 As promised, we have a presentation by Professor Uday Atwankar, a senior member of the faculty in IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay. Professor Atwankar teaches courses in game design, product design, and user studies, among others. And much of his work has been around designing products of everyday use for homes, offices, and industries. He has designed zero-cost games for children through which he has explored games as a way of learning. And he has designed low-cost housing for urban populations with two of his colleagues, Amaya Atwankar and Prasad Anakar. In many of his projects, Professor Atwankar has used an ethnographic approach to learn about his participants, their needs, and their context. In this section, he, along with Amaya and Prasad, will share with us some of the insights that this approach has brought to their work. Let us listen to what they have to share. We study people to make them a source of innovation for us. In conventional design language, this part of designing is called as user studies. We are still not using the word ethnography right now. We will come to that as we go along. It is relevant because it overlaps with many other professions we study people and study cultures. It has some overlap with visual ethnography, and we will actually discuss this overlap as the case study unfolds. At this point, I would like to introduce you to two of my colleagues, Amaya and Prasad. We were involved in the project for affordable housing, which was funded by Housing and Urban Development Corporation and partly by TATA funds in IIT, to investigate how we cater to a slum rehabilitation scheme. This project started around 2013. We had team of architects and researchers with us. Two of them are with me now, Amaya and Prasad. In 2014, we began working on a project on affordable housing, which is housing for urban low income groups. After the economic downturn of 2009, there had been renewed interest in this area. But most of the work that was being done in the area was still quite narrowly focused on the idea of achieving affordability through cost reduction. Naturally, the approach tended towards taking middle or high income housing solutions and adapting them to the affordability constraints of low income groups. Our project was looking to take a different approach to this, being initiated at IDC. The idea was to look at the entire problem of delivering affordable housing solutions through a design thinking lens. It was very natural for us to begin by understanding the needs and aspirations of the people that we were designing for. In this project, we were looking to develop radically innovative solutions. We needed to look beyond what people in the target segment wanted to see in their house and really look for insights into what housing meant to them and what role it played in their lives. We felt that new design opportunities could emerge only if the problem space was expanded and a wider understanding of the problem was created. We began our research with a broad question. We framed it as we wanted to know how people in the target group currently live, why they live the way they do and how they aspire to live. As you may imagine, this included probing a very large set of past, present, as well as future choices and behaviors. A lot of topics required the use of different ethnographic methods. For example, the house, the dwelling that a household currently occupies tells a lot about their lifestyle choices and behavior. And identifying these and probing these choices can provide valuable insights into the household's current struggles for self-betterment. We asked household members to give us a guided tour of their houses. We also captured photographs and drawings to understand how households inhabited their current spaces, if and how they modified them and what they chose to populate them with. But housing and living patterns also changed and evolved over time and used a bunch of visual methods to capture this temporal dimension. To give you an example, we created a deck of cards with household products and furniture, some home improvements, etc. Using these, the participants were asked to create a timeline of changes to their household, to their house rather. As they built the sequence, the researcher would encourage them to share the stories behind these decisions. This exercise revealed to us a lot of rich and detailed stories about the decisions and events like say weddings or childbirth, educational milestones, employment changes that shaped the house as well as the household. Interesting thing that we saw was how they would sequence their belongings in the household and the sequence would go one after another and suddenly there were like three or four items in a straight line, a horizontal line. And we realized that most, a lot of households had that and when we asked them what that was, they said was this is what they got in a dowry. If we had to really come up with radical solutions based on powerful insights, what we needed to understand was not only the pushes or the current struggles of the household with their housing, but also the pulls or their desire for progress that would drive change towards betterment. What we realized that we were looking for a more deeper engagement with them so that they would reveal a lot more than what they have currently experienced and to an extent that they would reveal something that they would have not experienced before and what they would like to experience which is a very difficult thing to do. We feel that people are willing to tell you the truth and my experience of doing this for several years is that a lot of people try to study you and give you responses that you want to hear rather than what the actual truth is. We developed an elaborate set of visual props. There are a bunch of activity cards, furniture, products, building elements and a set of combinable frames that represented rooms. Households had to sit together and they had to work together to use these to create or represent a house that they would love to live in. For example, most of them in tier two cities, the first thing that they did was put a TV in the center of the room and then they would arrange everything, all the furniture around the TV. So we figured out that TV was an important member of their household as much as a family person because that's what they put in the center of the house. Any specific instance where this came out very strongly? I think most cases the TV was almost placed, one of the first items to be located in the house and also very highly contested among different family members was the location of the TV. Whether it should be in the living room, it should be in one of the more private or secluded rooms and so on. But most often they would agree upon keeping the TV as a center in the living room where everybody could watch it. So here it was almost like the TV was like the center of the, you know, the whole house kind of revolved around that particular item. There was an incident when we were mapping a person's behavior within the house where he performed different activities. Literally all the activities were performed in front of the TV. Literally, including studying. So that was how much TV was important to them. Now if this exercise was to work, it would have to be very open-ended and, you know, encourage a lot of playful exploration. So the household was asked to think as if they had won a lottery and there was no budgetary constraint on their actions. All of them wanted to have a grand entrance experience because the entry to the house somehow was very important for everybody. I mean they put the jula, the flowers, the very decorative doors. They would want to have parking for their cars or bikes right in the front of the house. So all of it sort of created an aura of say, opulence that they wanted to show to people. You had that experience of somebody describing their requirement for a bathroom. Maybe you should discuss that. Yeah, it was interesting. It's probably another example of how the natural language takes over when things are more playful. So we had asked them to arrange a house and which included, you know, putting rooms around and including the bathrooms and all that. So our initial thought was that maybe perhaps because there were these semi-tier two cities, they would sort of put the bathroom a little bit outside because we had earlier seen a pattern of that happening. But this lady actually made the bathroom the center of attraction, so to speak. And what she said was interesting that she said Now that sort of language, I don't think you would see in a regular interviews or things, but it was interesting the way she described the bathroom and we asked her where she got the idea of this dhenchak bathroom. And what she said was also interesting that she said that she, she was a tailor and she basically stitched wedding dresses. So she would go to these rich people's houses and get their measurements and stitched dresses and sell it to them. So she said she actually saw one of these bathrooms in one of her client's house and that is what she wanted to sort of replicate here. I think what was unexpected for us was that we never expected the bathroom to be like a symbol of luxury and such a, such a delightful experience for people. I think it was partly that and partly I think she was also reacting to the fact that most bathrooms in their current situation are extremely tight spaces and I think you have to probably imagine the challenge of dressing up in a sari, let's say in like a 3 by 3 kind of a bathroom which is essentially a wet space. After this, the first step where the ideal situation had been imagined we started introducing constraints. We told the household that they had exceeded their current budget and they needed to give up some of their, some of their house as well as their possessions. This started a bunch of negotiations. It turned out to be an extremely engaging experience for people. That helped us understand how they, what they prioritized and why they prioritized and what are the reasons behind their choices. What this exercise did is it opened our eyes to the aspirations of low income people which was extremely different from what we had imagined. What we saw was some of the techniques that we used which were constructive and playful helped us to create these engaging environments and hence build that related trust. People started off with telling us that we don't have time so we could wrap it up very quickly and since I've got to go to work or you're intruding in my income time and so on and so forth. But when we started these activities they just played for an hour, hour and a half so some of our interviews or I mean we didn't call it interviews but some of these activities that we did with them went on till like 90 minutes or sometimes even beyond that. So the playfulness of the activities also helped people to lose their inhibitions because they thought they were playing a game. So they would actually reveal a lot of things that they would never reveal in an interview like for example their income when you would put it in a game like environment you found out that they would not think twice before sort of stating what and where the spendings were. Interestingly a lot of it comes out in form of a language or an expression, right? That seems to be interesting you know. Is there a reason why this happens that people speak very differently when you use your tools? I think one of the reasons is at least this is what we've been reflecting on now having done this study is that what these tools do is that they put the participant in control of the entire process. That part he has autonomy, he has control over the entire session. It's not as if it's not a conventional interview and interview interview relationship anymore where I ask a question and then you're supposed to respond. So people are taking charge of activities they themselves are expressing what they want and therefore it becomes very natural to speak the way they do usually with each other or amongst themselves rather than having formal interview responses. To put it in a nutshell we focused on capturing three sets of data what people had to say what they did in terms of current behaviors and what they made and what they said as they made those particular artifacts. After looking at all the people's aspirations as well as their priorities and choices the most interesting thing that came out of it was that what they were looking for was not really housing. Currently most of the reports were focusing on creating housing as solutions or bringing affordability to the housing construction. But what we realized was what people were looking for was not just housing but looking at solutions which are beyond housing which was beyond just the hardware which was the house. What they were looking for was living a more broader solution that included things like clean water access to sanitation, access to 24 by 7 electricity, proximity to work, schools for their children and so and so forth. One of the interesting things that we found out was that while the marketeers had segmented the entire low income group into a single segment with the assumption that everybody within that segment who has income between 90,000 a year to 3 lakhs a year had similar priorities, similar desires, similar likes and dislikes and so and so forth. What we saw was that was not true because within that income group there were different people who were qualitatively different from each other and whose housing needs and priorities and choices and likes and dislikes changed based on several factors. We discovered about four distinct personas based on their lifestyle choices were very distinctly different from one another. There were the transients who were below about five years of residence at a particular location. These were people who did not manage to save much. Their skills and their occupation was such that they were not specialized skills. Therefore the kind of investments they would make in improving their house or setting up their house was sort of minimal. Their lifestyle was extremely frugal and they would make a lot of compromises just to make their ends meet. The second category on the other hand was settlers. These were people who had a foothold in the city. They had some amount of savings. Their skills were a little bit more specialized. You would be typically talking about people like let's say rickshaw drivers or ordinary private drivers and so on. You could see that they were investing in upgrading their house as well as their lifestyle. One of the typical characteristics of this particular persona was their investment in their children's future. So education for this persona as compared to the first one was a big priority. The third and fourth one are different from the first two in that these particular personas are they have grown up in post liberalized economy in India. So their choices tend to be much more comfortable with consumption. So the two personas are hedonists and risers. Hedonists are typically people who don't have the education currently to rise beyond a certain economic class. But their choices do not reflect the same frugality as the transients. They are quite comfortable with consumption. These are the people who will let's say buy Chinese goods or imitations of high cost luxury items. Another particular pattern in this particular category was that a lot of the choices were very different from their parents. So if you look at the parent the choices were extremely frugal, functional and ensuring that the house works very well. In stark contrast the hedonists who essentially have a tendency to sort of exceed their means a little bit were more focused on perceptions and projecting this idea of being upwardly mobile onto their house. You mean they are interested more in the image? Yes. The fourth persona are the risers. These are the people who have let's say graduate education and so on. They are likely to follow a path and you know come into the conventional consumption class. As compared to the third the hedonist persona these people believe in buying the best in class products. So typically a car like Tata Nano would be aimed at somebody like a riser persona. What they required was a lot more than the house. So the solutions that it required a lot of services. It required a lot of policies that helping them achieve their priorities. So all this combined together the hardware which is the house, the software which we call the services and the policies etc. When they are combined together it gave rise to something what we termed as serviced microliving. We focused more on the transients and the settlers in the early part of the phase because currently there were no solutions for bad groups. The service microliving was a solution which was designed in urban cities which was focused on these two sort of groups. So what it entailed was small rental units but which were expandable. So over a period of time they grew into something more than what was currently required as the families grew. It had something like a serviced kitchen which was a common kitchen also serviced sanitation facilities. It also had subsidized groceries, flexible living plans which were something akin to what we have in cell phone like a postpaid or a prepaid financing options. And the most important thing was that they were all located in prime urban locations. So they were perfect solutions for the slum rehab that when we started this project what HADCO was sanctioning this project for. So what these tools achieve is a quicker understanding of the situation and how people react to the product or they can potentially react to product. Tools also seem to ensure engagement and involvement of the user. So the data that you get from it is fairly reliable and also you know something that can convert it very easily into insights. What really is required in design is what could happen in future and how could design intervene in that future. And for that these tools have some additional techniques which get them to react to things that do not exist right now. So to a certain extent you can say that these tools are basically proactive and they try to look at what could happen in future and give you sufficient evidence that it may succeed. What a varied range of projects and what an interesting set of insights. Let us reflect on what we learned from this presentation. There is one thing that we see in all of the research engagements that Professor Atvankar has described. And that is the social norms and cultural beliefs that define people's behavior. For the design product to be acceptable to the participant it had to agree with his cultural beliefs. This attention to the cultural context is something we see in the housing design project as well. While a common approach to designing affordable housing would be to make cheaper versions of middle class houses. But this was not the approach that the team took. They in fact spent time and effort to understand the context of their participants. And it was through these ethnographic engagements that they were able to understand the very different needs of the population they were catering to. You may recall that the team finally came up with four personas of people. While these personas broadly matched an age group or an income group, they were based on a much deeper understanding. The personas represented different needs and desires that people attached to the idea of a house. In designing for these personas, the team tried to cater to these varied sets of needs. This links back to one of the earlier discussions in our course. We had talked about the need to look at a diverse range of participants. This project shows us that diversity need not be limited to age groups or gender or even household sizes. There is also a diversity in how participants relate to a phenomena and the meanings they associate with it. Professor Atwankar's work shows just how we may be alert to these variations and design for them. Many of you must have been impressed with the interactive game that Professor Atwankar and his team used. As tools for engaging with participants. Listening to their discussions made me think of our conversation on researching with the visual. We had discussed how we may use various kinds of images and visual media to learn from participants. This project is an excellent example of that approach. In some of the instances that Amaya and Prasad mentioned, we see how engaging it can be for participants to work with such material. And we see how using such tools can lead the research towards unexpected directions. The team had initially thought of these tools as a way to overcome language barriers between themselves and the participants. But they proved to be much more than that. In playing games with the researchers and thinking of hypothetical situations, participants revealed their actual desires and aspirations. And they revealed the practices of their everyday lives which sometimes differ from the practices they claim to follow. This was an outcome of them feeling comfortable enough to let down their guard. It was also because the interactive tools brought in a new element to the research engagements. That of fun. In our next section, Professor Sahana Murthy will introduce us to a different form of ethnographic research. Cognitive ethnography. See you there.