In the last few years, I have been working on several action-based research projects in the Global South focused on designing with marginalised communities in low-resource settings. In these contexts, designing frugal innovations is crucial to alleviating big and small problems that affect individuals and groups. However, questions about people’s agency and how to foster long-term transformative practice remain and keep emerging.
As investigated by Corsini, Jagtap, & Moultrie (2022), in recent years in a humanitarian design context, interest has shifted away from designing for marginalised people to designing with marginalised people, recognising the fundamental role of collaborative design and the active involvement of affected stakeholders in the design process for the social and human development of marginalised communities. However, when working with marginalised groups too often, desires and aesthetic pleasure leave space for basic and essential needs and functionality. The notions of ‘needs’, ‘basic needs’, and ‘immediate solutions’ often – and understandably – become a priority in humanitarian settings, with the risk of forgetting that for people affected by a crisis, attention to desires is essential to regenerate and restore themselves at a deeper level.
In the paper From Needs to Desire: Pluriversal Design as a Desire-Based Design, Renata M. Laitao (2022) argues that the creation of meaningful social change requires shifting the focus of design processes from needs to agentic desires. The author suggests that shifting the focus from mere needs, which often reflect a Eurocentric model of life, to personal agentic desires supports people’s agency and, consequently, human flourishing.
In line with this theory, the most recent projects I have developed in collaboration with FabLab Nepal/Impact Hub Kathmandu, have been designed – or better co-designed with the research team and stakeholders – with a focus on agentic desires.
In 2021, we developed a project with SIRC (Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre) in Kathmandu to co-design and 3D print therapy assistive devices for spinal injury patients. The design, development and testing of the devices were the results of a teamwork, including designers, occupational therapists and patients. While some of the devices were designed to meet everyday essential needs identified by the patients and therapists, other devices were designed following the patient’s desires, either to allow them to keep cultivating their passions or to meet their desire to have prosthetic devices that would look as natural as possible (Campoli et al. 2024).
One of the patients’ desire, for example, was to have a prosthetic finger that was not only functional but would also match their skin tone and have a natural shape so that people wouldn’t note it and they would feel less vulnerable and more at ease when engaging in social contexts. After the first prototype, the patient asked for a re-design that would consider these elements in addition to functionality. Another patient was keen to keep handwriting, which was their passion before the accident.
The team designed a writing-assistive device that enabled them to hold and use a pen. They stated that the ability to handwrite their personal experience after the accident and surgery that caused their spinal injury gave them a sense of achievement that helped the rehabilitation process.
In 2023, with the same team, we started working on a pilot project to introduce STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) education into community and government schools in Lalitpur municipality, with a focus on girls. We designed the research with the school teachers involved in the project to identify existing educational gaps that needed to be addressed and, at the same time, worked with them on their desires for their school and students. The two main desires that emerged from the conversations were access to visual and tactile resources to engage students in active learning and more time and opportunities for students to experience their learning in real-life experiences.
The project is still ongoing, but the research team is now working on two main actions to integrate educational needs and emerged desires: using the existing 3D printing facilities at the FabLab to print tactile resources for the students, such as a solar system and earth globe; and integrating subjects requested in the existing curriculum with traditional knowledge in the creation of STEAM activities that can be easily taught in schools and have at the same time practical applications in students’ daily life experiences.
In both projects, meeting people’s needs requires small actions that result from listening to people and, as stated by Manzini (2015: 96), “consider them as active subjects, able to operate for their own well-being”. With Sen (1999) and Leitao (2022), we agree that what marginalised communities and groups that live in a temporary or ongoing crisis are denied is often their human fulfilment. It would be wrong and disastrous to consider poverty merely a question of lack of material resources. Design can be a tool to help people (anyone!) meet their needs while living lives that they value and appreciate and that meet their desires.
References
Campoli, A., Luck, R., Shrestha, P., Pradhan, P., & Rana, P. (2024). ‘It is not rocket science but it can change our lives’: pluriversal design with FabLab Nepal at a spinal injury clinic. CoDesign, 20(1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2319280
Corsini, L., Jagtap, S., & Moultrie, J. (2022). Design with and by marginalized people in humanitarian makerspaces. International Journal of Design, 16(2), 91-105. https://doi.org/10.57698/v16i2.07
Leitão, R. M. (2022). From Needs to Desire: Pluriversal Design as a Desire-Based Design. Design and Culture, 14(3), 255–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2022.2103949
Manzini, E. (2015). Design When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Image Credits
All photos by Alessandra Campoli 2022-2024
Leave a Reply