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?