Understanding epistemic violence in design practices (against disabled people);
By: Vikash Raj
Tags: Co Création, Design Process, Participatory Design, Epistemic Violence, Disability

What is Epistemic violence: “Epistemic violence is violence against one’s status as a knower; one’s role as a creator and communicator of knowledge. It is the dismissal of people as credible sources of information, because of our presumptions about them, or because of how their communicative means (or what they have to communicate) clashes with how we would like to believe the world works.” [3]

Overview of epistemic violence in design practices

In a world driven by power and dominance, it’s always a race to stay at the top of the hierarchy order and be valuable. While I always knew how soft power, media and literature, philosophy etc is used to hold that stature, it’s only recently that I learnt that design thinking as a tool could also be used to stay at the apex of the global labour hierarchies. In her paper, Lily Irani refers to studies of Fouché (2006) to highlight how patent officials deemed black invention a product of accident or laziness rather than intention and intelligence and; Oldenziel (1999) shows how North American and European anxieties about white racial superiority shaped what counts as “technology” — bridges and machines, but not textiles, pottery, and mud architecture [1]. As design and manufacturing in China started to boom in the early 2000s, IDEO was not able to charge their rates for engineering and manufacturing-oriented projects. They had to shift from mechanical to mystic approach of design and its emergence was as much about global production and labor flows as it was about epistemology [1, p.2]. IDEO’s attempt to propagate design thinking as an emerging and highly exclusive form of technical expertise was the outcome of defending North American design against growing competitions in Asian countries like China and India.

I see this reflecting as an epistemic problem at two levels:

At level one; design practice has been highly colonized by the western way of thinking. Mainstream design discourse has been dominated by a focus on Anglocentric/Eurocentric ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world, with little attention being paid to alternative and marginalized discourses [9]. In the context of Indian design education, epistemic dominance is reflected in the kinds of design tools we use, the art movements we study and the aesthetics we take inspiration from both for academic and portfolio purposes. The Indianness of Indian design that ‘Lota’ reflected and became the inspiration for the emergence of design education in India, in my opinion, got confined to ‘The India Report’ that was presented. What followed in the Indian design curriculum was primarily based on western principles, tools, case studies, and examples. Shiva Nallaperumal rightly puts it by explaining how in Indian design school, they never studied Indian work. Instead, they were taught Paul Rand’s logos or Massimo Vignelli’s New York Subway maps which had no relevance to us culturally or technically [6].

At level two, designers across the globe and in India develop mindset into believing that they have the sole power to change the lives of the people. That their highly expensive and ‘mystic’ education garnered over several years of extravagant colleges has given them the capability of solving problems in the right way using “the right tools”. They carry the attitude of “Design Savior” and are made to believe that their training and tools could quickly access and innovate in the domains they are unfamiliar with [2, p.3, sec 2.3].

Epistemic violence in design for disabled people

While the epistemic attitude of designers slowly becomes part of their nature, its consequences are more apparent while designing for disabled people. Disabled people are often portrayed as people who need our help and any contributions they make towards solutions often goes discredited. Technology for disabled people is often developed by non-disabled populations, producing an environment where the perspectives of disabled researchers — particularly when they clash with normative ways of approaching accessible technology — are denigrated, dismissed or treated as invalid [3, p.1]. Disabled people often find themselves represented in the literature as objects of inquiry — systematically belittled, disregarded, ignored, and dehumanized [3, p.2]. So when it comes to designing solutions, it’s often a “non-disabled” designer’s attempt to create for “disabled non-designers”. In such cases, both the initial and the end phase of the 5-steps design process (Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test) of HCD and HCI seem problematic to me.

“Disabled people often find themselves represented in the literature as objects of inquiry — systematically belittled, disregarded, ignored and dehumanized.”

In the first step i.e. empathy-building; designers attempt to understand disabled people through various simulation activities to achieve temporary body impairment. For e.g. by using elementary tools like blindfolds to occlude vision and then try to complete a daily task with these unfamiliar bodily constraints. The aim here is to put themselves into the shoes of disabled people to be able to better understand their problems and thus be able to empathize. However, it is not actually possible for any normal person to ever completely understand what a disabled person goes through in their day-to-day life. In many other cases, designers may engage directly with interlocutors through interviews and user testing and still choose to simulate disability [1, p.7, sec 4.1]. The first step of the design process ie. Empathy becomes a mechanism through which designers demonstrate their professional judgment by responding to their personal reaction and subverting the experiences they intended to uplift” [2, p.7, sec 4.1]. Along with the “design savior complex”, the empathy phase becomes a means for designers to extract the customer’s wants and use those insights for capitalization.

“Empathy becomes a mechanism through which designers demonstrate their professional judgement by responding to their personal reaction and subverting the experiences they intended to uplift.”

After an inefficient and biased discovery of the problem led by ideation and prototyping through various iterations, the designer reaches out to the user for user-testing. At this stage, the disabled person’s inefficiency to properly interact with the solution is blamed on the user rather than the solution or system of solutions that inhibit them from engaging with the solution in a particular way. Such interactions tend to discourage disabled users from providing any rational and critical feedback in the research. Furthermore, solutions based on a non-disabled designer’s assumptions and experiences end up causing more harm than good.

Illustration by Vikash Raj

A better approach

Designing ‘with’ disabled people rather than ‘for” disabled people.

The epistemic attitude misleads designers into dismissing any suggestion that disabled people might have about the solution. Designing ‘with disabled people’ rather than ‘for disabled people’ and ‘being with’ them rather than ‘bring like’ them (w.r.t. empathy-building activity) is a more effective and more ethical approach. It is important to have direct conversations with disabled people about their problem, engage in co-creation and participatory mode of ideation to learn about their experience and accept their views when the situation calls for it. Doing so not only helps designers destabilize and reimagine the imposed boundaries (e.g., between categories of “disabled” and “designing” or “designer” and “user”) [2, p.10, sec.6] but also demystify who a designer is. To be able to see disabled people not just as mere spectacle who needs non-disabled designer’s help but an equal contributor with authority.

Concluding notes

The race to finding “specialization and USP” becomes the driving force to form new ideas and scope for companies; and these new ways lay edifice for how the future would be from global development, economic and career aspects. The example of IDEO’s shift shows how this could be one of the ways to discover new possibilities and domains of practice, but it could also cause unintended consequences that impact business, communities and people in unanticipated and dreadful ways.

The field of design education and design methods is ever-evolving. New tools are being created globally and locally to improve their practice both ethically and economically. Design is not about bringing all users on the same page but helping different users with their varied needs. Although as designers we learn to be observant, good listener, be empathetic and apply problem-solving methods to better identify hidden problems, sometimes it may not be as effective. These tools just help to streamline the process and build quick, efficient and economic solutions. However, similar to the flaws of empathy-building activity in designing for disabled people, other processes could have some setbacks too. I feel as designers; we need to be aware of our practices, our attitude and biases. Designers should be ready to accept that they aren’t always right and that great ideas can come from anywhere, even from the otherwise least expected human materials i.e. disabled people.