ trajectories of language practices in social contexts and cultural identity developments (Black, 2008; Lam, 2004). However, few empirical studies have explored the relationship between Facebook and immigrant students’ online literacies, social interactions, and cultural identity representations. It is believed that the digital composition of Facebook allows users to generate not only linguistic forms but also visual images (e.g. photos and video and audio clips), which increase their meaningful transmissions in on-line communications, especially across potential language and ethnic barriers. In order to address this gap, this study will examine four, collegiate-level generation 1.5 Chinese immigrant students’ literacy and social practices on Facebook. Qualitative research methods, such as semi-structured interviews, direct/unstructured observations, and collection of physical artifacts (e.g. field notes, Internet data, and interview translations and transcriptions) will be used. The purpose of this research study is to better understand how college-age generation 1.5 Chinese immigrant students use the multimodal (image, text, sound, space, movement) functions of Facebook to communicate, express themselves, and represent their identities.

Participant's groups

Improvising Community: A Telematic Collaboration

Christopher Dobrian (Professor of Music and Informatics) and Michael Dessen (Assistant Professor of Music)

Chris Dobrian

Teleconferencing tools are common today, yet there has been relatively little exploration of their ramifications for the performing arts. In this project musicians and technologists investigate the challenges and creative possibilities of the new telepresence media. The primary technical challenge is reduction of the transmission delay for high-quality audio signals in order to enable tight time-critical interaction in real time. The main artistic goal is to explore the transformative and poetic opportunities in these emerging tools, and in the new social modes of interaction that they enable. Drawing

Mark Dresser

on previous collaborations, artists and researchers at UCI are working with colleagues at UCSD to develop original music that is uniquely linked to the phenomenon of realtime distance collaboration. The work will culminate in a networked performance taking place simultaneously between musicians in Irvine and San Diego, experienced by audiences in both locations as well as online via webcast.

Assessing College Instruction in Digital Rhetoric

Educational researchers point out that today’s college students do more writing than ever before, but because this writing is largely done in the context of social computing, these forms of communication are often poorly integrated with course requirements and faculty expectations that are based on the print cultures of the university. Students writing in informal situations with online friends may also perceive these discourses to be ephemeral and thus may be more likely to generate texts regarded as inappropriate by potential employers or gatekeepers to graduate or professional school.

In conjunction with a campus-wide initiative to explore “The Future of Writing,” U.C. Irvine has begun to offer courses that satisfy the upper-division writing requirement on the subject of digital rhetoric to foster the development of new forms of authorship and to offer more direct instruction in multimodal writing, the editing of rich media content, and document design.

In the 2007 and 2008 iterations of this course, students began by examining their own rhetorical practices in the context of the familiar social network site Facebook. During the course of the ten-week quarter, they also analyzed the persuasive powers of computational media such as videogames and content-creation for online virtual worlds.  Although they completed a series of conventional reflective essay assignments, the bulk of course credit was allotted to public writing for the web, so that blogging and online video production constituted the largest percentage of the grade. Like other composition courses, students completed projects in stages, revised their work in response to critical feedback, participated in peer review, and were graded using common standards for research in academic disciplines developed by the office of the Campus Writing Coordinator.

One of the unexpected effects of this course was that a number of students continued their blogs long after the course was finished. Some students were still contributing carefully composed content for the web a year later, even though they derived absolutely no curricular benefit from these activities, which were started for a particular class, that could be measured in grades, course credit, or academic units. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some believed that they had developed audiences for their blogs outside of class, while others felt the obligation to continue writing because they were exploring a particular mode of personal development or wanted to create places to showcase work for graduate school or the job market. It is also interesting to note that after learning about possible risks to privacy and public reputation from composing for the web, a number of students pulled down their blogs and YouTube videos, even those who had received high grades and were nominated for further recognition. This group included the recipient of the campus-wide award for multimedia writing in 2008.

This summer, using funding from the People and Practices Research Initiative, instructor Elizabeth Losh will conduct a formal survey of former students to look at two basic research questions: 1) Why are members of the still-blogging group still blogging? and 2) Why did members of the group who removed their materials from the web choose to do so?  In addition to assessing students’ current attitudes about public communication and private work on the Internet, researchers will also solicit ideas about how such classes should be taught in the future.