From Designing for Labels to Designing for Life Stories

Introducing a framework when designing for complex systems.

Words carry more than just meanings of matter, but when the words we use, start to become labels, they become matters of consequence.

Labels are heuristic tools to understand the world and the people around us. Designers seek to reduce redundancy, and thereby, using labels in our work is a means of being more efficient with our communication. However, this comes with a certain risk of simplification.

We have an innate tendency to give labels to entities to trick ourselves into believing that we understand it without having to explain it to ourselves. These labels create a frame, and the minute we have a frame we seek to fill it with a picture. These pictures we create are inevitably permutations and combinations of what we know with little space for what we don’t know about the world. This is where we need to learn to paint over a picture or better still, break the frame and extend the canvas.

“The Power of Labelling: How People are Categorised and Why it Matters” has got me here to think about the power and disjuncture that words create. Labels create unintended lacunae not just in dialogue but also in the structures and services designers seek to create. It’s a compelling read that helps us understand how people are seen by the world and how people want to be seen by the world. A part of the book talks about refugees in particular, which took me to the summer of 2022 when the war in Eastern Europe broke out.

It’s not a summer I will ever forget but it’s also not a summer I want to remember. I found myself as a twenty-something-old designer designing for a world struck by war, in real-time and for real people, a lot of which I could not process was happening. The behavioral science and design consultancy I was working for then, was approached by UNICEF to ensure that the millions of people, especially mothers and children moving across the borders of Ukraine and into Poland could find respite at the Blue Dot facilities that were set up along the borders of Poland. We encountered a particularly interesting juncture in how language and the choice of words we used played a role in designing a service to serve people and subserve a greater need for care and comfort at a time when people’s lives and homes we under threat.

We were tasked to understand what services mothers and children needed and then suggest service design interventions that would equip these facilities to serve the needs of the people accessing these services, better. While the in-person team collected primary data across 6 cities in Poland, I was a part of the remote team that helped synthesize secondary data as well as prototype potential solutions that the in-person team tested with the Ukrainian mothers and children who had moved to Poland.

Amidst all the thick data we were collecting to find ways to improve the services at the Blue Dot facilities, we found a quiet signal that was imperative to how the services were being implemented. Ukrainians didn’t see themselves as “refugees”. There was a subtle rejection of this categorical order that they found themselves in. We realized that services could not be labelled as “for refugees”.

There are however exceptions to this— ”Anthropologist Liisa Malkki found that Hutus (from Burundi who were in exile in Tanzania) living in the camp preferred to be called refugees. This was because their exile had significance to them. It meant that they had been wronged by the Tutsis and they could envision a collective return. On the other hand, Hutus living in the towns preferred not to be called refugees. They wanted to assimilate into their new environments. They didn’t want to be seen as different.” (Safari, 2021) [1]

Displacement comes with a loss of home, not with a loss of identity. This means that changing contexts, uprootedness and war cannot change how people fundamentally view themselves overnight. Challenging labels and categories to complex contexts in the world of social innovation is a designer's duty if we want to design for complex people and not just for complex contexts. Contexts are easy to define, but people are harder to understand and that’s where a designer has to engage in the tedious yet rewarding journey of learning to understand people’s stories. There is an inherent conflict that arises when what people perceive you as is far from how you perceive yourself. This is where we begin to look at people not just in their current context, zoomed out, but look at their life stories, zoomed in.

Here’s my framework if you’re designing for complex contexts. The PLANT framework.

1. Present in the moment, yet detached to the self: Strive to understand people and communities within their (new and even old) context, and detach from as many labels or assumptions you may have about them. We’re so obsessed with thinking of the right question we want to ask because we’re all secretly looking for validations to our assumptions, that we forget to think of what people want to be asked. There is a certain detachment to our selves that designers need that we don’t talk about or are even taught how to practice. The full statement when you hear people say, “We put people at the centre” is that we then have to put ourselves at the periphery.

2. Look for labels: Labels will inevitably arise but treat them like a pomegranate. Yes, a pomegranate. Look for labels and flag them red. Peel the label open and identify your own implicit biases that come with it. This is tricky, but always has a sweet outcome just like the rather arduous task of peeling a pomegranate open.

3. Allopoiesis and Autopoiesis: Allopoietic systems innovate and Autopoietic systems replicate; that’s my very simple definition of these two ideas. There’s something essential in both these ideas for a complex interconnected system to flourish— you need certain ideals to stay the same while others need to evolve and change. Solely replicating an idea in a new context just because it has been successful in another can be detrimental. A complete overhaul to recreate a system is enticing at times but will most certainly take you away from rolling out change efficiently and sustainably. Define boundaries for your system that will stay the same or replicate and then create or find pockets for allopoiesis to take place.

4. Narratives: Create a safe space for candour and look for stories. Richness in data comes from collecting stories and then weaving them into narratives that can move from insight into action. But before you can even get to insight or action, it’s a designer's duty to create an environment that allows for people to be the main characters and the narrators of their truth.

5. Tension: Finally know that the act of alleviating tensions in one part of a system means that another part gets strained, that’s just the way of systems. Sometimes it’s visible but more often, less noticeable. Know that creating value through design is not always starry and magical, it’s the very uncomfortable truth of finding respite in one part of the system while creating some amount of strain somewhere else.

Designing for complex systems goes well beyond just understanding the immediate context at hand; it’s about honoring the lives of the people and the energy that all the other entities bring to the context. By discerning labels, focusing on stories, and staying cognizant of tensions, we can plant some trees that will reap some sweet fruits.

I can hear some people I know say “Sam really went hard with the plant/fruit metaphors huh”
I guess we did. 🤷‍♂️ 🌱

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References:
[1] Safari, Elena. “The Refugee Identity Crisis” BizGees, 2021

The Power of Labelling: How People are Categorized and Why it Matters, Chapter 4 by Jaideep Gupte and Lyla Mehta.

Image:
Generated using Adobe Firefly, the only artifact generated by AI in this piece.

More seeds:
Allopoietic Design