Sujit Devkar

A Case Study in Participatory Service Design for Rural Healthcare System in India Using a Pattern Language

Application of a Service and Touch Point design pattern language for a rural healthcare service in India with the participation of a multidisciplinary team comprising designers, IT professionals, business analysts and doctors was studied. We discuss the process followed, and the benefits of using a service design pattern language. Specifically: the participants could start with a few patterns and progressively acquire an understanding of the patterns through mutual assistance; the patterns and associated sharable artefacts facilitated communication and continuity of thought process among the team members; the team could dynamically refine a set of appropriate patterns and were guided to rich, comprehensive and innovative solutions. The real life constraints neither hindered the progress nor the quality of the solutions. The potential of embedding the pattern language in a socio-technical system to mediate the process was demonstrated. The study provides several theoretical and practical insight concerning the use of pattern languages.

Validation of a Service Design Pattern Language as an Effective Framework for Multidisciplinary Design

A Service and Touch Point Ecosystem Design pattern language was validated for its effectiveness as a service design framework. The participants forming multidisciplinary teams designed for two distinct service scenarios -- healthcare and education service. The well triangulated exhaustive study has identified that the pattern language led to richer and comprehensive service design, facilitated multidisciplinary collaboration and enabled structured yet creative design. Further, it established that the participants could design effectively using the pattern language despite lack of design expertise. These and several findings as well add to the knowledge about pattern languages in general as design frameworks.

A Grounded Theory Approach for Designing Communication and Collaboration System for Visually Impaired Chess Players

Social interactions for visually impaired take place in the traditional way, such as meeting and calling, digital platforms are largely not utilized by them. Empirical research for visually impaired has focused largely on accessibility, usability and is yet to understand the problems from CSCW aspect holistically. We carried out a qualitative study of communication and collaboration activities for 43 visually impaired chess players in India. Through semi-structured interviews, the participants’ experiences in using existing collaboration and communication channels were noted. A Grounded Theory based analysis was performed using Atlas.ti and themes were identified. Research indicates that - social collaboration and ‘staying in touch’, searching and sharing new information, exploiting existing ways of mobile interactions, and having several interests help visually impaired in their daily lives for social collaboration and communication. This study provides insights concerning designing CSCW mediums for them.

Multidisciplinary Team Dynamics in Service Design- The Facilitating Role of Pattern Language

Service design is an evolving discipline. Service value is co-created by service providers and their customer. The complex nature of services requires collaboration in a multidisciplinary team at the design stage itself to create service systems that lead to a delightful customer experience. While working in a multidisciplinary team for service design there is a need to effectively capture the knowledge of participants from different disciplines and integrate it in the design process. Team dynamics play an important role in this context as it is an unconscious, psychological force that influences the direction of a teams behavior and performance. Therefore, there needs to be a language that serves as lingua franca to improve the communication and a medium to ensure effective collaboration within a team. It this paper we share our study of the team dynamics in a multidisciplinary team while designing for services, and highlight the role of pattern language as an effective mediating entity.

Participatory Design of Vaccination Services with Less-Literate Users

Participatory Design (PD) in an ICTD context can be challenging due to various constraints of lesser literacy, exposure to technology, infrastructure, socio-cultural factors and power distances amongst others inhibiting users to participate. In this paper, we explored this phenomenon with Vaccination and Immunization as a case study. Our team in the field comprised of two Designers and a student of Public Health Policy who is also a qualified Dentist. We recruited users who were migrants to the city, less literate, and had a child within the past 18 months. We used Contextual Inquiry (CI) as a probing method. The team visited the users at their convenient time to conduct the PD sessions with individual users. We anticipated users to face difficulties in participating, designing and expressing critical and creative opinions, as they would have less formal awareness of the processes and systems. This paper discusses outcomes of the PD process, and shares the insights about conducting PD with users in an ICTD context.

A Critique on Participatory Design in Developmental Context: A Case Study

The dimensions of understanding and involving users and their context while constructing a system have become important. Participatory Design has shown promising success in recent times. The concept of Participatory Design originates from developed countries [11, 13, 16, 17]. Its nature and methods are more oriented toward the Western setting where there is more privilege in terms of economy, education, and technology and a different socio-economic context. However, in the Developmental context, these presumptions may operate differently. In this paper, we critique the operationalization of Participatory Design in a healthcare case study in a developmental context. The study was conducted in urban-poor areas in a metropolitan city in India with 5 users individually, by a Designer and Public Health policy student. All users were recruited on the basis of their education (not more than 8th standard) and the age of their child (below 18 months). This paper reports findings on various factors such as social-cultural barriers, family power hierarchy, language barriers, power distance issues which affect and limit an attempt to facilitate Participatory Design in a developmental context.

Exploring Cards for Patterns to Support Pattern Language Comprehension and Application in Service Design

Service Design is a complex activity that requires collaboration among multiple stakeholders. Research indicates that pattern language can help multidisciplinary team overcome the service design complexity. This success hinges critically on comprehension and use of pattern language by the multidisciplinary team. Literature shows that the research focus has been use of pattern language, not the means required for comprehending pattern language. To address this need, we explored the use of pattern cards as a tool to support the comprehension of pattern language. In this paper, we share experiences of using pattern cards in studies conducted to understand the complex field of rural healthcare services. The participants of different domains used the cards for easy reference while designing service interventions. Analysis showed that pattern cards facilitated the team to comprehend patterns easily and helped in externalizing thoughts when used with experience journey map. It enabled discussions among the team keeping pace of the design process.

smartHTTP: Improving rural mobile user experience

Mobile Internet connectivity in Indian rural areas is fragile and unreliable, thus needs continuous reattempt to successful data transmission, which becomes agitating and frustrating, and is quite expensive. The existing economical, engineering and infrastructural challenges act as deterrents in building enriching rural mobile-based user experiences. Consequently, significant societal adoption of mobile-based ICT4D systems is severely impaired. This paper describes an adaptive and smart mechanism - smartHTTP - for transmitting data over a weak network. Data analysis shows that smartHTTP performs better than HTTP in intermittent network conditions.