My History with Community-Centered Design

Here I discuss my history with community-driven design as an addendum to "To Create a Better Society"

Abstract

I have written and taught a standard form of human-centered design: 
we start by sending out the design researchers to understand the 
target audience. Then we study the reports and videos until we 
understand the issues. After that we develop repeated prototypes 
of possible solutions to the issues, testing all the time, 
and finally deliver the result to the customers. 

Today, I believe that I have been wrong in teaching this method 
of design for all the variety of things that designers do. 
This way of doing design works well for the traditional set 
of consumer and business needs, but not for attacking the 
major issues facing society today.

Both the traditional application of design methods and 
the development of foreign aid programs suffer from a 
form of arrogance, created in part by the belief that 
Western Civilization has developed the methods of 
science, technology, and governance that should be applied 
all over the world. It is time to develop with people, 
not for people. Design by the people for the people, or 
what I am today calling “Community-driven design.” 


Part of this abstract is taken from (Don Norman, 2020).

After I published my talk to the National Institute of Design at JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur, India it created considerable discussion, especially around the theme of Community-Driven Design (Don Norman, 2020). Community-centered design has a long history, starting with cooperative-design, co-design, participatory design, etc. I learned about these approaches to design early in my career as a designer (in the 1980s), but it has only been relatively recently that I have started practicing and teaching it. Why the delay? This brief note gives my history with the concept starting even before it was named while I was working at Apple in the mid-1990s, some 25 years ago. Yes, it has taken a long time for those early lessons to take hold. Call me a slow learner.

I was introduced to the concept by Rao Machiraju when I was VP of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG) and Rao reported to me as director of one of our research groups. The Indian government was concerned about the large delay in reporting diseases. Health care workers would visit villages and work with families. They would write their observations into their diaries and every evening, they would transcribe their notes into a logbook. Then, each month they would visit their home office where they would copy their notes to another hand-written ledger. Eventually, these notes from all of the many health workers were compiled together (still handwritten) and set to a more central location. It could take many months before the individual records were tabulated. When a disease outbreak occurred, it could be detected in the records, but the extreme delay in getting the information to the appropriate authorities often meant that it was too late to stem the epidemic. 

The Indian government asked Apple to install a computer system to solve this problem. Rao said no, just throwing technology at a problem is seldom the proper answer. He insisted on starting by understanding the conditions in India, and so he dispatched a team from Apple to do what today we call Design Research or Applied Ethnography. The ATG team of Sally Grisedale, Catherine de Santis, Jahar Kanungo, David Land, and Kent Boucher produced a short (7 minute) video, Padma’s story, that provides an excellent illustration of what life was like in many rural areas of India and the laborious hand transcription process of the medical records (Grisedale, Santis, Kanungo, Land, & Boucher, 1995). 

Note that a traditional computer system of the mid-1990s would not have worked: no electricity, no infrastructure, and even in places where there was power, there were not people who could maintain the systems.

Eventually, Rao’s team recommended using the newly developed Newton, one of the very first small portable tablets (we didn’t have the word "tablet" then) to record the information. As the healthcare workers walked from village to village, the Newton was inside a shoulder-bag covered on its outside with solar cells so that the Newton would be recharged during the walk. This was necessary because the villages had very little or no access to electricity, or even running water and sewerage. The use of the Newton meant that once the information had been entered, it never had to be manually entered again, eliminating the need for manual transcription and the resulting delays and errors. This simple tool would give much more immediate results to the government. Except that the project was never implemented. The work was documented, both in the YouTube video and in a conference paper (Graves, Grisedale, & Grünsteidl, 1998; Grisedale et al., 1995).

A little after the video was made, Rao took me on a tour of India, starting with the Apple facility in Bangalore and a research center in Gachibowli, close to Hyderabad. Then we visited remote areas, very similar to the ones depicted in the video. We visited a textile weaving factory Doddaballapur (where the workers were locked into the factory with padlocks accessible only from outside the building) and medical facilities with no water or electricity. We visited parts of India that many of my Indian friends (who lived in the major cities such as Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, or Bangalore) had never visited.

This was my first experience of community-driven design. I credit my current championship of this method to my learning’s from Rao. I have been learning more and more ever since, hence the talk at JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur, India. Although Rao was my employee, in actuality he was my mentor and teacher, or in Indian terms, my Guru. We are still good friends today, over 25 years later.

Community-drive design today

I am fully aware that many of the ideas I discuss here are modifications or even copies of work done by many other designers. The philosophy has been called by many names, participatory design, co-design, and community-based participatory research, among other terms. In this brief note, I have not tried to give a historical reckoning of the concept. But I will give credit to all those who were – and are – working with these methods, which I have known about since the early days of participatory research in Scandinavia, particularly at Aarhus University in Denmark, where I did visit in the 1980s: see, for example (B?dker, Ehn, Kammersgaard, Kyng, & Sundblad, 1987).

As my history in the above sections indicated, I was first exposed to the ideas in 1995, and although I have written a lot about design since then, I have not discussed community-driven design. Sometimes I am a very slow learner. But here are my recent writings on the topic: (Hekler et al., 2019; Hesse et al., 2020; Meyer & Norman, 2020; Don Norman, 2019); Don Norman (2020); Don Norman and Spencer (2019)

References

B?dker, S., Ehn, P., Kammersgaard, J., Kyng, M., & Sundblad, Y. (1987). A Utopian experience. In G. Bjerknes, P. Ehn, & M. Kyng (Eds.), Computers and democracy: A Scandinavian challenge (pp. 251-278). Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Graves, M., Grisedale, S., & Grünsteidl, A. (1998). Unfamiliar Ground: Designing Technology to Support Rural Healthcare Workers in India. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 30(2), 134-143. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/279044.279174

Grisedale, S., Santis, C. d., Kanungo, J., Land, D., & Boucher, K. (Producer). (1995). Padma's Story. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xul91zbCdXk&t=20s&ab_channel=DigitalWellBeing

Hekler, E. B., Taylor, J. C., Dow, S. P., Morris, M., Grant, F. J., Phatak, S. S., . . . Lewis, D. (2019). Exploring, Defining, & Advancing Community-Driven Design for Social Impact. Paper presented at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), University of California, San Diego.

Hesse, B. W., Ahern, D., Ellison, M., Aronoff-Spencer, E., Vanderpool, R. C., Onyeije, K., . . . Norman, D. (2020). Barn-raising on the digital frontier: The L.A.U.N.C.H. Collaborative. Journal of Appalachian Health, 2(1), 6-20. doi:https://doi.org/10.13023/jah.0201.02

Meyer, M. W., & Norman, D. (2020). Changing Design Education for the 21st Century. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 6(1), 13-49. doi:10.1016/j.sheji.2019.12.002

Norman, D. (2019). 21st Century Design for Societal Problems. Combining Community and Domain Experts. Paper presented at the World Government Summit, Dubai, UAE. https://jnd.org/community-and-domain-experts/

Norman, D. (2020). To Create a better society. LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/create-better-society-don-norman/ also https://jnd.org/to-create-a-better-society/

Norman, D., & Spencer, E. (2019). Community-based, Human-Centered Design. Paper presented at the 2019 World Government Summit, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. https://jnd.org/community-based-human-centered-design/