Insider Blog: Talking People at the Royal College of Art

Talking People at the Royal College of Art Royal College of Art researchers Lisa Johansson and Catherine Greene explore people-centred design to create community and build trust between strangers.

Over the past two years we have noticed a shift in the work of design students at the Royal College of Art. In their concern for the environment many young designers find themselves trapped between being trained to design yet more “stuff” and not wanting to contribute to ever expanding landfills. Who wants to design the drill that only gets used 13 minutes in its entire life time when really, what the consumer wants is a hole, not a drill? Moving from a focus of designing for mass production they are increasingly concerning themselves with whole system thinking and a more holistic approach to design. This has resulted in an upsurge in projects that deal with community either by designing a service or tackling a particular issue through social innovation.

It was therefore timely to be asked by Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry, to think about community. Their motivation was not to produce new device designs but to really explore the debates around ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of community and the value that communication technologies can bring in building and sustaining the communities of today.

RIM has an ongoing relationship with the Royal College of Art through its Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD), with whom it has been working for six years. The HHCD advances an approach to design that is people-centred and socially inclusive and previous projects with RIM have looked at issues such as communication in the family unit and work-life balance.

The Centre launched the project with an introductory presentation based on three months of research. The themes presented by Rachel Botsman in her book What’s mine is Yours, How Collaborative Consumption is changing the way we live was an important influence. The students were asked to investigate how technologies could enable trust between strangers and to look at how online and offline technologies could be used to complement each other. The aim was to support and enhance communication, by increasing opportunities for social exchange.

Six teams took part from the RCA departments of Design Products, Innovation Design Engineering and Communication Art & Design. Each team identified groups or communities to work with and research activities included running workshops with over thirty school children to ask them about their thoughts on future technologies; interviewing fifteen parents about the battles they have each day to get the family to sit down at meal times together; and jogging alongside thirteen runners to understand what sort of running community they would like to be part of.

Research and ideas were developed into design concepts which were then presented at the college in front of a judging panel of academic staff from the RCA and senior members of RIM’s design team. As each team had spent time investigating both the positive and negative effects of communication technologies, it was interesting that most of their work focused on the often neglected, emotional impact of using technology.

One example, The Garden, is an online public space for people in long distance relationships. It allows people to share their daily experiences with their partner in a more creative and expressive way than is currently made possible through text message, email or VOIP services. Couples create a virtual ‘tree’ together that grows with their relationship. The garden is open to all offering support to people through the knowledge that there are other people in the same situation as you.

Another project, Virtual Boss, is based on the insight that many home workers lack the self discipline to work efficiently as they miss the pressure of having a boss. They also miss the support of the workplace community around them. The idea is an online system that recreates this office community culture for homeworkers in the same local area, helping to create self discipline through a a virtual boss who’s always on your back and holding Christmas parties for everyone at the local cafe.

Both of these are examples of designers looking for ways to bring together people who are going through the same experience creating a system of support and trust between strangers. Harnessing empathy in this way is key in generating new types of peer to peer relationships, something that is fundamental to collaborative consumption.

It seems that today’s design students are not only questioning the effects of mass production but are keen to accelerate the emergence of a more collaborative way of life.

Many are re-thinking the currently established design practice. Instead of solely designing for mass manufacture they are working directly with the people around them, seeing them not as passive recipients of design but as active contributors in forming ideas. The students have learnt from working with real people rather than contrived consumer stereotypes and their designs benefit from this type of empathy and understanding. After all, consumers just consume products, but real people live full and interesting lives - something infinitely more inspirational for designers.

Research In Motion has recognised this, as Jason Griffin, Vice President of Advanced Ergonomics says: “It’s not so much about the mobile device itself, it’s about the quality of communication”- in other words, it is not about selling the drill, it is about providing the hole.

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