Social Labs and the right to intervene

Sitting in a circle with notebooks in hand, the moment was for sharing. Groups had been to the field to collect data a couple of weeks before, and the first activity of the day was to showcase people's findings. The five minute videos illustrating issues related to housing, education, art, health care and youth were presented, and shortly after we crossed the rolling white boards barrier that were dividing the studio into two different learning spaces. Zaid Hasan, guest instructor and head of the consultancy Reos, had come from Turkey to conduct us into a design thinking Social Lab. He described Social Labs as a platform sustained by three core particularities. First, “they are social”: bringing together a team of partners from different sectors of society (civil, government and business) to work collaboratively. Secondly, “they are experimental”: the development of a lab is an ongoing and iterative process of prototyping solutions. Finally, “they are systemic”: they want to find solutions focused on the root of the problem, to understand why things aren’t working. (Hassan, 2014, 3)[1]

Hassan was not just an authority in this kind of lab, but was also admired by professors and students, who looked at him with fascination.  He started the exercise asking students their feelings while doing fieldwork. One group immediately felt the need to speak. There were two girls and a guy, and he is the one who started:

"There was this moment, when we were at the intersection of 125th street and Malcom X Blvd that we felt very uncomfortable. We were trying to address people to talk with us, but they seemed to ignore us. We tried to approach them, but they would pretend we weren't there. And there was this guy who was sitting and playing the percussion, either for money or just for audience, and we tried to speak with him. We said 'Hi', and he replied 'Bye'. Us 'Don't you wanna talk us us?' 'Do you know where you are?' 'Yes, in Harlem', 'Yes, exactly'. We felt so distressed that we left the corner and headed somewhere else."

Although this was the only group who experienced rejection, everybody seemed to agree that they weren't bonding with Harlem's community. Although the sightseeing in the second week of class was supposed to introduce us to the neighborhood, it didn’t seem enough to establish a connection with the community. Some groups found a gateway through grassroots organizations, schools or religious institutions. But the ones who didn’t, felt afflicted. After all, we were neither invited to act on that community nor to propose change. Some students and myself vocalized the issue of designer’s authority.  A discomfort raised by students since day one: what right do we have in proposing change in Harlem? Do we have any? 

Answering the question was a challenge to the team of professors but the general sense was that usually someone hires designers to develop a project so they have a compromise of changing something. Different from anthropologist, designer’s work is done once there’s a proposal for an action plan of intervention. Imagine if a company analyze a target community and just delivers a research report? Imagine if a design consultancy decides not to act because the challenge belongs to the community?

I realized that doing fieldwork as an anthropologist is sometimes less compromising than as a designer. Anthropologists when working for academia are not looking to intervene on the current scenario, but the opposite, the sexiness of the exotic is what captivates us, so the barriers for community acceptance are very distinct.

[1] Hassan, Zaid (2014) The Social Labs Revolution. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers