Design Thinking for India’s Wicked Problems
The crushing reality of the Covid19 pandemic also showed us stunning examples of the human spirit, its resilience and ingenuity in the face of crises. From Italy to India, complex problems were solved with efficient solutions in a short span of time. Health- care professionals in Italy converted scuba gear into ventilators, Indian NGOs like Anahat For Change took to producing reusable cloth pads in order to safeguard womxn’s menstrual health during the lockdown period, the global community is rife with such examples.
Such complex or “wicked” problems, where circumstances and factors are constantly evolving pose a daunting challenge for policy makers and governments.
While there are several mechanisms and frameworks employed to design and implement public protocol and projects, one could argue that Design Thinking offers the most holistic approach.
Design Thinking is a problem solving tool that relies on empathy and an understanding of the lived experiences of the people these products, services or programs are designed for. This iterative approach has been employed by the likes of Apple and Netflix to create user-friendly products as well as the Governments in the UK, Australia and Germany among others to design public works projects and campaigns. These examples enshrine lessons for Indian policy makers and development professionals to learn from.
Just like the famous eight-fold path of Eugene Bardach to analyse policies, the Design Thinking process can be reduced to 5 iterative steps; Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. While the phrasing of this seems too far removed from conventional policy nomenclature, these steps lend themselves seamlessly to dynamic policy and social design.
Typically one would begin by Empathising with the stakeholders in question. The de- signer at this stage would focus on learning how people interact with their existing surroundings, current policies, services as well as internal and external factors. The knowledge gained at this stage would allow the designers to Define the problem area to be addressed and elucidate the root causes of the same. At this stage, the designers would also be able to define a goal to be accomplished.
Once these aspects are made explicit, the designers would Ideate solutions and paths to achieve the end goal envisaged, often without regard for the likelihood of success. Prototyping, following these steps would involve beginning to build the solutions. These serve as tangible ways to discern potential obstacles, risk areas and perceptions. The information gathered through these steps would allow the designers to pick between moving forward or going back to the drawing board to build a different solution. Should the designers choose to move forward they would likely Test by designing and implementing ‘pilots’ and reassess the efficacy of the project implemented.
This process employed for governance was seen in action through the protocol many villages in India adopted during the lockdown. In India, northern states like Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh see large numbers of labourers moving to larger cities without their families. These migrant workers often move to agriculture intensive states like Punjab and industry intensive states like New Delhi, Mumbai etc. in search of employment. The sudden lockdown imposed by the Prime Minister in an effort to contain the pandemic posed a mammoth challenge for this segment of the Indian society. On one hand, it led to tens of thousands of such workers stranded across the country, often unemployed and with very little they could use to survive. On the other, it led to their families back home, who depend on remittances from these labourers to sustain themselves, losing their loved ones as well as their source of financial stability in the middle of a global pandemic.
While thousands attempted to travel back to their native homes on foot or often re- sorted to dangerous means to sneak past state borders, the actions taken by local representatives offered constituents much-needed relief. In order to locate and track the labourers from their villages, disseminate information to migrants as well as to the families in their villages, many local representatives like Mukhiya Ritu Jaiswal from Simhavahini Panchayat in Bihar, devised a simple and effective plan. A grounded understanding of the circumstances of both these stakeholders, the labourers and the families likely led them to define these problems: The current issues these stakeholders were facing were uncertainty about the wellbeing of their loved ones, inability to send aid monetary or material to either side as well as the lack of a support structure to help in case of emergencies. The best case scenario for these individuals (save from reunification) would be a credible assurance; knowing that their loved ones are safe and taken care of and for another, availability of resources and people to help in cases of emergency.
In order to make this happen these representatives turned to Whatsapp, a widely used communication tool in India.
Through this, they were able to track and establish a line of communication with the labourers originally from their villages across India. In the same vein, similar groups were used to mobilise villagers and resources to help sustain the families worst affected by the lockdown. Through this process, representatives like Mukhiya Ritu Jaiswal intuitively walked through the design thinking steps of empathising and understanding the different concerns and fears of both the stakeholders involved, identified and defined the scope of their problem and established building a support structure and line of communication as their objectives. They used this information to create a simple, frugal and effective way to achieve these objectives through Whatsapp. By adopting a human centered approach, they were able to take care of these stakeholders in cost effective, efficient and sustainable ways.
The reason Indian policy makers need to adopt Design Thinking (DT) as a norm across levels in our state machinery is because a country like India has far too much diversity for a one-size-fits-all policy solution. For a policy to truly stand a chance at making any tangible impact, it needs to be adapted as per the religious, sociological, economic and political demographic considerations of the area in question. This diversity isn’t just accommodated in a DT approach rather it is incorporated from the very beginning by taking a human-centred approach. These processes emphasise on observation and a keen understanding of lived experiences of people to build solutions that work and resolve the conflict between what people say and what they actually do.
This approach thus helps create a knowledge database about both the demographic determinants as well as the aspirations, circumstances and general discourse of people in a given area. Knowledge that is important not just for policy making but also for efficient governance and welfare of citizens.
Design Thinking celebrates democracy by allowing for participatory development practices. By virtue of being an observation and user-focused process, the end user, in our case the average citizen of that region, is at various points represented in the room where these policies are being designed. Having such an active role in the design process allows for policies to be both more readily accepted by masses as well as more likely to succeed since they were designed for, of and by the people themselves.
This particular aspect of the Design Thinking process bolsters democracy by involving citizens, administrators, policy workers etc at different intersections of the policy design and implementation process. In decentralised and federal countries like India (quasi federal) where grassroots representatives and administrators like a sarpanch or district civil servant have been given the resources and authority to take meaningful actions to impact the lives of citizens, such frameworks can prove to be incredible assets.
Prioritising the human experience, embracing the feedback loop to constantly evaluate the efficacy of a policy or program and the other tenets of DT embraced in this way go beyond making the lives of citizens better. They also make the execution process easier for facilitators and administrators. It allows them to learn, rework and later adapt their learning for a myriad of contexts. This same mechanism built by Mukhiya Jaiswal can thus also be used to tap into the migrant network to locate miss- ing persons, mobilise resources in cases of emergency and even offer a sense of be- longing to such internal migrants.
By breaking down mammoth tasks like designing and implementing a policy or development project, Design Thinking offers a structured approach to tracking and evaluating the progress of any given plan. By offering multiple checkpoints throughout, it creates a feedback loop that allows for more efficient governance. These strengths hold merit especially in countries like India where cultural diversity, poverty and disorganised development pose an incredible challenge for administrators and policy designers. While the merits of empathetic governance and social design are prominent across academia, a structured way to incorporate empathy in this way is still lacking. This is the gap Design Thinking could fill seamlessly.
