Design & Cultural Attributes: Issues for cross cultural design research and
application: Prof. M P Ranjan, NID, Ahmedabad
The recent discussions on PhD-Design have raised many issues and questions
about the various dimensions of the representation of culture in design
research and practise and on the tools and processes within design that
could help cope with research into the impact of cultural differences on the
delivery of design research and design applications. While the range of
issues at the global level would be huge and of great significance for
future research I would try and share some experiences that we have had in
the past few years in India in trying to cope with such cultural and
linguistic differences in our own application of design principles to
several tasks that recognised and required the resolution of such critical
parameters in our own design work. Unfortunately very little is published
about this work although we have some internal documentation in the archives
of the Institute upon which some of my comments and insights are based. Many
of these projects are done by teams of designers on the faculty and in many
cases student designers have been active participants.
NID was called upon to design the electronic voting machine (EVM) in 1988-89
by the Election Commission of India. At that time I happened to Head the NID
Design Office, which managed all design tasks of the Institute, and our
design team consisting of Product Designers J A Panchal and V M Parmar were
entrusted this particular design task. The electronics for the voting
machine had already been developed by the Hyderabad based Electronic
Corporation of India but it was clear that the Industrial Design inputs were
needed to bring coherence to the form and representation of the EVM so that
it would be acceptable to all stake holders involved as a reliable and
effective interface that could work across the vast range of linguistic and
cultural diversity that covers the India voter population. The complexity
that the
team encountered was not a technological one and it was apparent that we
would need some critical user studies to be undertaken before we could offer
a credible solution to the design task. We called upon our Graphic Design
colleague on the faculty to undertake such a study. Neeta Verma, an NID
graduate and then faculty of Graphic Design, took up the challenge and
devised numerous experimental mock-ups in cardboard with graphic
representations that simulated the look and feel of the voting machine and
took it to the field. The idea was to use these mock-ups with a variety of
user groups in order to evaluate their feedback and it was based on such
interactions that the final solutions were evolved. This voting machine
works across the country with a huge variety of people and cultures and
linguistic differences and many of who are totally illiterate. Today it is
used in every single election and we believe that the semiotic analysis that
was conducted as part of the design process helped a great deal in embedding
the reliability and credibility that the machine has in the electoral
process in India. This was perhaps the first time that such semiotic
analysis was conducted for defining the critical characteristic of a product
that we developed at our Institute.
In 1994 Apple Computers, USA entered the Indian market for the first time in
a big way and were looking for partners in the higher education sector in
India across design, technology and management institutions to showcase
their Macintosh computers for the education market. NID was chosen as their
active partner Institute for design and I was deeply involved as Head,
Information Technology and Apple Academy at NID. Apple initiated our
involvement in the Apple Design Projects in 1995 and 1996 when our students
were invited to be part of Apple’s global initiative of involving design
schools in the development of new forward looking IT applications and
interfaces that could solve critical local problems. Many students took part
in the Apple Design Projects and these required them to do considerable
field studies to locate challenging design tasks and then to develop
concepts using a highly interactive process that had the users at the centre
of the whole design process. Two outstanding projects were selected in each
year out of a crop of several significant proposals submitted by the
competing design teams at NID. INFARM (1995) and MANDALA (1996) were
presented at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino along with similar
offerings from many leading design schools in Europe, Australia and the USA.
INFARM was a solution that helped illiterate Indian farmers use technology
to test their field for pests and obtain rapid recommendations for suitable
action from experts using shared public telecom resources available at that
time. MANDALA on the other hand was a hand held personal device designed to
give retired and elderly people in our society a means to stay connected
through an interface that was evolved by an active process of learning from
the user so that their cognitive and physical abilities informed the design
decisions and not just the aesthetic sensibilities of the design team. Both
these projects were awarded the DuPont Canada, Student Design Award of
Excellence in 1997 at the ICSID Congress in Toronto, Canada. The lesson that
we learnt through all these projects about the effectiveness of user
centered design and about the associated design processes that we had to
innovate with the help of a vast variety of users has by now been
assimilated into our way of thinking and acting in the areas of design
research and practise. This more than anything else gave us the conviction
that design is more about culture that it is about technology and business
although it is about these as well.
http://www.meadev.nic.in/photogallery/perspec/dec2001.pdf
During this period another significant project was carried out by a team of
professional developers and designers from Apple on which one of our
students, Amitabh Pande, was involved as a member to help the team with
local contacts and an interpreter of the local culture as part of his
diploma project in Graphic Design. The task was the design of a health
management system for villages in Rajasthan called the Apple Healthcare
Project using the handheld Apple Newton and a new local language interface
and software that were developed by the Apple team. This project was an
experimental venture that Apple had initiated through their Advanced
Technology Group that was being led at that time by none other than Prof.
Don Norman, the Guru of usability in software interfaces and products. This
project is better documented and some information is available on the web.
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/chi97/proceedings/briefing/mg.htm
http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/documents/sn37160/Chapter02.pdf
http://www.thinkcycle.org/tc-filesystem/download/development_by_design_2001/
unfamiliar_ground:_designing_technology_to_support_rural_healthcare_workers_
in_india/IndiaHealthcarePDA.pdf
More recently in 2000 – 2001 I helped set up the Web Usability Research Lab
(W-URL™) at NID with support from an Indian software company in Bangalore so
that we could carry out a sustained programme of investigations into issues
of usability of software and web based resources across many domains. The
question of differences in culture and the varied abilities of user groups
across the globe were very much in our list of research objectives. We
conducted many explorations using this facility but the full impact of our
research could not be achieved since at that time we had not managed to get
a broadband connection that was at the very basis of our enquiry. Many
usability issues on the web are also determined by the speed of connection
available. However with the limited facility available then we conducted
many research and mapping exercises with a group of volunteer students on
experience of several selected websites and news portals. We also set up an
ongoing and distributed volunteer group that reported on interesting
websites from a design and usability perspective which we called the
“Taxonomy of the Web Project” and this continued for a period of two years
till the lab was wound up for lack of funding, the dot-com bust!!
The other projects of significance worth mentioning here in the context of
design and culture that we are discussing here are two recent ones explained
below. An international camera and photo company seeking to enter the Indian
market with a range of digital photographic products commissioned NID design
teams to conduct research into Indian preferences in shape, colour and
features in a whole class of electronic and digital products. The NID team
led by Gaurang Shah and Dr S Ghosal included students of product design who
designed the research to cover numerous regions and ethnic groups across
India and many economic profiles as well. This project was shrouded in
secrecy due the confidential nature of the contract but now I hope that the
procedures and the findings will be published more broadly in the context of
the growing need that is perceived in such areas of research in design and
culture and the tools and processes that work. The second project is one
being currently being carried out by an NID graduate who has been working in
the Non-Governmental Organisational (NGO) sector in issues of communication
of critical health and social development type information with
disadvantaged and illiterate groups in parts of India. Lakshmi Murthy, has
an ongoing project where she has been exploring visual communications
strategies for transmitting critical health and personal hygiene knowledge
to village women in Southern Rajasthan. Her work is briefly documented on
the web at her Vikalp Design website http://www.vikalpdesign.com/
commconc.html She was previously associated with the NID as an associate of
Prof Ashoke Chatterjee and Prof Vikas Satwalekar who had conducted extensive
research work on social communication in the area of health and family
planning which are very touchy and taboo subjects in traditional societies
of Rajasthan. This work has been published as a book by NID. Lakshmi Murthy,
Amita Kagal & Ashoke Chatterjee, “Learning from the Field: Experiences In
Communication”, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad 1998.
All these initiatives and project experiences, and many others done at
faculty and student level at NID over the years are perhaps examples of the
critical interplay of cultural forces on the design initiatives and on
designers groping for pathways into an undocumented and unexplored areas of
social design action with all the complexities of culture, politics and the
softer attributes where the classical principles of industrial design do not
quite seem to add up and hence call for a reappraisal of our values and
aspirations in building a better profession and a cadre of design
professionals who can find their way through this maze of undefined
contradictions that is “Design in the Real World” if I may borrow Papanek’s
famous title and modify it as well.
Yes there is much that we do not know about culture and design while there
are many examples of designer attempts to bridge these spaces and these need
to be revisited by our research community to make sense and discover
principles through reflection. Design research will have a big agenda ahead
and there is much to be done, which may be quite “unscientific”, but
meaningful, which perhaps only design and its associated sensibilities can
provide. The discussion on the list has been rich and full of exciting
directions for the future.
With warm regards
M P Ranjan
From my office at NID
2 February 2004 at 11.50 pm IST
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Prof. M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
and
Head, NID Centre for Bamboo Initiatives
and
Faculty Member on the Governing Council
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380007
INDIA
Email: <[log in to unmask]>
Fax: 91+79+6605242
Home: 91+79+6610054
Work: 91+79+6639695 ext 1090
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