This article is based on an interview with Swarali Pandare, a young designer in India. It is the first of two articles, and highlights Swarali’s reflections on mindsets, biases and approaches from doing fieldwork on an HCD + Public health project for the first time.
Swarali graduated with a degree in accessory design and went on to complete an internship in industrial design. She then worked for a year as a user researcher before transitioning to a role in human-centered design. Through her journey, Swarali realized that she likes to understand the needs and contexts of users. She believes that successful design goes beyond the final form of the outcome, focusing instead on the impact and contextual relevance of solutions. Swarali values creating designs that are not only human-centered but also positive, sustainable, and impactful, ensuring that every solution effectively and appropriately addresses the problem at hand.
I’m more focused on the objective behind my work, how the solution is going to impact the problem space. I don’t want to focus on what form it may take. I want to make sure that no matter what form it takes, the solution is catered towards the impact we are trying to achieve.
Swarali started working in public health as a design researcher around eight months ago, in October of 2023. Having studied HCD during her Bachelor’s and as part of the HCDExchange Youth Leadership Hub last year, she was familiar with the process and had heard about others who applied it successfully. This exposure attracted her to HCD because it aligned with her desire to address serious, real-world problems through design. This led her to apply for a design researcher position at TinkerLabs, where she hoped to engage in work that created real impact in the world. She notes that her first experience as a design researcher fulfilled all her expectations from the role. She learned that HCD principles and processes are designed to understand human needs deeply and ensure that this understanding is maintained throughout the design process, making it more inclusive. When she was learning about the HCD principles she had found it to be quite broad and abstract, lacking complete certainty of how they might be implemented. Swarali further notes that while she understood the importance of understanding users’ feelings, lifestyles, problems, and identifying relevant opportunities for solution, she had lacked a clear framework for moving from this theoretical understanding to actual, on-ground utilization of HCD. Working full-time at TinkerLabs gave her that context and the framework she needed to apply HCD principles effectively. She realized that HCD doesn’t prescribe exact actions but depends much more on specific contexts within which the principles can be interpreted and followed. While acknowledging that different organizations might have unique ways of conducting research, brainstorming, or designing solutions, at TinkerLabs, she saw how HCD could draw from different fields like academic research, communication design and behavioral science. The strongest aspect of HCD for her was the focus on understanding the target population, immersing herself in the user’s perspective, and ensuring their needs and those of different stakeholders are always represented. Witnessing HCD in action and focusing on the needs of problem areas made fulfilled her desire to create impactful, human-centered solutions.
The project that Swarali worked on at TinkerLabs aimed at increasing the uptake of contraceptives in a rural area of North India amongst a migratory audience. Swarali provides background for the project, stating that the project has been underway for about four years, from around the time of the pandemic. By the time she joined, much of the groundwork, including design research and solution testing, had already been completed. The solutions are a package of tools that are designed to be integrated into the system, in order to facilitate the adoption of modern contraceptives. A first round of testing was completed and when Swarali started working on the project a pilot implementation was going to be done over a three-month period to test the effectiveness of these tools over the long term. This phase as Swarali notes was not just about retesting but actively implementing the tools in real-world scenarios.
“We had three to four visits to go interview people, observe their environment and challenges, see how they will use it, and also do a little bit of quantitative research on how people were reacting to the solutions, whether it was having any impact on their attitude towards contraceptives. And based on that we redesigned the solutions.”
Swarali notes further that these refined tools are now set to move forward into a year-long implementation phase. This rigorous testing and redesign process was important to refine the solutions significantly and ensure they were really meeting the needs of the community.
Swarali’s first field visit was an eye-opening experience for her, both personally and professionally. Coming from a metropolitan city, she emphasizes that it is unreasonable to work on social impact projects remotely, especially given the levels of separation socially with the target population. Swarali was excited about the opportunity to engage directly with the target community, which she saw as important for understanding ground realities that could not be grasped from a distance. Personally for Swarali the experience of being in the field helped her acknowledge and reflect on her privilege:
I acknowledge that I have a lot of privilege. I know that, ethically, it’s a bit of a gray area where maybe as designers, we’re already in such a privileged place and in social impact, we design for people who are much less privileged than us. So actually going in and seeing what people’s needs are, is something that I wanted to do as a person as well to understand my privilege better. And I think it was also super important as a designer to be able to do that, especially multiple times. Because without spending weeks on field, I think we would have been sort of half blind in the whole design process.
Swarali also notes how the composition of her team played a role in the project’s success. The team took SRHR seriously, fully aware of the impact their work could have on people’s lives, including their decisions around finances and family progress. Learning from senior team members who had experience in public health both in the roles of designers and public health implementers, also proved to be valuable for Swarali. She further highlights that it really helped to have the team’s diverse perspectives and open communication so that diverse ideas could be considered for further development. Having an honest and communicative team, in her experience, helped in them being able to catch each other’s biases, challenge existing ideas of how things should be, and use different experiences to point out different facets of the problem. This was helpful in creating a holistic solution.
When asked what might have contributed to Swarali feeling a sense of success personally, she highlights that first and foremost, her willingness to accept that the way people live in a different place can be very different from the way she lives allowed her to learn more openly and honestly. Her conscious efforts and awareness to avoid conferring judgment on the way somebody else lives and trying to stay unbiased was helpful in distinguishing biases from real design insights. She notes that in her opinion, ‘it’s not fair to compare or judge how people from different contexts live or to use that judgment as a basis for design decisions’. This awareness, she says, led her to be very open to status quos being different from what she expected. This also enabled her to empathize better through embracing the commonalities of the human experience rather than being held back by the differences. However, she argues that processing these new experiences and complexities can be quite overwhelming in the start.
When basic aspects of life are different, processing that difference and on top of that processing, what are the different expectations from contraception? What are the expectations from a reproductive health point of view for the individual, the family and society. Then what exactly is the public health system like? And how does that play a role? There were multiple levels of processing to do which was pretty overwhelming at first. It would have been quite easy for me to become a little complacent, and just let the experience wash over me. But eventually, I learned that that’s not the right thing to do. It’s much more important to write it down or try to process it or talk it out with team members to understand the different facets of the context. These conversations that we had really helped in the designing phase afterwards, where we were redesigning the solutions. At the beginning, I was unable to independently gauge how the things we design would be perceived by the target population. I would need my team members who have more experience to tell me what will and will not work. So things like these icons might not be interpreted the same way, these images might have different nuances in them etc. But towards the end of the project, I think I was able to do that much more independently, including having a sense of the kind of language to use about things. This came from consciously observing the visual elements that we saw on the field and paying attention to the kind of language used.
Swarali’s biggest takeaway was that the designer needs to make a concerted effort to notice everything that is going on and document everything that they are learning, which is not easy.
You can’t just go with the flow, you have to really practice curiosity. It’s about learning — it’s also about doing, but in order to do that you need to do justice to the learning first, and I really underestimated this at the beginning. So next time, I think I would take learning a lot more seriously than I did this time. In the sense of learning about contraceptives and health itself first, and then learning about the context that we’re in, the geopolitics, the culture, the health system, and then like immersing in the field and empathizing with an open mind, and having all of this information accessible, being able to use all this information when needed.
Swarali reflects on how being an HCD practitioner paired with conflicts that are happening in the world right now and her own experience with some of the most marginalized people in India, has shown her how much more unequal this world is from what she had imagined it to be. She acknowledges that she is an idealistic person and seeing the inequality has had a big impact on her and makes her even more certain of what she wants to do. She realizes that the impact that she can have on the world, while being small, can still be quite significant, and that has made her want to continue working in social impact. She notes further that her experiences and learnings have widened her horizons, further making her realize that different areas of work can contribute in different ways and also have different limitations.
I started to see the different ways even fields outside of public health and social impact can contribute to improving people’s living experiences. I would idolize working in social impact a lot but through this project, I also realized we all have our limitations, and that there isn’t just one best way to make the world a better place. So I think moving forward, no matter what work I do, I think it will come from a place of – can I somehow make the world a better place through this?
The two things Swarali emphasizes as advice she would like to give to new designers is to have respect for the people that they work with — whether it’s the people from the target population or people within the system. In her opinion, it’s a loss for people when they can’t directly participate in the design process of solutions that will directly impact them. Her parting thoughts will resonate with a lot of HCD designers:
Somebody else is designing things for them that are impacting their lives. So the least we can do if we can’t have them lead the design process is have respect for them and their lived experience, and fully, truly believe in their lived experience, even if it conflicts with things that we believe to be true.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article which focuses on Swarali’s interview where she discusses the design process and technical attributes of the HCD process.
This article has been written by Rimjhim Surana, and edited by Swarali Pandare and Belindar Kwamboka
