Aditya Dev Sood

Innovation and the Public Interest
Aditya Dev Sood
2011
“The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation — if I may use that biological term — that incessantly revolutionizes
the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating
a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
— Joseph Schumpeter
Innovation and the Public Interest
Published in 2011 by the Center for Knowledge Societies in Bangalore
Copyright © 2011 Aditya Dev Sood
All rights reserved by the author
No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied,
recorded or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.
Additional copies ofthis book may be requested by emailing cks@cks.in.
Electronic versions or this book are available at www.cks.in
Contents
A Parable on Innovation
07
1.
What is Innovation? 11
2.
The Routinization of Innovation
19
3.
Innovation in India
27
4.
How Shall We Define the Public Interest?
31
5.
The Challenge of Governance Innovation
6.
The Path Forward
35
A Glossary on Design, Innovation & Governance
41
45
A Bibliography on Design, Innovation & the Public Interest
About the Author
55
63
A Parable on Innovation
You are tasked with finding ways to design new kind of toilets, ones which will actually
be used by those who have no experience using them. The challenge is complex because
it is underdefined. Do you change the people or do you change the design? What kind
of new design might work? It boggles your mind, just as it has defeated the minds of
so many social workers and bureaucrats over the many years since Gandhi made toilet
design an integral part of his program for the upliftment of India.
To try to bound the problem you agree to do fieldwork in rural India. Participant observation, to be precise. Early in the morning, you rise from your bedding with your host and
take a walk out towards the fields. The light is still soft, the birds are singing, and the
leaves rustle in the gentle breeze. You have your bottle of mineral water clutched firmly
in your right hand. Your host points out a spot. It is secluded, partially hidden, and with
a faint grimace you settle down to the act. It is necessary to understand the point of view
that you are trying to change.
On the third morning you are walking back from the fields with a faint smile of contentment trying to remember why you are here. Toilets? Why on earth would anyone want to
give up the simple and elemental pleasure of crapping in the fields? We are human mammals, evolved in riverine deltas and migrated to savannas, why do we need toilets? This is
the natural way, the only way to betake oneself.
You return from the field shaken in your understandings down to your very inner core
and sense of self. Everything you knew about the problem is out the window. Now you
are ready to design, not one toilet, but an array of propositions and possibilities, that
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collectively transform the very way in which we think about what toilets are and what they
are supposed to do. Innovation has begun to be possible.
The grand challenges facing our society remain unsolved because they represent an intersection between competing needs and desires for which no solution has yet been found. Once
a solution is found, the challenge will become trivial, for an off-the-shelf solution for the
problem will already exist: a ‘best practice.’ Until then, we will need the application of
design in thought and innovation in action to discover possible, incremental solutions to
these socio-technical problems.
To identify those grand challenges facing us, and to explore and articulate how innovation
approaches can help us grapple with them is the goal of he Design Public Conclave.
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1
What is Innovation?
Design Public is a conversation about whether and how Innovation can serve the
Public Interest.
The way that innovation is conceptualized and practiced can have large ramifications for a society. These exceed the prospect of steady and swift economic
growth and even the potential for wide-spread prosperity. The individual capacity
for bringing about innovation, and the social possibility of enabling and making
it possible for innovations to come about may be considered one of the higher
ends of society and civilization. Innovation may turn out to be the crucial means
through which we can create and recreate our social universe in the image of our
higher capacities, aptitudes and values. It is in this higher sense that we ultimately
perceive innovation to be an expression of human potential and fundamental human values.
Innovation: What Is It and How Can It Be Advanced?
One hears, from those who study these things, that that agriculture came about
more or less by accident. Our early ancestors found fruits and berries, corn, edible
plants and other vegetation and ate the good parts, discarding the seeds without thought, here and there, or in the garbage. In other cases they ate the seeds,
which passed through them to find themselves in newly fertilized ground. In this
early period, one would have to conclude, agriculture was not yet routinized, even
though it came to be later on.
One also hears, from several reliable authorities, that we have entered, or are
entering the Age of Innovation. What this exactly means is not quite settled, but
one possibility is that in the future the dominant mode of production will involve
the creation of incrementally or drastically more valuable outputs given the same
inputs. That is to say, most people will make their very living through innovation.
Perhaps the parallel with the age of early agriculture is useful, for even though
innovation is being practiced in scattered and unorganized ways around us, we are
still in a very preliminary phase of being able to actually understand what is going
on, how exactly it yields us benefit, and what parts of the process are critical to its
success in different climates, sectors of industry and world cultures.
Joseph Schumpeter, sometimes considered the first theorist of innovation, spoke
of it as an effect of capitalism. He wrote that “the function of entrepreneurs is to
reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention, or
more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply
of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.”
Innovation, to Schumpeter, drives capitalism through a process of ‘creative destruction,’ which ensures that old paradigms are incessantly replaced by new ones.
Later management theorists have attempted to describe innovation as an integral
part of the business process. Peter F. Drucker, for instance, noted that innovation
is both conceptual and perceptual, and that it must therefore be market-focused
and market-driven. Moreover, Drucker maintained, innovation must be viewed as
organized, systematic and rational work that can be integrated into any organization. On the other hand, Joseph Engelberger, the noted engineer and roboticist,
saw innovation as an integral element of technology development. He famously
said that in order to innovate, one requires only three things: a recognized need,
competent people with relevant technology, and financial support.
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It is striking that neither management studies nor engineering is able to offer
any account of the inner dynamics of innovation. Rather, they tell us only about
the physical, organizational and social elements, resources and conditions might
be necessary for innovation. Necessary perhaps, but not sufficient. In order to
understand innovation in subjective and interior terms, we must have recourse to the
discourse and discipline of Design.
13
Innovation in Relation to Design
Schumpeter listed several different kinds of changes that could be brought about
through entrepreneurial activity. These included the discovery and creation of new
markets, the development of new methods of production and distribution, as well
as new forms of industrial organization, and new kinds of consumer goods. All
these different kinds of entrepreneurial activity require creative thinking, resourcefulness, planning, forethought and continuous compensatory action. In other
words, they require that specifically human ability for intentional social or material
change, which we may call design.
However, of all the different dimensions of entrepreneurship identified by Schumpeter, there is one, which seems to have a greater impact on our collective consciousness, which seems to shape culture, and which may in fact create greater value than all the others. This is the last area of innovation listed above, the creation
of new kinds of consumer goods. For in creating a consumer good, one is also
already creating new kinds of experiences, new propositions about how to experience and live in the world, one may be instantiating and imbuing into a product or
service new ideologies about what is good and valuable. There is therefore, a larger
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role for design in this particular area of innovation, which necessarily encompasses
the different ways in which a product or service is experienced, including its very
brand, identity, packaging, color, finish and materiality, form, user experience, all
of which come to bear cumulatively on the underlying technology and platforms
through which it may be delivered.
If, as Schumpeter more or less says, innovation describes the business or economic
dimension of the forward movement of society under capitalism, then the immanent, cognitive or mental aspect of this forward movement can be captured by
the term design. It is the multivariate, parallel, sometimes collaborative process of
finding solutions to problems that have no obvious and available answer.
Whereas the language of design gained prominence in the Industrial Age as a
means for the rendering of surfaces and finishes for the more effective marketing
of consumer products (‘posters and toasters’), the concept has far wider application in the present. The most effective practitioners and users of design in contemporary times have proved, time and again, that a multidimensional approach to
design that encompasses all levels and aspects of the user experience, including the
making and reinforcement of meaning and value for the user, also yields the greatest success in the market.
How can techniques developed for the creation and distribution of consumer
goods be relevant for the solving of large social and public challenges? While no
close relation between these two areas of human activity may immediately suggest
itself, a moment’s reflection will reveal that the large and intractable challenges that
we encounter in the public sphere are also multivariate, complex, with multiple
stakeholders and competing definitions of the problem and therefore of its possible solution. It is precisely for these reasons that they are likely to be amenable to
the application of design-based approaches for the creation of solutions, which go
beyond the obvious and readily visible options available to decision-makers.
Innovation in the Public Interest, therefore, will necessarily involve design as a
means of thinking, creative rearticulation, continuous reiteration and refinement
of the Grand Challenges facing society.
15
Accelerating Innovation by Investing in Design
For most people alive today, it would be obvious that our lives and experiences
have been dramatically shaped by technologies, services, and new kinds of consumer goods that could not have even been imagined just a few years before they
came about. Those goods have been widely adopted, those who conceptualized or
distributed or otherwise supported them have grown more wealthy, and those who
had invested in their companies have also prospered. In fact, this would appear to
be the most important story of an economic or financial newspaper — what are the
new products or propositions that are next likely to replicate this kind of extraordinary arc, from obscurity to ubiquity, bringing untold wealth to those who can
spot them early on.
But where, in the words of author Steven Johnson, do those good ideas come
from? Since Thomas Edison built Menlo Park in 1876, we have imagined that
those ‘inventions’ come from Science Buildings, R & D Centers, Laboratories of
some kind. That’s not entirely wrong, of course, for that is where most intellectual
property is in fact created around the world, but that intellectual property is often
productized through licensing agreements and special purpose vehicles that leave
their inventors behind in the labs in which they are most comfortable. New entrepreneurs with game-changing ideas aren’t most at home in laboratories — they
mostly live in the real world, out here with the rest of us.
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Since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple Computers in 1976 out of the
Jobs family garage, it has become more widely recognized that start-ups need space
and support of some kind in order to realize their vision. And so, over the past
two decades, we have witnessed the rise of incubators, first attached to educational
institutions and then in the private sector, funded by venture capitalists who seek,
in some way, to farm the innovativeness of a whole cohort of young entrepreneurs, on whom they have placed bets of varying sizes at varying stages of their
growth. At first these clustered around the Bay Area of San Francisco, but then
migrated to the greater Boston area, and New York City, but now can be found in
practically every city of the world with aspirations to host what Richard Florida
calls the ‘creative class.’ Such centers can now be found in Bombay and Bangalore,
not to mention Pune, Kanpur, and other university towns across India.
The idea that young people need a desk and a place to get coffee while they come
up with the next big thing makes sense, but they do tend to take rather long going
about it — in fact, if you give them a year, they’ll take a year or two. Isn’t there
any way to speed this process up? A small group of investors put together a program called Y-Combinator five years ago, which pulled together a cohort of seed
entrepreneurs for a boot-camp of just about three months, in which they had to
pull everything together or face the axe. The continuing success of the program
has made everyone in the venturing community sit up and take notice: it isn’t all
about the space, but about the kinds of inputs that go into a cohort of entrepreneurs that can make for success. The metaphor of the hatchery has given way to
that of a cyclotron: investors shouldn’t be waiting around for nature to take its
course, but speeding particles up to light speed and then shooting them out into
the market!
But why start at the level of the incubator or accelerator? If we really want more
innovation to come about in India, surely the place to start is our educational system. For ventures to be successful their founders need technical skills, to be sure,
but they also need to be informed of the market. They need intellectual suppleness, the ability to synthesize different kinds of qualitative and quantitative information, the ability to observe social behavior and then respond with new propositions that offer people things they did not know they wanted. All these qualities
of mind are what we call creative, an ability that we too often imagine is innately
present only in a few, and not teachable for the many. But there is a discipline that
teaches these skills, and its name is design.
And so, if we want to see more innovation in the marketplace and public squares
of our society, we need also to invest more in design.
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2
The Routinization of Innovation
Even as we were in the middle of hectic preparations for the second edition of
Design Public, we received the sad news of Steve Jobs’ passing. Many of our volunteers, young researchers and designers at CKS, and some of our partners felt the
need to express themselves and the surprising, inchoate loss they were experiencing. One young person wrote to me saying that while they had never been a Mac
user, and in fact they associated Apple products with some amount of exclusion
and control, they still felt that Jobs had inspired them.
Soon, memorials to Steve Jobs were everywhere in the mediasphere. Different
kinds of people have connected with the different aspects of Jobs’ complex and
synthetic personality, seeing in him a geek, an entrepreneur, a leader, a designer, an
artist, a visionary. The greater sum of Steve Job’s life and work achievements was
always on account of how he made all these parts fit together: left with the right,
the emotional and the rational, the aesthetic with the technical, the social with the
entrepreneurial.
The outpouring of affect from the digerati of India is noteworthy, because this
was not someone any of them had done business with, but only someone who
inspired them to imagine how their lives and careers might look like. It tells us that
the back-end Information Technology sector of the previous decade has passed,
and this new generation of Indian hackers and geeks yearns to do something else
with their skills: make new products and services that will touch people’s lives and
change them for the better. They want to be like Steve, in some way.
But how can one be like Jobs in India? If one wants to make new kinds of products and services and build new companies and create entire ecosystems in the
process, where would one start and what approach should one take? Steve’s own
words are markedly unhelpful in this regard, for throughout his life, he went out of
his way to increase the mystery and mythology of Apple’s approach to innovation:
We never do user-centered design, he claimed, because consumers don’t know
what they want. And even if we did make what they said they wanted it would be
too late by the time we hit the market, for they would be on to something else.
Steve also talked about his design team making products for themselves, for like
expert cabinet makers, only they would know where the deficiencies were.
How would such an approach work in a country like India? What would happen if
the top 5% were to design products and services in their own image, without any
inquiry into the market or the real needs of users? The answer lies in the marketshare of practically every Apple product since the mid-1980s: the few, the proud,
the inabled stand apart from the rest of us. This was an outstanding strategy for a
firm like Apple, but probably very bad advice for all the rest of us, and a catastrophe for the many that are not yet ready for the sophistications of Steve Jobs. As a
company Apple has never expressed any interest in Emerging Economies, except
to the extent that they have changed, and now resemble the mature markets that
Apple is already capable of understanding and serving.
Designing well is like giving someone a gift -- the receiver must know that it was
from you, but also feel like it is meaningful and relevant for them, and finally realize that you cared enough to feel and think about what it is like to walk in your
shoes and experience the world the way you do. This requires self-knowledge and
confidence as well as skill, but also empathy and understanding -- the ability to
understand how the end user is not like the person designing.
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A Structured Approach to Innovation
One of the great challenges involved in the creation of any sophisticated consumer good, be it product, service or system, is its complexity, owing to the multiple
dimensions of meaning and possible value, each of which needs to be aligned to
the consumer’s needs and expectations, and also to all the other dimensions, so as
to create a harmonious and integrated whole.
It often seems nearly impossible for any one intellect to hold together in his or her
mind all these different requirements, variable options, possible alignments and
points of misalignment at once. At the same time, when different functional teams
try to come together to develop a new version of a consumer product, we may
encounter the trend towards mediocrity and even stupidity that is known as ‘design
by committee.’ Clearly, leadership is required for innovation to arise, and at the
same time there must be some way for the distinctive insights and knowledges of
different specialist teams come together and contribute towards this more complex
whole which is the new consumer good.
In trying to address this question, much has been made of so-called ‘design thinking’ over the past few years, which has perhaps been best addressed by Tim Brown
in a series of books and essays. He defines design thinking in a variety of different
ways, including as a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the
designer’s toolkit. The problem with this definition really is how to distinguish design thinking from design. We must necessarily consider design an intellectual act,
albeit with diverse physical, social and interactional manifestations, for example,
drawing, making post-its, writing things down, maybe even measuring and calibrating, talking to people and frequently scratching one’s chin. Where does that leave
design thinking? Well, it is all of these actions, only done by someone who doesn’t
think of himself as a designer. As Socrates might point out, if someone draws
from a designer’s toolkit to act as a designer then he is indeed acting in virtue of
his power to design, and is indeed the designer. The term ‘design thinking’ seems
to have come about on account of a wide-spread misunderstanding of what design
is — that it is something concerned with the surfaces of things rather than their
total meaning and every layer and dimension which contributes towards it. The
confusion also arises out of the need to mark territory and to distinguish between
‘professional designers,’ who putatively design, and others who may be capable of
thinking like designers. But this distinction is untenable.
All managers, engineers, entrepreneurs, decision-makers who think synthetically about the data available to them in order to solve problems are designing.
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The question really is how well they are doing so. Are they capable of handling
complex, multivariate and recursive problems and arrive and something new and
hitherto unimagined? Or do they keep reaching for the shelf for tried-and-tested
modular solutions? As discussed above, one definition of design is that it is the
means through which difficult, intractable and wicked or recursive problems are
solved. The verb form of that process is designing, and it applies to anyone, professionally accredited to draw on a white board or not.
In our experience at CKS, the best way for this to arise is through a collaborative
and interactional process we call Design Analysis. Having completed ethnographic fieldwork, and having gained rich contextual insights into how intended
users of the new product or service deal with each other and the existing resources
in their lives, we organize this data into a set of Use Cases and Failure Cases.
One may define a complete set of Use Cases as a series of descriptions of (usually optimal) user behavior, each of which is non-overlapping, analytically indivisible and collectively comprehensive for the product, service or technology being
developed. Conversely, Failure Cases capture the non-optimal behaviors or experiences which must be overcome in order for the solution to be successful from the
point of view of the User. This is the set that most interests us. We then undertake
an analysis of each Use Case and interrogate it so as to reveal what is the cause of
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the failure observed -- is it material? Visual? Informational? Contextual? Systemic?
And exactly how?
This eventually leads us to identifying a series of likely solution vectors, which may
be classified, for example, as product form, product color-material-finish, product
interaction, product infographics, in the case of an actual product, for example a
portable ECG machine or a new kind of cellphone or tablet device. In other cases,
where the challenge has to do with systems or services design, these solution vectors might more look like, information management, training and capacity enablement, systemic and organizational redesign.
At this point, of course, we have only captured the possible solutions, which are
relevant to known problems. We have yet to integrate them into a new prototype
concept. All of that can come later. In my view, however, this analytic stage represents the very crux of innovation. It is this series of cognitive maneuvers that
proves hardest for most minds to accomplish, precisely because we are not generally taught to think in this backwards way.
Design Analysis turns out to be not an individual but collective and social process,
requiring small and large groups to be able to work together in relation to the
available information about the task or challenge at hand. The use of such a design
frame of mind, when appropriately structured, can lead to innovative ideas, to new
insights, and to new actionable directions for organizations. Design Analysis is a
critical means through which the express and latent needs of Users can be married
with the technical capabilities of a complex product or service in a systematic and
organized manner. These skills can be taught. This process is replicable, and not
only within the private sector, but also within government, within the public sector
and the social sector.
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The CKS Innovation Cycle
Innovation arises when we see in a visionary way, see things anew, see things as
they really
are or as they really should be. But this seeing of things a new way must also be
organized to some extent, or else it devolves into a fugue of mutually exclusive
and confusing branched possibilities. Therefore, it is necessary to structure one’s
creative eye into three distinct phases of cognitive action:
(i) examining, evaluating and redefining the fundamental challenges at hand,
(ii) generating multiple possible options and solutions in parallel, and
(iii) prioritizing and selecting those solutions which are likely to achieve the greatest benefits
These activities may also be undertaken in a recursive or reiterative manner, for
finer degrees of specificity as a team gets closer and closer to the solution.
At CKS we have structured and routinized these cognitive strategies into a series
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of phased work, which we call an ‘Innovation Cycle.’ It has proved a useful framework to incorporate into the working, planning and thinking of different types of
organizations in order to bring about greater innovation-focus and innovationorientation in their annual or biennal cycles.
The CKS Innovation Cycle consists of three arcs:
I. Understand
Through active or passive participation techniques, organizations should seek to
understandtheir context, market, users’ challenges, interactions, needs and preferences and their existing ecology. This ethnography-driven first phase helps us to
understand exactly how a service is used at all levels, and to identify what works
and what does not.
II. Develop
In a studio environment or through collaborative workshops, we conceptualize,
design and develop solutions that respond to the earlier identified areas of need.
From the gathered data, we develop multiple possible solutions and evaluate their
relative values and optimal feasibility.
III. Enhance
In the last phase of innovation, we take our solutions directly to the intended
consumers and communities to test and enhance our proposed solutions. We
involve users in a collaborative dialogue to see how our solutions can be tweaked
to fit better into the client’s future application contexts. And it is by making it more
widespread and more easily understood, learned and applied, that we can more
fully achieve the promise of this Age of Innovation.
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3
Innovation in India
In India, innovation is emerging as one of the most important rubrics in the
discourse on how to bring about greater and more consistent economic and social
development. One observes steadily growing investments in R&D across the
country, the setting up of national and state innovation bodies, as well as the introduction of government-sponsored innovation funds. There have also been several
conferences and debates on innovation and how to best promote and accomplish
it in India, and a number of articles on the subject, written for newspapers and
magazines, as well as more informal platforms like online forums and blogs.
Academic engagement and Indian authorship on the subject has also exploded
the last five years. A book search for ‘Innovation in India’ on Amazon yields 790
results. Despite widespread agreement on the importance of innovation in India,
there are wide gulfs between different conceptions of innovation and the path India that should take towards securing benefits through investments in innovation.
Many Indian conversations around innovation begin by talking about jugaad, that
uniquely Indian approach to making a joint, or temporary fix when something
complex, like an automobile or a steam engine stops working. Initiatives like Anil
K. Gupta’s Honeybee network have been started in recent times in order to document and promote the many jugaad-driven rural innovations across India. However, many observers have pointed out that while jugaad is certainly innovative,
it is a response to the lack of an innovation culture -- more a survival or coping
mechanism at a time of need than a systematic methodology to effectively address
a wide-ranging, complex set of problems.
Another specifically Indian approach to innovation that has entered into wide currency of late is so-called ‘frugal innovation,’ deemed by many (including the Government of India) to be the most appropriate for the Indian context. In its midterm assessment of the 11th five-year plan, the National Planning Commission
stressed the need for innovation in India in order to ‘accelerate its growth and ... to
make growth more inclusive as well as environmentally sustainable.’ The document
went on to say that ‘India needs more frugal innovation that produces more frugal
cost products and services that are affordable by people at low levels of incomes
without compromising the safety, efficiency, and utility of the products. The country also needs processes of innovation that are frugal in the resources required to
produce the innovations. The products and processes must also have frugal impact
on the earth’s resources.’
The late management guru C. K. Prahalad, along with innovation thinker
R.A. Mashelkar, formulated a similar theory called the More-from-Less-for-More
(MLM theory of innovation) theory of Innovation, which advocates a focus on
innovations that allow for more production using less resources but benefit more
people. Under this rubric come products like the $2000 Tata Nano car, the Tata
Swach water filter and the Tata Ginger hotels — all more affordable versions of
existing technologies.
While both frugal innovation and the MLM theory are certainly valuable in terms
of bringing affordable products and services to a greater number of people, and
may even be considered a necessary first step on India’s innovation path, they
barely graze the surface of what innovation can accomplish. That is, innovation
is capable of bringing about complete paradigm-shifts and redefining the way we
perceive and interact with the world. Take the cellphone, for example: it revolutionized communication in previously inconceivable way, provided consumers
with a product of unprecedented value and created an entirely new market. The
cellphone was a result of years of directed, intentional innovation efforts and large
investments, and would not have ever been created if the people responsible simply set out to make the existing telephone cheaper and more accessible to all.
A third emerging stream within the discourse on India’s innovation paradigm, convincingly argues that India has yet to achieve its innovation potential, is represented by Rishikesha T. Krishnan in his recent book From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation.
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In his view, while jugaad and frugal innovation may be indicative of the Indian
potential for innovativeness, this potential is not utilized or given opportunity to
flourish due to the lack of an enabling culture. India’s many diverse and complex
needs can be met only through systematic innovation, and major shifts have to
first take place in our educational institutions, government policies and commercial
firms in order for such an innovation-enabling culture to come about. But what
is systematic innovation? More conversation and thought is required to arrive at a
shared understanding of this question.
The one thing that India’s innovation theorists have not said is that the absence of
a culture of innovation is intrinsically linked to many of the most intractable problems facing India as a nation. These include poor delivery of government services,
inadequate systems of personal identification and the absence of widely available
financial services for rural poor, health and sanitation failures. This list can go on.
Cumulatively, the inability of India as a nation, society and economy to adequately
provide for its own population no longer reflects a failure of implementation, but
rather of a failure of innovation, for there are not immediately-available off-theshelf solutions that would make it possible for these grand challenges facing India
to be redressed.
Rather, we need to look at these intractable problems from the more sophisticated
and empowering lens of innovation, for them to begin to be solved. This, to a
great extent, forms the basis of this edition of the Design Public Conclave.
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4
How Shall We Define the Public Interest?
Having described and discussed what innovation is and how it can sometimes be
accomplished, we may now turn to the question of how it can align with the Public Interest. But first we must first ask: how do we define the Public Interest? Or,
even more fundamentally, what is the Public?
On account of India’s socialist past, and despite the nearly extinct figuration of
India as a ‘developing’ society, one often encounters a conventional figuration of
different ‘sectors of society’ in terms of (i) the Government (ii) the Public Sector
(iii) the Social Sector and (iv) the Private Sector. Whereas, prior to liberalization (i)
and (ii) were seen to operate in a manner indistinguishable from one another, their
roles now appear to be diverging, with the role of Government having to do more
and more with the creation and regulation of markets, while the Public Sector
is either privatized or else outsources all its core functions and operations to the
Private Sector.
While each of these sectors may operate in ways which it claims are in the Public
Interest, the ways in which they make these claims are varied, and in each case,
it may be difficult to articulate how the interests of the particular bureaucracy
or organizational or financial-communications network is actually aligned with
the putative Public Good. The collective interests of society, when described as
the vector sum of all the diversely oriented forces operating upon and within it
appears as a static quantity, which can easily be reduced — through corruption,
inefficiency, venality, cupidity, and the concomitant destruction of value — but
which cannot easily be increased except in so far as a functioning service providing
entity continues to operate with its own enlightened self interest in mind. Thus do
we once again derive, through a metaphor of vector integration, Adam Smith’s famous Invisible Hand, whereby private ambitions are channelled towards the larger
aims of society.
Another approach to the Public Interest is as that object which Journalism serves.
More generally, the press, journalists and the media widely-considered, are defined
as such in virtue of their ability to conceptualize and serve something we posit as
being interesting to the Public. In order to consider this proposition further, we
might need to consider how the Media relates to the rest of society.
The classic, European means of defining the Press is in terms of the Estates of
Society, of which it is the Fourth, following the Clergy, the Nobility and the House
of Commons. It is not entirely clear, of course, that the first three Estates are
properly represented in India as a tight and triangular triumvirate. For one thing,
32
we have abolished the nobility, and have only a figurehead President, who is usually
allied with the government in power, which in turn is formed out of the legislature. So those two Estates have become more or less mutually-identical and have
merged. Moreover, unlike the Roman Catholic Pope or the Anglican Archbishop
of Canterbury, we have no single religious leader recognized as representing the
faith of the land. So while the Clerical Estate also looms large in the Public Life of
the nation, it is not unified nor represented univocally.
Here in India there is also, of course, a Fifth Estate, namely Civil Society, of which
we were recently powerfully reminded when Anna Hazare and his supporters took
over Ram Lila Grounds in New Delhi. Each of these Estates would appear to have
a kind of claim on representing the Public, and each may attempt to do so from
time to time, in coalition or contest with other Estates. The interactions between
these diverse Estates of Society may, in fact be getting more and more agonistic
and mutually antagonistic, and one may even propose that the Public Interest can
only briefly be glimpsed whenever these contests come into play.
The clash or collisions between different sections of society give rise to temporary
disruptions or irruptions which can bring about change. We may recall that innovation is also a vector of change, specifically socio-technical change. There would
seem, therefore, to be a possible alignment between the possibility of the Public
Interest and the processes of Innovation. More work will remain to be done,
however, by the participants of the Design Public Conclave, to explore and explain
where precisely those alignments lay, and how the creative-destructive force that is
Innovation can be made to align with the Public Interest.
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5
The Challenge of Governance Innovation
In the first edition of the Design Public Conclave, we addressed particularly the
challenge of governance innovation, and explored different routes and pathways
through which it might be achieved.
Even as we were preparing to host the first Design Public Conclave in New Delhi
in early 2011, another group was organizing to march on Parliament, and take up
temporary residence at Jantar Mantar, the capital’s traditional venue for civic protest. What became Team Anna was demanding an end to corruption, a challenge
so vast and so nearly unfathomable in this nation divided by poverty and plenty,
it might seem like howling at the wind. What no one could have predicted at the
beginning of that movement was the kind of broad coalition that would come out,
across urban and rural India, against this hated object. Team Anna had successful made a link between gross anti-competitive corruption at the intersection of
the government and large private players, which operates at the highest levels of
power and the kind of petty corruption — more accurately citizen extortion —
which you might encounter every time you run a red light, having left your wallet
at home.
By the end of the summer there was Anna Hazare’s fast, different kinds of
criticism and riposts from the ruling coalition, which eventually culminated in
a memorable debate in parliament. But before all that, there was also a notable
response from Nandan Nilekani, who gave an interview to CNN-IBN about how
his UID authority was more likely to curb petty corruption than all the marches
and demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and Ram Lila grounds.
Nilekani spoke in terms of systems. He said that he’d taken a ‘systems approach’
to thinking about failures in India’s Public Distribution System (PDS): “The way
you look for corruption is through analytic tools. You look for suspicious behavior
the way credit card companies do. Why would you use a nineteenth century approach in today’s day and age?” he asked. He talked about the top-line goals of the
UID initiative in terms of a series of new use cases that would now become available to PDS beneficiaries: “We need to see that we give people an identity so that
they are not denied something because they have come from the village to the city.
We need to see that the PDS is portable from one distribution center to the other
so if there is a problem in one place the person is not denied benefits. We need to
ensure that people have a more hassle-free relationship with the state.” This is the
kind of approach many service, software and systems designers would also take in
trying to resolve the fundamental challenges of citizen-state interactions.
But Nilekani’s technocratic impulses were also powerfully on display in this interview: “Why do we have this agitation when a Lokpal bill is already before the
standing committee of parliament?” he asks. Based on our analysis of the interactions between different sectors of society, we can now answer that Team Anna had
mobilized the authority of the Fifth Estate, Civil Society, to challenge the normal
functioning of the Third Estate in the name of the Public Interest.
36
Hazare and Nilekani represent two contrasting ideal types in their approaches
to social change in India — one using mass mobilization and ethical and moral
appeals and the other looking for technological, regulatory, organizational, and
management solutions to bring about change. For much of this year they appear to
have been talking different languages. Is there a way to translate across their idioms
and bridge this gulf in Indian public discourse? Can the language of design serve
as a kind of lubricant to the clogged gears of India’s social and political machinery? Can we take and innovation approach to the problem of governance?
The problem of governance is perhaps as old as society, as old as the rule of law.
But it is only more recently — perhaps the last five hundred years of modernity
— that human societies have been able to conceive of different models of government, different modalities of public administration, all having different effects
on the configuration of society. The problem of governments, of governmentality,
and of governance is always also the problem of how to change the processes and
procedures of government, so as to enhance the ends of the state and to promote
the collective good.Since the establishment of India’s republic, many kinds of
changes have been made to the policies and practices of its state. We may think of,
for instance, successive stages of land reforms, the privatization of large-scale and
extractive industries, the subsequent abolition of the License Raj and so and so
forth. We may also consider the computerization of state documents beginning in
the 1980s, and more recently, the Right To Information Act (RTI). More recently
there have been activist campaigns to reduce the discretionary powers of government and to thereby reduce the scope of corruption in public life.
While all these cases represent the continuous process of modification, reform,
and change to government policy and even to its modes of functioning, this is
not what we have in mind when we speak of ‘governance innovation.’ Rather, we
intend a specific process of ethnographic inquiry into the real needs of citizens,
followed by an inclusive approach to reorganizing and representing that information in such a way that it may promote collaborative problem-solving and solutioneering through the application of design. This process must be participatory, like
Team Anna’s movement, and it must be systematic like Nilekani’s UID reforms, so
that minute and specific improvements in the functioning of state systems can be
effected for the benefit of the citizen who is at the receiving end of different kind
of interactions with the State.
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Design for Governance Innovation
Many European countries have government-supported design conglomerations for
the purposes of enhancing business and the government’s interface with the public. Design Council in the UK not only works to create public identities but also
helps formulate national design strategies that help the United Kingdom to differentiate its national brand and achieve broad national benefits. Elsewhere in the
UK, a private organization, Think Public, and various governmental agencies, are
working through a consultative approach with citizens to better target governmental services so as to maximize citizen benefits. In Denmark, three national ministries came together to establish an internal innovation center called Mind Lab,
which seeks to discover and implement new and improved means for the delivery
of social and welfare services to its citizens. In the context of public health, the
first major public health information system has been built in Canada, and in many
ways it may serve as a reference and benchmark for other countries around the
world. The first deployment of a public health information system in developing
country contexts is in Ghana, where a specialized Resource Center is even now being conceived to enable the support and further development of this new system.
38
In India, early innovation research and concept development activities by the
Center for Knowledge Societies for the Gates Foundation has shown promising
results in terms of new opportunities to enhance the quality of health care delivery
through the Bihar pilot itself, using the tools and techniques of ethnography, design, and user experience enhancement. In its studios in New Delhi and Bangalore,
CKS has hosted innovation workshops with international health experts, public officials and other stakeholders to envision new kinds of technologies and solutions
for improving public health delivery. In future, it may be possible to organize these
kinds of efforts in the form of an Innovation Lab or Innovation Center.
Whereas, in the past, attempts have been made to reform government, to make it
more efficient, to reduce corruption and the arbitrariness of decisioning authority.
Beneficial as these approaches may have been, they have not always been successful in fundamentally transforming the ways in which bureaucracies think about
their mission, objectives and goals. They have not resulted in greater consumer
orientation of these cadres, or greater public participation in the decision-making
of these bureaucracies. These are the kinds of benefits that the skills of design and
the processes of innovation can bring to governmental and quasi-governmental
bureaucracies.
But none of this can happen without a more widespread transformation of India
into a society that welcomes innovation, believes in the possibility of social change,
and approaches difficult challenges with a light optimism and spirit of collaboration. One of the most important lessons for us, through the first edition of Design
Public, was that the creativity and innovativeness of governments is directly linked
to the society and economy within which they are situated. One cannot have innovative government without a broader economic and social context which supports,
rewards and therefore reinforces the virtuous cycle of innovation.
At the same time, we learned more about how governments change and how they
acquire new skills, values, aptitudes and ways of working. In the Indian context
most of the social, economic and even technological change that we have observed over the past two years has come about through the efforts of the private
sector. Consequently, government in India has come to expect to be changed by the
private sector.
If governments in India or other regions of South Asia or the wider emerging
economy world are to become more innovation oriented and innovation focused,
this will only occur due thanks to new kinds of consortia and public-private-social
partnerships, which together bring a new kind of culture of innovation into being.
39
6
The Path Forward
The second edition of Design Public has enjoyed many more partners, a wider
array of well-known and well-respected speakers, and more enthusiastic and
involved volunteers, guests and other attendees. It is being held in Bengaluru, now
recognized as the leading metropolitan center for innovation, design, research, and
development in India.
The two editions of Design Public this year have heralded the final conclusion of
India’s career as a developing country and its emergence as an innovation society.
The conversations and deliberations at Design Public will establish new priorities
for different stakeholders to contribute in different ways to accelerate the pace and
widen the scope of innovation in India. For this purpose it will be necessary to
educate Indian industry as well as the public as to
•
•
•
the varied approaches to and possible steps involved in innovation
the importance of design and its relationship to innovation
how innovation can solve the grand challenges of society
During the Conclave itself, it will be possible for attendees to be involved in
brainstorming, concepting and ideation sessions with innovation specialists from
CKS as well as domain experts in different fields such as education, healthcare
and sanitation. In this way, they can better arrive at an immersive and experiential
42
understanding of how innovation is accomplished, and what challenges are faced
when attempting to solve complex societal and value-chain challenges.
Thanks to Intel, TCS, GE, the Gates Foundation, Arghyam, Janaagraha and other
partners and participants, we have already identified certain specific challenges that
assembled partners can take up in order to build public-private-social partnerships
in order to address and overcome. These include:
•
•
•
•
•
Online Higher Education
Financial Inclusion and Banking for all
Improved Medical and Health Services for all
Clean Water and Sanitation Solutions
Participatory and Innovative Civic Administration
Design Public is already serving as a platform through which new networks, alliances and coalitions are being built on these topics. Through this conclave, we aim
to formalize some of these working relationships in order to set a more comprehensive and ambitious agenda for a large international event in New Delhi on the
12th of April 2012. It is expected that many of the organizations and companies
represented at this edition of Design Public will come on board as sponsors and
partners for the next event.
Many participants will be focusing on what is missing from the Indian innovation
ecology, and there is an emerging consensus that there is a need for a specific kind
of innovation program called an accelerator, which can help create new companies
that address the grand challenges identified above. We will be seeking partners for
this kind of innovation accelerator as well as possible funding and advisory relationships to bring about this kind of resource or institutional entity.
Findings and outbriefs from the Conclave will be shared with Indian and international media, with government agencies including the Karnataka State Innovation
Council and the National Innovation Council. Funding agencies including USAID, Hivos, the Gates Foundation among others have expressed an interest in the
outcomes of this event, and they will be specifically briefed on the emerging focus
and interest in innovation as a means of bringing about socio-economic change.
Finally, we expect that the media will play a seminal role in reporting on and interpreting and translating the intense and informed dialogue and discussion that will
ensue in Bengaluru, as we take on the important question of how to make Innovation serve the Public Interest.
43
A Glossary on Design,
Innovation and the Public Interest
From the time of the Siva-Sutras through to the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary and the
techno-futurist writings of J. G. Ballard, definitions and redefinitions have served as
critical means through which to establish new discourses and constitute new communities.
Our Glossary on Design, Innovaiton and the Public Interest, therefore, falls somewhere
between the Amara-Kosha and the Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce.
In this glossary you will find a number of terms that are often used by designers and
innovation specialists. We have also addressed key terms related to governance, statecraft
and the public interest. We hope you will find these entries to be useful for reference before,
during and after the Conclave.
Where we have found good definitions ready-to-hand, we have specifically cited the authors or institutions who have provided them. In all other cases these definitions have been
developed in collaboration with colleagues at the Center for Knowledge Societies.
Apple An American corporation that
reigns as the current organizational
embodiment of Design, Innovation,
and User-Centered thinking, creating
products that seem to anticipate Users’
expectations and desires before they
are even aware that they have them.
See also: Consumer Value
Brainstorming A collaborative activity
in which small groups work together to
generate as many new ideas or solutions to a problem as they can in response to particular kinds of stimulus
and a particular framing of the problem. Ethnographic data is often the
best form of stimulus. Large format
index cards or post-it notes are good
ways for participants to express their
ideas. Team members should seek to
build upon one another’s ideas and to
express them visually, so far as possible.
Co-creation
“...increasingly, the joint efforts of the consumer and the firm - the firm’s extended network
and consumer communities together - are cocreating value through personalized experiences
that are unique to each individual consumer.
This proposition challenges the fundamental
assumptions about our industrial system - assumptions about value itself, the value creation
process, and the nature of the relationship
between the firm and the consumer. In this
new paradigm, the firm and the consumer
co-create value at points of interaction. Firms
cannot think and act unilaterally.”
— Prahalad, C. K., and Venkat Ramaswamy. The Future of Competition:
46
Co-creating Unique Value with Customers.
Boston, MA: Harvard Business School
Publishing, 2004.
See also: Crowdsourcing
Concept Design The description of
a possible Design solution in words,
diagrams, and other forms of text
and visualization to communicate an
imminent possibility that does not yet
exist. Concept Design is the first and
fundamental stage of design, from
which the proposed solution may come
to be described to increasing levels of
fidelity.
Consumer Value The benefits and
advantages experienced or perceived by
a consumer beginning well before the
moment of purchase, at the point of
retail sale, extending through the product’s lifetime and period of use, and
beyond into the memory and imagination of the consumer as and when she
should have occasion to reflect on the
myriad ways in which the consumer
good in question has impacted her life,
style, values and livelihood.
Convergent Thinking
“The ability to narrow the number of possible
solutions to a problem by applying logic and
knowledge.”
— “Convergent Thinking.” Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. Farmington Hills,
MI: Gale Group, 2001.
See also: Divergent Thinking
Creative Destruction
“The opening up of new markets, foreign or
domestic, and the organizational development
from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S.
Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological
term—that incessantly revolutionizes the
economic structure from within, incessantly
destroying the old one, incessantly creating a
new one. This process of Creative Destruction
is the essential fact about capitalism.”
— Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edition. Mansfield Center: Martino Publishing, 2011
Crowdsourcing The inclusion of
large groups or the public at large into
specific forms of decision making or
solutioneering using public platforms
such as websites, wikis, mobile media or
other mechanisms that allow members
of such groups to contribute ideas or
propositions and for others to validate,
ratify or improve them.
Design 1. Any expression of intentionality or purposiveness by an agent,
including for example the scratching
of one rock against another. 2. The
process or path through which a final
solution comes about. 3. The iterative
description of a proposed solution, using language, gesture, text, visualization,
plastic modeling, and any other form
of human expression, to increasingly
higher degrees of fidelity, until it approximates the object of design itself.
4. To see the world other than it is, to
see it as it could or should be.
design An increasingly fragmented
set of visually-related competencies,
acquired more through apprenticeship than through formal training, that
subserve the needs of post-modern
consumer capitalism.
Design Analysis 1.Ways of thinking, conceptualizing, imagining, and
envisioning solutions to problems that
(i) redefine the fundamental challenge
or task at hand, (ii) develop multiple
possible options and solutions in parallel, and (iii) prioritize and select those
which are likely to achieve the greatest
benefits in terms of, for example, impact, viability and cost. 2. A collective
and social process, that allows small
and large groups to work together in
relation to collected and available information about a complex challenge, that
can lead to innovative ideas, to new insights, and to new actionable directions
for organizations. 3. A process through
which the express and latent needs of
Users can be married with the technical capabilities of a complex product
or service in a systematic and organized
manner. 4. A set of replicable, teachable skills, which can be employed not
only within the private sector, but also
within government, within the public
sector and the social sector.
47
Design Engineering The technical
development of a Concept Design,
beyond its visual, formal and strategic
articulation, towards a working prototype that will nearly resemble the final
product, by employing the tools and
technologies of material, electronic,
informatic or other dimensions of
Engineering.
Design Research All forms of data
capture, research, intelligence gathering,
and insight generation that may serve
to inform the design and development of any product, service, system
or solution. Methodologies commonly
employed in the course of Design
Research may include Ethnography,
User interviews, Usability tests, and
other interactive and immersive means
for engaging with and observing prospective Users.
Design Strategy An overarching
approach and systematic policy of
expressing, associating or otherwise
aligning the physical and aesthetic
values of a product or service with
the expectations and needs of Users
(based on underlying conceptual, social,
psychological or other factors) so as to
advance the commercial interests of
the manufacturers or providers.
Design Thinking Thinking like a
designer, while overtly doing something
else, for instance Ethnography, market
research, business strategy, training or
thought leadership.
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“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the
designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of
people, the possibilities of technology, and the
requirements for business success.”
— Tim Brown, President and CEO,
IDEO, <www.ideo.com/about/>
Divergent Thinking
“The ability to develop original and unique
ideas and to envision multiple solutions to a
problem.”
— “Divergent Thinking.” Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology. Farmington Hills,
MI: Gale Group, 2001.
See also: Convergent Thinking
Fifth Estate Civil Society, NonGovernmental Organizations, People’s
Groups. The set of social forces that
self-consciously identify as being dedicated to the achievement of societal
benefits as distinct from economic or
political gain.
See also: Fourth Estate and Estates
of Society
Fourth Estate That column of society
which preeminently styles itself as
dedicated to and focused upon the
Public Interest.
See also: Fifth Estate and Estates of
Society
Ease of Use
“[Usability/ease of use] has been defined in a
very broad and inclusive manner as “the quality of use in context.” However, the practice
has focused heavily on task-centered thinking. If a given user accomplishes a given task
quickly and without mistakes, the product
is usable. Understanding the user is in effect
understanding how that person performs the
relevant tasks. What particularly characterizes
the discipline is just how detailed this understanding has to be. The tasks to be evaluated
are deconstructed into the smallest pieces
imaginable.”
— Lindholm, Christian, Turkka
Keinonen, and Harri Kiljander. Mobile
Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of
the Mobile Phone. New York: McGrawHill, 2003.
Estates of Society 1. Discrete loci of
distinct forms of power to which variant kinds of interest, purpose and Intentionality then aggregate, cohere and
align. 2. A European concept cognate
with the Hindu varna.
Ethnography
“Ethnography involves the researcher’s study
of human behavior in the natural settings in
which people live. Specifically, ethnography refers to the description of cultural systems or an
aspect of culture based on fieldwork in which
the investigator is immersed in the ongoing
everyday activities of the designated community
for the purpose of describing the social context,
relationships and processes relevant to the topic
under consideration. Ethnographic inquiry
focuses attention on beliefs, values, rituals, customs, and behaviors of individuals interacting
within socioeconomic, religious, political and
geographic environments.”
--American Anthropological Association, <www.aaanet.org/stmts/irb.htm>
Experience
“Experience is limited by all the causes which
interfere with perception of the relations
between undergoing and doing. There may
be interference because of excess on the side
of doing or of excess on the side of receptivity, of undergoing. Unbalance on either side
blurs the perception of relations and leaves
the experience partial and distorted, with
scant or false meaning. Zeal for doing, lust
for action, leaves many a person especially in
this hurried and impatient human environment in which we live, with experience of an
almost incredible paucity, all on the surface.
No one experience has a chance to complete
itself because something else is entered upon
so speedily. What is called experience becomes
so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to
deserve the name. Resistance is treated as
an obstruction to be beaten down, not as an
invitation to reflection. An individual comes to
seek, unconsciously even more than by deliberate choice, situations in which he can do the
most things in the shortest time.”
--Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New
York: Balch & Minton, 1934.
Governance The practice and process
of administration, management, regulation, organization and coordination of
the machinery and apparatuses of the
state.
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“The word yogakshema is a compound made
up of yoga, the successful accomplishment of
an objective and kshema, its peaceful enjoyment. Thus, peaceful enjoyment of prosperity,
i.e. the welfare of the people, is given as much
importance as knowledge, self-control, and
observance of dharma.”
— Kautilya, The Arthashastra of Kautilya. Translated by L. N. Rangarajan.
Penguin, 1987.pp. 70-71.
Innovation 1. Bringing newness into
the world; making and remaking the
world anew. 2. The transformation of
insight into actionable knowledge that
can make new use of the social and
material technologies already available
in the world.
Innovation Cycle A process devised
at the Center for Knowledge Societies
to integrate three distinct components
of Design Thinking into a formal
innovation process, including: (i)
Understand: the use of ethnography
to describe the context, behaviors,
needs and preferences of users in their
everyday environment, (ii) Develop:
the conceptualization, creation, development, detailing and specification
of multiple possible solutions, and
(iii) Enhance: the testing, trialing,
and refinement of proposed solutions
through interactions with end-users
either in the field or laboratory conditions.
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Innovation Workshop A specialized
environment in which small groups of
specialists work together in a highly
choreographed and coordinated way.
Through audio-visual stimulus and
instructions, they create new options,
possibilities or solutions using techniques of data review, role-playing,
concepts generation, wordplay, notetaking, visualization, and solution
creation (among many others).
Intentionality
“Intentionality is the power of minds to be
about, to represent, or to stand for, things,
properties and states of affairs. Intentionality
is a pervasive feature of many different mental
states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love
and hatred all exhibit intentionality.”
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Kaizen
Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better,” refers
to the continuous improvement of
processes in diverse organizational systems. It refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves
all grades of personnel from the head
of an organization to its frontline staff.
It can also apply to processes such
as purchasing and logistics that cross
organizational boundaries to become
part of an entire industry, supply chain,
or national economy.
Planning A fusion of the individual
psychological and cognitive process of
imaginative forethought with the social
and organizational process of arriving
and agreeing to a plan. Planning is aided
by having rich accurate data about the
facts on the ground, insightful representations of that information in the
form of maps, charts and other kinds
of diagrams, and social organizational
techniques which allow groups to organize their thought collectively.
“In preparing for battle I have always found
that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
— Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower
See also: Innovation Workshop
Public That external horizon which is
the culmination of diverse individual,
private, or local interests, projects and
goals, but which remains superordinate
to them all.
Public Interest That static, possibly
unknowable quantity which arises
upon the integration of all the vector
forces operating within a society, which
represent individual, private, or local
interests.
Public Sphere
“The public sphere is . . . a metaphorical term
used to describe the virtual space where people
can interact. . . . The World Wide Web, for
example, is not actually a web; cyberspace is
not a space; and so with the public sphere.
It’s the virtual space where the citizens of a
country exchange ideas and discuss issues, in
order to reach agreement about ‘matters of
general interest”
— Jurgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
(Studies in Contemporary German Social
Thought). English ed. trans. by Thomas
Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991.
Social Change A significant alteration in the existing social order of a
society, which may be driven by cultural, religious, philosophical, economic, scientific or technological forces. It
can be endogenous (driven by internal
factors) or exogenous (brought about
by external factors) or a combination
therein. It can be either uni-directional,
or cyclical, as in the case of the business cycle.
Service Design
“Service design is a design specialism that
helps develop and deliver great services. Service
design projects improve factors like ease of
use, satisfaction, loyalty and efficiency right
across areas such as environments, communications and products – and not forgetting the
people who deliver the service.”
— Engine Service Design, <http://
www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/>
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State 1. A social organization capable
of making war, peace and political
alliances so as to enlarge the territory
under its authority (Kautilya). 2. The
ultimate expression of human rationality (Hegel) 3. That entity which holds
a monopoly over legitimate violence
(Weber). 4. The vector sum of all lines
of power in a society (Foucault). 5.
That institution which is ultimately and
cumulatively responsible for the equity,
upliftment and welfare of its members
(Ambedkar).
Usability
“The design has been optimized for human
usage with respect to task completion, speed,
accuracy, self-evidency (minimized training
requirement), satisfaction, and safety. This
does not mean that every user will be able to
operate the offering in a flawless way (or even
avoid lethal mistakes). It means that care
is taken to optimize the design so that the
overall usage by the target population of users
is effective.”
— Schaffer, Eric M. and Susan Weinschenk. Certified Usable Designs: Products,
Applications
and Web Sites. Human Factors International, 2010.
Use Case 1. The counterform of the
product or service offering. 2. A narrative example that captures the specific
instance in which a real or imagined
product or service offers value or
meaning to its User.
“A particular form or pattern or exemplar of
usage, a scenario that begins with some user
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of the system initiating some transaction or
sequence of interrelated events.”
— Jacobson, Ivar (et al). Object-Oriented
Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven
Approach. Addison-Wesley, 1992.
User-Centered Approaches or strategies that focus on and proceed from
an understanding of the expectations
and needs of the User of a product,
service or technology, as distinct from
the possibilities of technology, market
forces, media, or any other set of social
or organizational factors.
User Experience Design An approach to the Design of things and
environments which seeks to envision
how their ultimate User might encounter and interact with that artifact or
system; the purpose of the Design is
to have made possible a particular quality or character of experience for most
if not all of those end-users.
Visualization The transformation of
linguistic, textual, numeric or otherwise
symbolic information into a diagram,
map, or other form of graphic illustration so as to express or provoke a new
kind of understanding of the same
information.
User An individual agent or subjective self who uses linguistic, cultural,
symbolic and material technologies to
manipulate or navigate the world in
which she finds herself.
Wicked Problem 1. A subclass of
problems for which there is no readyto-hand or off-the-shelf solution, but
which can only be addressed through
Design (with a capital ‘D’). 2. All
complex problems of state and society
in which different stakeholders have
radically different world views and
divergent frames for understanding the
problem, which moreover, may change
over time. 3. Problems which have no
formulation, owing to which the definition of the problem turns out to be a
Wicked Problem.
“The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail
because of the nature of [wicked] problems...
Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there
is nothing like the indisputable public good;
there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be
meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no
sense to talk about ‘optimal solutions’ to these
problems...Even worse, there are no solutions
in the sense of definitive answers.”
— Rittel, H.W.J. The Reasoning of Designers. Stuttgart: Institut fur Grundlagen
der Planung, 1988.
53
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62
About the Author
Aditya Dev Sood is a leading expert on innovation,
particularly its relationship to Design, Entrepreneurship and Social Change. He is the founder of the Center for Knowledge Societies, which uses ethnographic
research, design anlysis and user experience modelling
to make new things possible.