TALK: “Responsible Design” at Zomato HQ, Gurugram 🧘♀️
India’s most disruptive food startup, Zomato has been growing massively across the globe now. Their product and design teams have also been actively promoting community building and thought leadership in Gurgaon. ‘Huddle’ is a casual & interactive meet-up where they invite industry experts to share insights from their respective fields.
Last month’s theme was Product Design and so I was invited to share my views on design practice.
I must admit that even though it’s been over a decade that I left design school but the academic hangover of responsible design is still alive & kicking. And now with the position of designers in tech getting powerful day by day, dialogues around responsible design are coming to the mainstream. So I thought of using this platform to start some local dialogues around it. I bounced off my contemplations on alternative lenses for the future of design practice. This talk turned out to be a part of an ongoing quest to find the right set of answers (or rather questions).
Now that designers have honed their craft, trained themselves on a myriad of tools, got a seat at the table, what lies next?
Disturbances and distress being caused by technology is only getting louder day by day. And technology alone can’t be held responsible for it. Design and designers have been passively a part too.
As a reaction to this distressful landscape, some provoking speculations from the global design community have been emerging. One of my personal favorites, the FOMO breather - a response to addiction economy from Tatiana Toutikian and her students at Aalto university did a few rounds last year. Thomas Wendt has also been critiquing frictionless-ness of HCD with focus on blind consumerism.
This is not a new phenomenon. Design has been in distressful conditions even before the software times . What did our older cousins do? What did architects & industrial designers do?
They realized that commercial design and responsible design cannot continue to be two ends of the spectrum. On same lines, can product designers, UI/UX designers, user researchers also start bridging this gap?
Newer crop of designers need to be empowered with methods to frame design problems around social & communal needs vis-à-vis around isolated business metrics. I try doing that with my students. Here is an example of one of my projects with them:
There are some inspiring examples from the industry to take cues on this. Airbnb’s cultural value system did not originate from hyper-growth goals. But more from intrinsic org-wide goals of building trust and relationships between people.
For design goals, the first shift that needs to happen is to move from industrial forces to sociocultural forces. Of course industrial forces are important but they alone do not inspire you to design responsibly.
Bradley Eone is a timepiece designed to be used in multiple ways—either by reading time visually with sight, or tactilely with fingertips through raised hour markers and magnetic ball bearings that move to mark hours and minutes.
It is a beautiful watch and by the way it works magically for visually impaired too.
The layer of accessibility wasn’t slapped on top of this product. It was beautifully interwoven.
Talking of in-built biases what comes to mind is my experience of designing a product for a leading bank in India. By default the user research sample that they recommended was a direct reflection of the team that was managing the product.
To overcome such default reservations while building digital products, the second shift that I propose is to consciously move from implicit biases towards inclusive foundations.
Architecture has a much matured practice of responsible design. Hy-fi is an architectural experiment that resulted from designing deeper connections between material, manufacturing, disposal etc.
Digital products & services can also impact users deeply only when they are designed with such deeper interconnections. Interface myopia restricts UI/UX designers to influence the real power of interconnections between systems, environments & people.
It comes from focusing on canvases, mapping systems and designing ecosystems rather than shipping assets. The third shift therefore that I recommend is from rapid shipping to deeper immersion.
If you are still with me, let me do a quick recap: Alternative lenses that I propose for responsible design are designing for sociocultural forces; designing on inclusive foundations; and designing with deeper immersions.
Because…
Thanks for reading 🙋♀️