Making of, making for

For her capstone project, one of my master’s students wanted to make a documentary for an island-based anti-mining advocacy group. I asked her why she thought a documentary was necessary.

She spoke excitedly about the group, which had blocked trucks carrying ore to waiting ships and had led the island in protest. The group also had an ally in its newly elected mayor, she said, and a documentary could make their hitherto hidden work more visible.

Then she paused. The group had indeed been anything but kept from the public eye. They had the local government on their side, were rallying more people to their cause, and got support from local advocacy groups. My student couldn’t explain why it needed an expensive, time-consuming, sleep-depriving documentary, which would simply add to a congested media environment. The group needed help, but it couldn’t be just bells, whistles, and technology striving to outshine and outtalk everything else out there.

I advised her to observe the group’s day-to-day work, talk to its members, ask them about their problems, and articulate the unspoken challenge beneath the obvious inconveniences. I also told her to look up human-centered design (HCD), something I’d been teaching for years as a required course for our undergraduates, but an elective she hadn’t taken at the graduate level.

She went off and read, observed, and investigated. A week later, she called me.

“Ma’am, they have so many activities!” my student said, excited, though not exhausted. “But they don’t have a mission and vision, and they don’t have a communication plan! I know what to do!”

This was around a year ago. Since that time, my student has gone through the process of creating her proposal, understanding her theoretical framework, applying for ethics clearance, organizing trips to the island, lining up her interviews and focus group discussions, carving out time to analyze her data, gathering the group for a workshop so that it could collaborate on the communication plan, and refining the plan for its final evaluation.

And my student embraced the uncertainty-imbued process of human-centered design. She recognized that she was not facing uncertainty that should elicit fear, anxiety, or unease. She was encountering the kind of uncertainty that comes when one is willing to let go of assumptions, to preempt nothing, to be curious, to play.

In HCD, everything begins with the needs of the target group. There should be no attempt at creation, speculation, or planning until all interviews, observations, and discussions are finished. There should be no push for an anticipated result, only observing, listening, and empathizing.

In my student’s specific case, it meant that she had to first speak to the group rather than plan a shoot. It meant being more attuned to the group and authentic to its experience, to immerse herself in their advocacy rather than record it as a story, to seek out what the group truly needed and allow the group to discover itself.

Everything went by quickly. In mere months, she had uncovered the story of a group that had energy in great abundance but no guiding path. Its members reacted to issues as they came and relied on centralized leadership for decisions. Its officers were dispersed geographically, but when she brought them together for a workshop, they finally articulated a mission and vision no one had given them the chance to name.

I remembered her story last week, as I taught more undergraduate HCD classes. My students have already gone through the process on a smaller scale. Every meeting, they also have to sketch three designs in five minutes to meet a specific need for a specific profile.

They were hesitant at first, but as the semester moved forward, so did their play. Last week, I asked for three designs “to meet this person’s need for something to keep water from splashing out of their shower.” I got rugs that looked like giant burgers, a device that pulled water when a person sang, and a variety of sliding doors with built-in monitors for scrolling through social media.

The students were meeting needs with their imagination, not endorsing products out of convention.

After class, a student approached me and said that his philosophy lecture earlier reminded him of our class. To be human, his professor had told them, was not only to be rational or to feel, but to recognize and meet another person’s needs.

Last weekend, I read my graduate student’s complete capstone document. She had added the results of her evaluation workshop. The group loved her communication plan. One participant said, in the vernacular, “We now have something we can use in actual life.”

My student is nearly done. In two weeks, her panel will review her work. There will be no big premiere, no film festival. But she was able to get people to work together to articulate their goals, create a plan to guide them, and meet a group’s greatest need.

And next year, she will graduate as someone who has learned to become deeply, lovingly human.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu