Blooming Community
Exploring ways to use design to activate community among Indian urban residents in a post-pandemic world.
ROLE
I specialized user research and speculative design as a part of the D-Lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I helped create this report to communicate my findings and innovative concept during the Designing Life After Covid-19 project.
Exploring Pathways to Increase Social Connectivity
This report showcases opportunity spaces and action areas discovered by graduate students from IIT Institute of Design and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, based on data collected in India during Remember Now. It emphasizes social connectivity challenges faced during the pandemic, highlighting the use of digital platforms while revealing feelings of isolation. Participants explored alternative ways, such as food-related hobbies and terrace interactions, revealing a need for new systems supporting diverse modes of social connectivity. The report presents findings and introduces ROOT, a decentralized community gardening system fostering skills, connections, and local investments. ROOT aims to enhance personal health commitment and community resilience for future outbreaks.
DESIGN REPORT
Process Details
Role
Within the Designing Life After Covid-19 project, I specialized in user research, speculative design and prototyping new methodologies. I entered the project after ethnographic data had been collected from over 13 countries using a diary study method, to understand how people across the globe were coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. I was tasked with managing, interpreting, and developing an innovative solution from the data collected in India by students and researchers from NMIMS. Once completed I worked together with a student from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and with mentorship from Andre Nogueira, PhD, co-founder and deputy director of the D-Lab, to explore concepts. Once ideation was completed I compiled this report to represent the entirety of the work done within this segment of the project.
Context
Designing Life After Covid-19 in India is a solution-oriented research initiative led by Andre Nogueira, Ph.D., and Patrick Whiteny at the Design Laboratory at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (D-Lab). The goal is to explore ways in which design can help individuals and organizations be better prepared for future epidemics.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused widespread turmoil within organizations and the lives of individuals. The unprecedented health and safety measures implemented to mitigate the spread of the virus disrupted daily routines and forced individuals to make sacrifices to protect the health of themselves and their communities. From the disruption caused by the pandemic, we were able to expose inequalities and vulnerabilities within our society, compelling us to re-imagine how we live, work, and interact with each other.
As we move forward to live after Covid-19, our premise is that we can design policies, objects, environments, messages, and services to support individuals and organizations to build community resilience against the inevitable occurrence of future health outbreaks.
Process
This initiative has three interconnected projects:
Remember Now was a remote ethnographic study that gathered 12.000+ micro-stories about how 1200+ people living across 15 countries coped with Covid-19. This phase results in opportunity spaces and action areas by identifying variable relationships extracted from participants’ stories, and then aggregating and visualizing them in a system map.
Sketch Tomorrow is an ongoing series of ideation sessions where experts use their experience and results from Remember Now to quickly explore diverse conceptual ideas that range from organizations, services, and strategies to policies that can help us make the world a healthier place.
Prototype Future includes experts in exploring bold policies that can help translate the sketches from the previous phases into interventions through prototyping and piloting endeavors.
As of March 2023, phase I has been completed, and phase II is underway. All research activities are being guided by two complementary design models: the Four-I and the Whole View.
The Four-I model helps multidisciplinary teams explore value-creation opportunities by considering the flow of various resources based on the interactions among diverse agents, integration of multiple systems, interconnectivity across levels, and iteration of interventions over time. The Whole View is a conceptual model of connected frameworks and methods that show the relationships among various forces influencing complex projects⁴. The Whole View integrates viewpoints of users, offerings, value creation, operations, and strategy around the purpose for making change.