Part 2: Design Talk — With Don Norman

Insights from Design4India’s Design Talk, a podcast series with thought leaders of design.

This is Part 2 of the series if you haven’t read Part 1: Design Talk — With Don Norman.

Democratizing Design

Norman says he doesn’t prefer calling it as “democratizing design” because the word democracy has too many different meanings and many people take it the wrong way. He suggests we use “design by people” or “bottom-up design” the one he uses.

In the traditional way, we design. We have experts. We send out anthropologists to go watch, observe and understand what people do and what their needs are, they come back and say, we didn’t understand that before. And then the experts do what they do and try to figure out what is the fundamental need that we should address and what are the possible solutions we might do. Then they test the solutions and then they produce it and then the company goes and tell the people that, this is just the product you need to solve the needs that you didn’t know you had.

Well, there are lots of problems with the traditional model, the simplest being there are roughly 7 billion people and they live in all sorts of places.
Let’s take India, we have large cities that are very well developed which are technologically advanced with all sorts of facilities and then on the outskirts of those very same cities with people who have no electricity, bad running water, bad sanitation and health problems and India has this big mix of people, problems and issues with concern to it. It’s not just India, this is true across the world.

How do we solve their problem? First, there are not enough experts to go around solving problems for this 7 billion. Second, is the problem with the experts, You give them this problem and they come in and spend a month or two watching people and then propose a brilliant solution but when they actually build the solution and put it into the place, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit the way people live, even if it breaks, the people have no ability to repair it.

Credit: inhabitat.com

But if you look around these areas of the world, there are lots of clever people. Often they have pieced together solutions to their problems and they use whatever is around them tape, glue, wire, pipe and they built simple electronics by taking apart old stuff to use as parts for the new stuff. One of the most powerful building blocks is bicycle wheels, gears and chains. Which can be reused for lots of interesting things. So we should be enabling these peoples, acting as facilitators, help them find out who the good innovators are and give them advice.

We should be building tool kits for simple parts that they can use or if they do something wonderful we should tell the world, so we can publicize it with open source access so others can use it solve their problems. So we provide material for them to learn it can be on the Internet, Videos, Books, Visiting lecturers, Workshops. It doesn’t have to always use technology.

By spreading the word in an open source way. People around the world could use the idea, Change it a bit for their need. Not only they use it, but add their improvements to the open source information and that is what is called democratizing design or rather bottom-up design.

We need top-down design too because we do need experts for some things like medical ailments, sanitation and clean water. But the expert knowledge should be used to help the people who understand the problems themselves to solve their own problems. And that’s what exciting about it.

Deliver knowledge in a way that allows everyday people to solve their problems.

Who is an expert?

To be the expert at an industry it doesn’t mean you should go to school get a degree, publish a book and so on, but it means you should have lived the problem and understand it or you have thought deeply about new business model and how it might work, most of the time when you have some idea and you try them out and fail. Now failure is considered a bad thing in most places, but it should not be. In fact, we should not ever use the word failure we should say, that you tried it out and learned a lot. The scientists never fail, they work in something for two years and then they say, that it didn’t work so they better do something different. They don’t say that they failed because when they try something, they are always learning. So these people are experts. They’re experts in what they are trying to create and that’s what makes it work. If they think they are clever so they can solve any problem, when they go into some new area, they’re apt to fail.

One can go into a new area and do wonderful things, but only when they spend a while trying out things and seeing what’s going on and soon becoming an expert. Everyday citizens who solve problems with diabetes, but in solving the problem for themselves making their lives better, they ended up being experts in diabetes.

Good Investors does not fund the idea because in general, they feel most of the ideas that people tell them about don’t work, but they are convinced with the really smart, energetic and flexible people who are going to try it out, find if it’s going to work, they will be good enough to figure out something else which is even better than the original idea if they discover that it doesn’t work . It’s all about finding the right people and they have an expertise. It’s just not the normal expertise that comes from a university degree or special knowledge it’s a different kind of expertise.

Designing for global markets

Consider India, It isn’t a single place. India is a very complex country with different religions, states, legislators, languages and cultures. And so, there’s something interesting about products. If you take a look at the pens, pencils, computers, automobiles, cell phones, almost every product that’s mass-produced in the world, they’re all the same all over the world. We don’t have to really build them differently across the world. But that misleads companies saying that they can just go in and sell people the products that they have. No, because the infrastructure that’s different first of all and it’s not always present. Second, the way this stuff gets used is very different.

The easiest example is the automobile. The basic automobiles which are the same all over the world. But to drive in a city in the United States and then in India, it’s different. The driving rules and the way people drive or just completely different. So we have to adapt, first of all, the differences in infrastructure and second to the differences in usage, the way that people interact with each other and get together.

We must learn these differences in culture and we can’t learn it by reading a book or learn it by visiting for a couple of days and especially we don’t learn it by going and staying in a luxury hotel and then going away. We have to live with the people and better yet we have to hire the people and let the people who live in that culture helps to develop the product.

This is part 2/3 of the series of insights from Design4India’s Design Talk with Don Norman.

Part 3: Design Talk — With Don Norman

In case if you have missed

Part 1: Design Talk — With Don Norman

‘For more podcasts and expert talks on Design, please visit https://design4india.in/'

I write about things I learn, discover, hear about design and tools here at https://siddarth.design/

See you soon with the next with Part 3 of the series.

Thank you.