- In the first one of the these two videos,
I talked about the human-centered design process,
and the logical way in which we work.
Well, now I want to expand that even more,
and say there's a completely different model.
It's still human-centered design.
Still follows the four basic principles
of people, solving the right problem,
a system, and iterate and modify.
But we do it differently.
The way that traditional design is done,
is designers study the problem,
figure out what somebody needs,
figure out their capabilities.
Goes off, does a lot of thinking, tests, prototypes,
and come back eventually and says,
here people, here's the solution to the problem
you didn't even know you had.
So, aren't you happy?
No, people are usually not happy.
And especially if we're talking about issues
that affect a community, like transportation,
or low-cost housing, or access to food,
or access to jobs, access to almost anything
that they care about.
If you go to other countries, or even, for that matter,
remote parts of our country,
you'll discover they need good sanitation,
they need running water, they need better electricity,
they need communication services,
especially high-speed internet.
And if designers come in and look at what they're doing,
and say, oh, here's your problem, here's your solution,
it almost always fails.
It's an outsider coming in and telling you what to do.
Nobody likes that.
But that's what designers do.
They don't have to.
There are seven billion people in the world,
and a lot of them are wonderfully creative,
and they understand their problems.
They live them.
They suffer with them.
So they understand the problems,
and they come up with clever solutions.
And so instead of designers going into a community
and saying, oh, I see you have high rates of cancer,
and I see that you aren't getting proper medical care,
and, oh, let me suggest,
here's how you should solve that problem.
That's a real problem, by the way.
That's a project that we're doing
in Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia.
We don't go in and tell people what their problems are
and what their solutions are.
We go and we find the local healthcare workers
who have lived in that community their whole lives
and are trusted by the people.
And they've already made advances,
and they've already understand what the issues are.
And then what we do is we say, oh, we can help.
We can provide advice, we can provide mentoring,
we can facilitate,
but you're in charge.
So that's what we call community-based design.
It's something we're practicing also in downtown San Diego,
with people on the Tijuana/San Diego border.
We're practicing this in other places around the world.
We go and we find the creative people,
and we build on what they're doing.
Now, they might need advice, because, for example,
if you're working in healthcare, well, germs are invisible,
and so people may not understand all of the ramifications.
But we don't tell them what to do.
We educate, and help, and mentor them.
Local people do have two problems in their work.
One is, because they have limited resources,
they tend to fix the symptom,
and not the underlying problem.
And second, they don't have the resources
to treat the entire system, even if they recognize
it's a system-wide problem.
But again, that's where outside people
can be of assistance by providing expert knowledge,
by providing useful information,
and maybe by providing the political support
and government support that's necessary
to fund these activities.
So that's what we call community-based design.
It's design by the community,
and the designer is now an educator and a facilitator.
It's a very different role for designers,
but we think a much more positive one,
a much more promising one, and actually,
for the designers, a much more rewarding one.