Design in translation Published by
320 South Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19102
Copyright © 2014 by The University of the Arts Photography credits: Jonas Milder, Jeremy Beadry, Nidhi Jalwal, Vrouyr Joubanian, Jordan Shade, Min Yeh All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced — mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying — without written permission of the publisher. Book design by Vrouyr Joubanian and Min Yeh. The University of the Arts 320 South Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19102 First printing October 2014
In the Design for Social Impact graduate program, we believe in the power of design to create meaningful change in the world. Our program prepares students to become leading agents of social change, instrumental in fostering strategic creativity, organizational learning, and community engagement. The program promotes a social design process that facilitates collaborative projects across disciplines, and that produces actionable models and scenarios to create sustainable change. Our process is hands-on, action-oriented, and highly visual, and the needs and desires of people and organizations exist at the center of our work. We recognize the need to balance ecological, social, and economic values in the development of innovative solutions. Graduate Students: Nidhi Jalwal Vrouyr Joubanian Jordan Shade Min Wen Yeh Faculty: Jeremy Beaudry Jonas Milder
Students work with businesses, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and community groups in sectors such as health care, social services, technology, and education. Project outcomes range from new service models, design for user experience, strategies and tools for community engagement, and the development of social entities, organizations, new businesses and initiatives. 5
preface With the increasing complexity of social, technological, and ecological challenges, design — as a process and a way of thinking — has subsequently expanded its focus to become a leading agent of social transformation and innovation. Designers have at their disposal a number of powerful tools and methods which give them a unique ability to initiate meaningful change in communities, organizations, and businesses.
collaboration with Lebanese students, designers, and residents in which they explored the shifting definition and application of design methods and tools in the Beirut context. In our planning conversations, the UArts team and MENA Design Research Center have acknowledged the difficulty of importing a team of designers into an unfamiliar place and culture for a short amount of time and expecting too much in terms of outcomes. Given this, the project’s success has depended on being authentic within these constraints and of setting the most appropriate expectations. What is important is building the relationships with the people we meet in Beirut so that the exchange is meaningful. It is a matter of building trust.
But how do these design tools and methods translate across cultural, linguistic, and geographical lines? And how do the underlying assumptions and values embedded within these practices sit within in other cultural contexts?
In the tangled web of personal, familial, professional, institutional and governmental relationships that order our lives, how do we know how to trust others? Who do we not trust? Why do we trust some institutions and individuals? What factors determine our ability to trust others? How much time does it take to build trust (or lose it)? Trust stands out as a systemic issue, one which we believe the American/Lebanese design team can explore within the specific context of Beirut through a focused design research process. Our work as human-centered designers depends upon our collaboration with others, and our ability to build trust with the stakeholders we meet in any design space. We will use the notion of trust as a point of entry to generate a specific set of questions for this design research experience.
Reflecting on these questions, a team of graduate students and faculty from the Design for Social Impact graduate program at The University of the Arts (Philadelphia, USA) initiated a month-long design
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acknowledgments This project was made possible by a grant from The University of the Arts Graduate Studies Fund. Logistical and organizational support was provided by MENA Design Research Center, a Beirut-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of design and developing its role as a creative tool for the enhancement of society at large in the Middle East and North Africa. Studio work space for the UArts team was kindly provided by AltCity, a co-working and incubator space created to facilitate, mobilize, encourage, and support high impact entrepreneurship and innovation in Lebanon and the region. A special thanks to Doreen Toutikian, Elena Habre, Rawad Hajj, Tatiana Toutikian and Kareem Badra for their great support throughout our project.
table of contents
Introduction
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Work on the ground
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Testing Prototypes
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Key Insights
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Research Findings
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Conclusion
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Beirut Design Week 2013
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All design is (inter-) local!? With memory of the movement towards an “International Style� in the early 20th century, today any call for a global and perhaps unified design practice appears to be reaching. However, since those early beginnings, design has come to a very exciting and fascinating place: By projecting beyond objects, design has begun to articulate and grow a social dimension. Led by European research and approach to sustainability, the discourse on design for social impact has gone global. At the same time, practice led design research remains
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focused and informed by everyday needs of local constituents and their communities. As design networks grow internationally, students enrolling in graduate design programs here the in US come from all over the globe. Our team traveling to Beirut provides a great sample for this multi-national demographic: Students come from Taipee, Mumbai, Beirut, the Golan Heights, and Texas. I myself grew up and got my design education in Germany. Program director Jeremy Beaudry is from Philadelphia and was educated in the US, but has had multiple opportunities to study and work abroad with time spent in Italy, Spain, and Egypt.
While “trust” and “empathy” are (at) the heart of human centered design, the design process, by definition, promotes empowerment and democratization by helping a team, organization, or community to define problems and alternative options for making decisions. As we are constantly assessing and articulating the role, value, and impact for social design, having the opportunity to test our tool kit and approach in Beirut, Lebanon sets up a particular opportunity and challenge: On what level will we be able to connect and get involved? What new connections, or perhaps re-connections
will this project produce? With so many broken civic systems and a great disconnect among its constituents, how will we have to rig our process to produce meaningful outcomes. And as we learn from other “inter local” design collaborations that helped jumpstart innovation by leapfrogging to the cutting edge of global knowledge and development, there might well be design opportunities in “pre-industrial” Beirut that never would become apparent or could be realized in a “post-industrial” Philadelphia. Jonas Milder
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introduction As human-centered designers, engaging with users and stakeholders in all of our projects and getting their input and feedback is our priority. But are the tools and methods we use to engage them the same regardless of the environment they live in? There is no universal design toolbox that works successfully everywhere, because, simply, design is not universal. Environments, communities, and countries have different histories, politics and traditions that build their own cultural behaviors and social rules. Lebanon, for instance, is a collectivist society (not individualist). This means people are integrated into strong cohesive groups (family, extended family, neighbors, etc.), where there’s an emphasis on the collective rather than the individual action or identity. This creates huge interdependence among members who
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become fairly unfamiliar with the notion of private space, as opposed to Western cultures, where private space is a high priority. Consequently, sharing of information — even those that are considered private to Westerners — becomes a common social behavior. For example “Do you have kids?” is a very common question which is often followed by “How many?” or “Why not?” followed by questions about age, job, religion, politics, etc. If a Westerner is asked these questions, they would probably feel offended and that their privacy is being invaded. A designer needs to be aware of that: a design tool that was successful in engaging Lebanese users might not be as successful when engaging American users (and vice-versa). We need to be aware of the questions we ask and how we engage people without being intrusive.
The goal of our time in Beirut was to test the various ways designers interact — with each other, with those who use our products or systems, and the public at large — in another country. One way designers interact or facilitate interaction is through the use of boundary objects. Boundary objects refer to any thing, often something physical , which is used in a conversation or interaction to help the people involved better understand each other. A common example is a blueprint. A blueprint, when on the table in between an architect, an engineer, an electrician and a project manager, allows all the parties to point to something physical and visual to reference different ideas, areas, trouble points, etc. This visual reference gives everyone a common understanding — which is nearly always more concrete and informed — than they would have in a mere conversation about the building without the blueprint. In design work, boundary objects help
designers ask people questions about complex ideas and give them a more rich understanding of how people feel, what they think, and how they view the world. Boundary objects are just one example of design tools — anything a designer creates to aid them in a particular goal. Human centered designers mostly use design tools created to gain perspective on human behavior, desires, motivators, etc. These tools are almost always visual in nature as visuals permit quick understanding and compliment the spoken word. An example of a design tool could be a deck of role play cards which give each person in a meeting a specific task or duty (devil’s advocate or navigator, for example) in order to organize the flow of conversation and heighten productivity. Design tools are often custom made for specific situations or needs of the designers, and then updated to improve their effectiveness over time.
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work on the ground
First Workshop During our first week in Beirut, we began our project by holding an introductory workshop with a small group of Lebanese designers in order to better understand the context of our project and how our design research tools might function in a different culture. Our goals for this afternoon workshop included learning from our Lebanese colleagues about their own familiarity with design research tools and how they function in Beirut. We then together developed a strategy for our first round of field research on the issue of trust. Referring to a large map of the city, we asked the Lebanese designers to describe and identify different neighborhoods and areas of greater Beirut, and to share their views on how trust issues manifest in the experience of the city. Next, we wanted to explore these specific neighborhoods firsthand and talk to local citizens about specific types of trust. Together we brainstormed areas in which to conduct street interviews as well as a list of appropriate questions.
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Left: Lebanese designers list boundary objects and design tools they have used in previous projects. Right: Map of Beirut was used as a boundary object to discuss the various neighborhoods and history. Opposite: Lebanese designers take part in a sorting exercise to evaluate and reflect upon past design methods.
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FIELD RESEARCH Over the course of two days, UArts graduate students and faculty and our Lebanese collaborators from the first workshop conducted 19 contextual interviews in the neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud, Ouzai, Badaro, and Furn El Chebbek. We began each interview by asking people on the street to tell us about their neighborhoods and daily life. Gradually, we directed the conversation towards more overt questions about trust as it relates to politics, religion, and family.
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This Page: Teams of Lebanese designers and UArts students interview citizens of Beirut on the street in various neighborhoods. Opposite: Jordan Shade and Vrouyr Joubanian ask a local artisan about politics, religion, and trust using the questions brainstormed at the first workshop. 25
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SECOND Workshop The field research produced a wide array of interactions and data concerning the issue of trust as well as the nature and application of design research in the Beirut context. Our next objective was to look for ways to begin to narrow the scope of our research and develop new tools that we could test in the next round of design research. In the second workshop, 20 Lebanese design students, working designers, and professionals from other fields joined us in a co-creative process to develop ideas for contextspecific design research tools. As human centered, holistically-minded designers, it is very important for our process to be highly participatory — including as many stakeholders as possible to insure a more well informed, collaborative output. This is why it was essential for our work to involve citizens of Beirut from many backgrounds, offering many opinions and insights in the development of our design tools.
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Reflection: Workshops In a small room with plexi-glass and chipboard walls, one chugging air-conditioner, and a table of fatayer and Pepsi bottles, twenty-one people created a flurry of activity as they interviewed each other at small tables, using their hands to emphasize ideas and emotions, caught in rapt discussion, debating the meaning of trust. Then the power went out. No one batted an eye – not a single hesitation marred the impassioned conversation. In Lebanon, when the power goes out, it is no big affair – it will be back – we trust it will be back – and that people will continue with their work,
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their lives, without smashing any windows, looting in the streets, or making a big todo. The room got hot and stuffy – fast. It could barely hold twenty-one people sitting calmly still, let alone those attempting to design boundary objects addressing specific elements of trust in Beirut in a mere three hours. I found myself frequently stepping outside to fan myself, wiping the sweat from my brow. Yet the design work continued. Our second participatory workshop was a clear success. Seventeen Lebanese people from various backgrounds actively took part in a very accelerated design process, in five small teams, engaged in the issues at hand, with impressive results. The
UArts students had carefully crafted every minute of the three hours: we directed the participants through ten specific activities ranging from ice-breakers, to interviews, to problem definition to scenario-enactment to prototyping. At the end of the session, each group stood and presented in the small room to their cohorts - an attentive audience, ready to listen and respond in turn. By mixing the expertise and subtle understanding of our guests from Beirut with the goals and design research background of our team, we managed a compelling co-creative session amongst those who have an interest in Beirut, social change, and their fellow human beings. Jordan Shade
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Workshop prototypes Participants in the second workshop created five distinct prototypes design interventions and research tools, which we would late refine further and test in the field.
role play cards These role play cards were created for people who need to work together. For a group of newly organized collaborators, these cards allow members of the group to assign and enact roles of authority in a game-like fashion in order to see how different individuals might perform when leading the group. The goal of the cards is foster trust between the collaborators so that they might work better together. 33
trust in public Map Installation This public intervention would be painted on the sidewalks of Beirut and annotated with prompting questions that probe people’s willingness to trust different categories of people. Pedestrians are prompted to follow a series of arrows that beckon participants, for example: “If I was a man under the age 25, would you still follow me?” Depending on the participant’s response, he or she would be led down different paths toward new questions.
Trust in a Time of Need This set of illustrated caricatures prompts users to make split-second decisions about who we trust when we are in a time of need. Accompanied by questions such as “If your car broke down at 3:00 AM, would you trust this person to give you a ride home?”, the illustrations invite viewers to reflect on their preconceived notions of different stereotypical characters in Beirut. 34
Trust Timeline Tool This design research tool functions as a boundary object in one-on-one interviews, and helps participants to map how trust is created (or lost) along a timeline. Predetermined categories of factors impacting how people trust others are provided to help participants qualify their stories.
Private Trust Survey To accommodate the often sensitive nature of trust and certain taboo subjects involved, this idea imagines a private booth where the participant can discreetly answer provocative questions about politics, religion, sexuality, and personal relationships. After completing the anonymous survey, the participant’s results are then dynamically visualized in comparison to others’ responses.
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testing PROTOTYPES
Trust Timeline Tool We tested the Trust Timeline Tool over the course of 20 interviews. For each session, the interviewer asked the participant to describe a relationship in terms of how trust evolved over time. Key moments in the relationship were plotted on the timeline and then qualified with more detail using 18 different categories of color-coded trust factor cards. This tool gathers both qualitative and quantitative data, and allows the individual participant’s responses to be compared with others across the whole data set. Because of the level of abstraction in the tool, participants are given the chance to speak to personal relationships and matters of trust and what influenced that trust without including sensitive personal details. The tool is available in English, Arabic, Armenian, and French, and the colorcoding allows the resulting data to be compared across multiple languages.
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Trust in a Time of Need Working with a local illustrator, we created eight different posters that present caricatures of stereotypical characters in Beirut — a taxi driver, a young Lebanese socialite, and so on. This set of illustrated caricatures prompts users to make split-second decisions about who we trust when we are in a time of need. These posters were installed in public spaces around Beirut along with one of two questions: “If your car broke down here in the middle of the night, who would you trust to give you a ride home?” and “If you were at a coffee shop and had to leave your seat for five minutes, who would you trust to watch your belongings?” Each question was given in Arabic, Armenian, French, and English and in multiple locations throughout Beirut. The illustration posters were each accompanied by a strip of tear-off paper tabs so that passersby could vote on who they might trust in each scenario. As a hybrid of two different ideas generated in the second workshop, this public intervention invites viewers to reflect on their preconceived notions of different stereotypical characters in Beirut.
Online Survey: Living in Lebanon We created a survey that asks provocative questions in a semi-private, intimate space: online. Each question the participant answers builds on his or her answer to the previous question. After gathering a sampling of responses from residents of Beirut, the results have been compiled by geographical location so that those who continue to take the survey can compare their answers to those of a larger population.
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Key insights
In a multilingual city like Beirut, the linguistic translation of design research tools into the most common languages spoken here (English, Arabic, French, and Armenian) made it possible to engage the widest range of residents. This accommodation of multiple languages also demonstrated a sensitivity to our stakeholders which was reciprocated with a general openness and hospitality toward our research. It is difficult to translate design vocabulary into languages other than English. Explaining the core values and concepts of a human-centered, socially-engaged design process requires more embodied strategies based on participation and demonstration through design in action. Exploring the issue of trust, whether through personal, religious, or political channels, is a vast subject, and the context-specific design research tools developed in Beirut with locals helped us to access more specific and meaningful data. The design tools and methods we use facilitate meaningful conversations with people from different walks of life because they offer opportunities for people to give input from their unique perspectives as experts in their own daily situations and experiences. 46
The tools we developed in Beirut allowed us to gather a variety of responses both quantitative and qualitative in nature, which was important in understanding individual stories as well as broader patterns revealed in the comparison of data. Co-creating design research tools with designers as well as non-designers from Beirut was very important to help us understand what questions we could ask — and how we should ask them — in this complex city which we are mostly unfamiliar with. The differences of working and communication styles found in every culture are quite subtle. In this case, our participatory design methods created an effective collaboration with our local designer partners and were essential to bridge these inevitable differences. The design research tools we developed are not only for gathering actionable data. The tools are also generative in that they provoke participants to think about trust in a more nuanced way.
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research findings
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Trust in a Time of Need
Trust Timeline Tool
In refining the illustrations that came out of the second design workshop, we had the opportunity to collaborate more closely with a local artist to create the posters for this public intervention. The street installation allowed us to understand the physical space of Beirut in a more intimate way as we became more aware of different types of public activities and spaces. Besides having a strong visual impact on the street as graffiti, the voting mechanism in the posters appeared to invite participation in the project. For us, this demonstrated the power of this type of interactive public design intervention. One significant obstacle for this prototype as a design research tool was the lack of feedback; the tear-off tabs were imprecise, and it was difficult to monitor and document the interaction with the installations.
The trust timeline tool encouraged interviewees to explain the factors that impacted their trust in a specific past experience. It generated rich qualitative and quantitative information through very quick interactions. When asked about trust, most participants easily related it to their relationships with specific people. The trust timeline tool allowed us to keep the conversation focused on the most important factors impacting trust without asking them to reveal any sensitive personal details about the relationships. The experience showed us how design tools can make a difference during the exploratory phase of design process, especially in a different cultural context. The tool not only turned out to be scalable in terms of different content and context, but it helped the interviewees to see their relationships from a different perspective, gaining a deeper understanding of them through the visualization.
Online Survey: Living in Lebanon The anonymous online survey was a refined version of one of the ideas from the co-creative workshop, designed to allow people to share their thoughts on taboo issues in a private space. During the process of designing the questionnaire with our local collaborators, we gained more knowledge about the social and moral constraints embedded in the culture of Beirut. The survey also helped to gather more quantitative data concerning topics that are considered sensitive in this society. The cultural fabric proved to be more complex and ambiguous than we expected. The results showed that most young people don’t vote but have participated in demonstrations. They do not identify as religious and nearly half of them wish to live abroad. The answers were rich, very detailed, and referenced personal feelings and intimate perspectives that would not necessarily have been accessible without the private nature of the survey, or careful ordering of questions. Still, there are shortcomings in the survey in the narrowness of the demographics of the respondents, which is certainly influenced by the web-based format and how the survey was distributed.
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As explained before, the timeline tools helped us in visualizing qualitative data and develop quantitative conclusions from them. The individual graphs are synthesized and as shown on the next page. For example, the very first graph represents how two people came together because of a common goal and how over time trust increased between them. However, due to a bad shared experience, the level of trust came down drastically, and it was followed by bitter emotions and distance, which led to a complete loss of trust between these two people. People often came together for common goals. While environment and personal qualities helped in building trust the
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most, the addition of shared experiences, emotions and building a relationship pushed trust to its peak. Interestingly, some of the same factors responsible in building trust (namely, personal qualities, relationship and emotions) led to a decrease in trust between two parties. In addition to that time, and distance also emerge as an important factor. However, a complete loss of trust or minimum amount of trust was predominantly marked by emotions.
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conclusion
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These three prototypes are the result of a series of co-creative workshops and field research in Beirut, developed and refined through our month-long collaboration with Lebanese designers. The prototypes range in scale and format: an anonymous online survey, an interactive interview tool, and a public design intervention. As design research tools, they work to gather pointed data about specific aspects of trust as felt in different situations by people in Beirut. As newcomers to this place, we have experienced the value of collaboration and co-creation as a connective link in cross-cultural exchange. The issue of trust not only stood out in the collaboration process, but also proved essential and palpable during our interactions with people in Beirut.
Trust and empathy are paramount elements to socially-engaged, human centered design. Exploring trust as designers in Beirut afforded us the opportunity to reflect on the delicate nature of trust in a qualitative design research process. We recognize the need to be present and understanding of our own feelings of trust and how working in a different culture continually affects our approach to the design work at hand. The issue of trust is complex and highly sensitive, and the use of carefully crafted design tools helped overcome barriers to discussing trust honestly. Through this very short but intense experience, we continue to believe that establishing trust with the people we work with leads to open collaboration, more engaged participation, and successful co-design.
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Reflection: Cultures As a designer rooted in Eastern culture, learning design methods and living in the West, I have experienced the cultural clash from two extremes. Therefore, how the ideas, design tools and methods traverse the boundary of cultures from one to another has become an intriguing subject for me. To strive towards the authentic, a single idea can never be expressed in the same way due to different languages and cultural characters. In Philadelphia, we had gained experience from our collaborative projects with organizations, in which we introduced design thinking into unique and individual
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corporate cultures in order to better deal with their issues from a systematic viewpoint. However, the cultural differences and challenges encountered in these previous projects could be considered relatively small in scale to the Beirut project, which would prove to shift our mindsets into a totally different spectrum. We traveled to Beirut with excitement for the coming adventure instead of assumptions built by the media. All the preparation and readings from books before the journey were not able to fully describe Beirut city, which could only be met by us with five senses opened wide. When we used the boundary objects to interact with designers and populations during the workshops and
interviews, the sense of co-creation and collaboration stood out in the process. With the design tools as a universal language, we gained insights and qualitative data more efficiently from the country with complexity. The most surprising thing to me was the vigor and energy underlying this culture which has suffered from political instability for so long a time. A place where people possess the qualities of both Eastern and Western culture, expressed everywhere in the nature and value of their lifestyle. I do see the potential of applying humancentered design in this city, where the cultural subtleties are expressed in the shared language of human interaction. Min Yeh
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Beirut Design Week 2013 Conference On Saturday June 29th, UArts graduate students Nidhi Jawal, Vrouyr Joubanian, Jordan Shade and Min Yeh joined by program director Jeremy Beaudry presented the findings of the project in Beirut to an audience of colleagues, peers and designers from all over the world. The presentation, entitled Design in Translation, took the format of a question and answer session, with Professor Beaudry asking pointed, pre-scripted questions to the students about their work over the past month. Through this conversational method, the hope was to engage the audience as the students defended and explained their methodology and process to each other, their director, and those watching. Feedback from the presentation varied from suggestions of a more scientific approach in the study of trust to comparisons to the social sciences. Most audience members appreciated the presentation style, but asked for more specific examples of the work done.
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A Kind of Ending
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The challenge in wrapping up Design in Translation, as with so many complex and heavily process-oriented projects, is to compose a compelling narrative of the work, to tell a story that communicates clearly the objectives and expectations as well as the outcomes, missteps, and key insights. When I arrived in Beirut nearly three weeks into the students’ work on the project, I was faced with the daunting task of very quickly learning about the richness of their experiences and then helping them make sense of and reflect on what happened.
of the project in that we were going to publicly exhibit and present the project during Beirut Design Week, the weeklong city-wide festival of design which culminated in an academic conference. What was exciting for me about these circumstances was how collaboratively I was able to work with the students in creating the narrative of the work. While they clearly owned the project and had managed the process after we established the basic framework, the students and I settled into a very fluid, non-hierarchical workflow that allowed us to produce a great volume of content in a short time.
Fortunately, we had a built-in motivation for producing succinct, clear documentation
For our presentation at the Design Week conference, we wished to extend
this collaborative working relationship and we devised a discursive format for sharing the project and reflecting on its outcomes. Presented as a Q&A, we asked each other a series of questions to point to specific aspects of the process and issues we encountered. The challenge with this format was to strike a balance between a predetermined structure and a more organic, conversational performance that could readily capture a live, emergent assessment of the overall project experience. In the end, we had to sacrifice some descriptive detail of the work in order to create enough space and flexibility for the kind of substantive conversation we wished to have within a limited amount of time. While this was
regrettable to a degree, I think that we successfully shared key insights from the project in a more dynamic, authentic format that resonated with many of the conference attendees. Jeremy Beaudry
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