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Pre Thesis project
Introduction
CoWHki - Community Owned Wireless Health Knowledge Infrastructure -- is one such community experimenting with different models of owning and organising a network. It's a collective of Community Frontline Health Workers (referred to as Health Navigators - HN's in the project ) and individual practitioners who are working towards imagining an embryonic form of the internet where people rule. We practice bottom-up, situated long-term engagement with communities driven by gradual trust building through transparency and participation in each step of design and development.
CoWHki - offers a space to interact, build, develop, shape, learn and unlearn with different complexly intertwined digital, physical and social infrastructures in play within and around the network, often by challenging the status quo of human centeredness of design. It will help students to understand both benefits and challenges of collective and autonomous practices of design, in other words, the praxis of independence.
Methodology
Participatory Design | Co - Creating
Theme
Documentation | Inclusivity
How did we investigate a space without
having prior knowledge about the community?
Planning visits
Each visit should have an agenda as to why we are visiting the space and what are we trying to accomplish
Co - Designing Activities (with HN's)
To understand the workings of the space, we need to engage with the workers of the community through activities designed with a certain intent. We asked them about their job and through that we were able to map certain points of intervention
Freedom to experiment
Making sure that the space we are creating is not an imposition but an explorative way for them to give us information
Analysis
After gaining the information, reflecting back on it and building activities from that point
Points of intervention
Through our visits and conversations we were able to identify certain themes
Moment of Realisation
The community operates on two values - Trust and Influence. The bond that these ladies have created through their work in the community has put them in a position where they are in a position to influence the community with valuable advice, in terms of their health.
How did I uncover this ?
Shadowing HN's
To understand what they do, how they operate, we as a group decided to shadow them when they interacted with the community
Observations
Observing the process of uploading the content that they put up on the portal and figure out how they use the content and for what reasons
Content Prioritisation
While uploading the content or even while collecting the information, what type of information is prioritised, why is that decision made etc.
Day in the life of a Field Coordinator
Observe the kind of decisions that are made by her to understand the "governing" part of the organisation
Interviewing/ Conversations with the members of the organisation
Through multiple conversations, micro-interactions and interviews, extracting the minute details that might get missed through the activities that are conducted
Shadowing HN's
To understand what they do, how they operate, we as a group decided to shadow them when they interacted with the community( the images shown below are annotated notes that were made after the visits)
Going in with questions
Before reaching the site, we had set up a few questions in our minds to answer while we observe what she does and she does it
Before we started recording, we had asked for consent from all parties present in the space, this was done so we respected the people present and also for us to look back the conversation and touch on the points of intervention
Observing the interaction (from the Client's view)
Noticing the minute details of the participation from the clients side
Making a note of what kind of advice was given and why certain topics were not touched upon
Observations
This activity helped us understand the pros and cons of the process of uploading the content on their
portal (PAPAD), it helped us map down the points of intervention, the information that we can use
to create an asset for them, any improvements that we can make in this process etc.
The notebook
The members of the organisations carry anotebook around and note down their interactions with the clients, get it back to base and then filter out the information to upload on PAPAD
Observing the steps they take to upload the information and helping them with translation and typing, if required
Working as a group
While uploading the content, the entire group sits and helps one another in this process
A closer look on the screen, the member is adding tags to the description so that when some other member of the organisation looks up those tags, they can find similar cases to the ones they have interacted with
Day in the life of Ramakka
This particular activity was planned to understand the decision-making process and
the fields of intervention which are taken hold by the field coordinator.
Step 1
We wrote down a bunch of categories (Materialisation of the idea, Onboarding of members, Organisation of ideas, Practices and Protocol Development, Public Engagement, Motivation and value drive) that we thought would apply in the case of the coordinator. So, when one of us was having a conversation with her - the other two were making notes and recording the conversation for future reference
Step 2
After asking the coordinator multiple questions, we wanted to map down the answers we received, most of which were related to the stakeholders and how they came to being.
The stakeholder relationship was something that we focused on to understand exactly who plays what role and what reasons. We also mapped down the communication systems and the funding systems that take place.
Content Prioritisation
While uploading the content or even while collecting the information, what type of information
is prioritised, why is that decision made etc. the categories that we offered were:
Focus Point
Food Knowledge -
I decided to create a physical artefact (hand book) with the food recipes they share in
the community.
Pain Point
How does it help?
The artefact is supported with visual elements for the community to read and refer to every time the HN's mention a remedy for their health
How does the entire team access this information?
These recipes are uploaded on the portal - PAPAD as well for the HN's to have a digital copy of the recipes, to share with their clients
Why is it needed?
Currently, they were just keeping everything in conversations by creating an artefact out of it, they can pass it onto the next generations of the HN's.
The pictures of the artefact haven't been uploaded since we were not able to get their consent.