Session 64 summary
Prof. Gareth is Head of Programmes of two masters’ programmes at the Royal College of Art, which revolves around Human Centred Designs and what can bring people of different disciplines together to work on quite complex challenges. They have students from different backgrounds on the course and having that mix of skill sets is what Gareth thinks is very powerful and therefore helpful in coming up with varied solutions to problems that need addressing and have an impact as a consequence of what it could do. Gareth did engineering, he has a general engineering background and he specialised in electrical and electronic engineering and he went to do his Ph.D. in Bio-Medical Engineering, where he was analysing signals from muscles called EMG signals and providing that information to doctors to help diagnose possibilities of muscular diseases. It was a purely technical task but at the same time very enjoyable and right out of his first degree into his PhD he was already working with people from different disciplines which he always found very fascinating. Subsequent to that he joined Apple, and worked in Singapore for 10 years. Up to that point Gareth was actually very much focused on technical skills. At Apple he started working with designers and got fascinated with the importance of design and the role of Human Centred Design. Through a collaboration with a colleague at Apple, who came from design background, he got fascinated of the link between design and engineering technology to solve more complex problems. Because he realised that designers thought about challenges in a different way than what Gareth was trained, he realised that those combination of skills is extremely important to tackle. Subsequently still in Singapore in late 90s he joined Ericsson, a telecom company, who predominantly deal with network site but were also doing mobile phones-looking at future mobile devices. His interest there moved not only from leading technology team working with designers but he also started working with anthropologists, psychologists where he was completely fascinated by the role of anthropology and understanding people in culture. Where they were looking at predominantly urban culture around the world and designing new future solutions for different types of cultural groups within the urban settings around the world. They looked at teenagers, looked at more professional adults and came up with a range of different concepts and product ideas and threw into prototyping and developing those ideas. Then he moved back to the UK in 2002 where he joined Cardiff Metropolitan University- Cardiff School of Art and Design and also ran his own businesses in various forms. Over the last 5-10 years his focus in the business work is centre for creativity which is his own project linking with training and development by adding creativity and innovation inside organizations. A year ago Gareth joined the Royal College of Art and became the Head of Programmes and since then he has been full-time in London Royal College of Arts. His research interest is quite wide; Human Centred Design (HCD), Creativity & Well-Being, Indigenous Research and Circular Economy.
There was an important paper written in 2017 from a western academic perspective highlighting the point that ‘Indigenous Research “has historically been completed on, rather than with” indigenous communities’. And Gareth thinks there has been a big push over the last 5 years, at least within the UK from research perspective to try and really make sure that that is not the way they are working. It is not an appropriate way in terms of making good solutions and it is also not sustainable and not ethically right. This is the ethos which is very much in his mind over the last 5 years in terms of his research work. One flavour of HCD is from the organization IDEO, which they call Design Thinking, it is what Gareth followed for the last 20-25 years on the kind of works that he did. It is a sort of philosophy that is involved in how academicians work with the students now. It really is looking at three aspects which somehow are interconnected; Desirability (Human), Viability (Business) and Feasibility (Technical). All these need to sit on a broader ecological context to not have negative impact on the future generations of people or the planet as a whole. So, the interaction between these three different key areas is often where the innovation happens, one can’t just focus on technology or just focus on anthropology which might be the classic understanding of people and culture or on business side. Design has played the key role in bringing these key elements together in the Human Centred Design HCD, probably the leading one over the last 25 years in making that happen. A lot of work that Gareth has done falls under this banner.
Gareth shares a case study: Healthcare in Zambia (2012-2017)where he did a project in healthcare in Zambia from 2012 to 2017 and the people involved were Cara Walkins, Judith Hall, Steve Gill and Gareth Loudon himself. Most of the work was done by Cara herself and Judith, Steve and Gareth were her supervisors, as a part of Cara’s Ph.D. research. Cara would go out with Judith to spend time in different hospitals whether it be major hospitals or health outposts in the rural villages with indigenous communities and try to understand people’s everyday life, focusing mainly on their healthcare needs and particularly interested in women initially. Part of the anthropological approach in terms of Human Centred Design is called ethnography and it is about using participant observation and interviews to capture and describe people’s behaviour, beliefs and values. Cara had an open brief and not a specific narrow brief which she tried to solve. She went with a broader understanding to understand the opportunities and needs. One thing she realised was that one of the biggest problems was road accidents in Zambia which often that meant that they were very high because of the road system and the people who got killed were often the young males and predominantly the main breadwinners for the families who had a lot of financial economic impact. They realised was that, that was the best area to focus as there was no ambulance service reaching those places. So, Cara decided to work with the tribal villages and decided to create healthcare emergency packs called ‘trauma packs’ for them so that the people could be the first responders to come out even without any medical training. It was important to design a trauma pack that could be used by them directly to help in a serious situation. The brief was to develop a “‘First Responder Pack’ composed of sustainable, locally sourced materials which can be used by people with limited knowledge, understanding and education to stabilise victims of road traffic accidents.” Initially she explored the materials and manufacturing capabilities of the different areas she was working in which were pretty rudimentary and then started developing a whole range of prototypes. She then started testing them back in the UK and see if it was medically appropriate with a whole range of different test and then redesign it until she got the product that were medically appropriate and relatively easy to use. She then also went back to Zambia and did the testing with the people who would end up using these solutions and observe whether they were able to use them correctly, understand how to use them both individually as components and also as a whole pack. They had a lot of success in terms of its performance and feedback from the testings’ that gave them a lot of encouragement that it was working quite well. Then the pack went out for further redesign and rounds of testing. Some of the key outcomes of that were; an ultra-low-cost trauma kit created specifically for manufacture and use in the developing world. They were also successfully used in real-life road traffic accidents in Zambia. So the team got further validation that the pack was effective. Subsequently it went on to large-scale trials in Namibia of a slightly revised design which didn’t work that well. One of the big lessons Gareth learned from this was- ‘is it really effective to have an approach where the research is predominantly lead by researchers based in the UK going out to Zambia for periods of time but not for long periods of time and if this is a sustainable solution. So, in the end it was not a sustainable solution in the sense that they were not able to secure the funding to help support that development in the local level and interestingly they got some resistance at the local level because there was also a sort of balance between one level creating a pack that was low cost but locally made vs wanting to but the latest highest technology (maybe from the west). In Namibia also it was an interesting insight in terms of there wasn’t full understanding of the needs of the different stakeholders and participants and therefore there were some weaknesses in the solutions they ended up creating.’
Gareth’s general reflections of the projects was; ‘people from diverse backgrounds should be involved in the implementation of projects in the villages, the villagers should be involved at the planning stage itself-since they have the best ideas regarding their needs and the practicability of ideas and also that each community is unique’. In the end the core lesson that Gareth learned in this project as a whole was the work Shrihini (healthcare worker in the fourth village) had been doing in the community- he had taken a very human centred design approach and followed those principles with great success.
Insights gained from discussions at the Indigenous Research Methods Workshop in Brazil (2019):
the council in the UK had funded a range of projects all around the world from Brazil to Kenya to Sudan to Pacific Islands and a range of different places. Where they brought everybody together in Indigenous Research Methods Workshop in Brazil, and shared all their experiences from the different projects and also what they felt was important and issues that need to be considered more broadly. This was predominantly to be fed back to the Research council on how they would fund projects in the future and also share those insights more broadly in publications. Gareth was asked to write a reflection piece where he mentions four key themes which he feels that are important from those workshops. The first one, is the importance of self-determination, the community members need to decide what they want to do and how they wanted to do it. Secondly, was the importance of creating something that has the benefit, a tangible of difference and has an impact in their community and Gareth feels often that this was lacking in the work done upto now in the communities. Third one is the recognition of the importance of natural way the indigenous community think and work which is holistic and interdisciplinary, that is their natural way of working dividing things into different discipline is not something which works for them and Gareth doesn’t thinks that it is appropriate but western academics is rooted in disciplines limiting themselves to only one of it. Finally, building capabilities was obviously very important- there were some issues that academics were coming from the outside those communities and they did their research and took away but they want it to be established/maintained in the local areas with structure to make it happen.
About the Speaker
Prof. Gareth Loudon
Prof. Gareth Loudon is the Head of Programmes (Innovation Design Engineering and Global Innovation design) and Professor of Creativity at the Royal College of Art. Prof Loudon is also the Director and Co-Founder of the Centre for Creativity which undertakes research, training and consultancy in key areas of creativity. His research interests focus on creativity and innovation, combining ideas from anthropology and psychology, engineering and design. Previously, Prof Loudon worked at the Cardiff School of Art & Design and for Apple Research and Ericsson Research in the design and development of new software and computer-embedded products.
