Are we witnessing an increasing influence of UX in the Bollywood scripts? - Part 1
By: Himani Singh
Tags: Design Methodology, Bollywood, Design Thinking, User Experience, Movies

‘PADMAN’ and ‘Toilet’ are among the Bollywood movies which have focused on how humans unknowingly use the design thinking process in their daily lives while building a service or creating a new product.

If you have ever tried chopping onions, you know it has the potential to make your eyes teary in an instant. In the movie “Padman”, Lakshmikant loves his wife Gayatri a little too much to even bear that discomfort in her life. One Day, he saw Gayatri cutting onions which made her eyes watery and that’s all it took to trigger Lakshmikant. He devised an onion chopper out of a toy drummer monkey with his skills as a mechanic. The drummer monkey had blades attached to his hands instead of drumsticks and would cut onions while rotating the onion. The perfect “Jugaad”. Even if it wasn’t the best idea considering a person would still get watery eyes if they stand anywhere near the chopper, Gayatri was able to manage.

In the instance of the onion chopper, the actual problem was “the chemical irritant that gets in the eyes of the user while cutting onions” and what Lakshmikant solved was “the task of cutting onions”. This tells us how important it is to know the root cause of a problem in order to find a sustainable design solution. The toy chopper was clearly an unsustainable and unsuccessful design solution.

Bollywood Movies like Padman, Toilet: Ek prem Katha and Mission Mangal have unconsciously focused on a few major aspects of experience design and have followed the design thinking process. This is similar to how unconsciously, all the movie references I just took were of my favorite actor.

All the three movies dealt with different kinds of design problems which were first identified with the help of empathy, then researched and iterated upon, and further improvised on the basis of user feedback. This very process is known as design thinking which helps culminate into a viable solution.

Design thinking process and other design methods are not as alien as the terms might seem. People have been unconsciously observing and learning the steps and the importance of design thinking in their daily lives. And now bollywood is seen to be picking up the concept into their scripts as well.

The movie Padman is based on one successful and sustainable design solution which was devised based on need. During Menstrual days, Gayatri would use a cloth piece as dirty as the ones used for dusting instead of sanitary pads. Lakshmikant saw this as an unhygienic approach and started his research. Soon he got to know about the harmful and life threatening effects of this practice from a local village doctor. Now, Lakshmi got fixated on finding a way to save the women of his family. Societal beliefs kept aside, unaffordable sanitary pads in the market turned out to be the main pain point. In the initial phase as an alternative, Lakshmi started making pads using his primary understanding of the existing product.

He took gayatri’s help in testing the product but the pad did not even work as effectively as her dirty cloth. Lakshmi now went on a spree to devise more effective pads changing either the amount of raw material or the kind of raw material he used. He iterated several times where he mostly failed to even find a user to get valuable feedback. There comes a point where he even presumed himself as the user to empathize and find the pain points for the best product possible. With every iteration he found more accurate and effective raw materials and with the slightest of hints or feedback, his next iteration improved in terms of hygiene, functionality, comfort and affordability. By the end of the movie Lakshmi achieves his goal of making hygienic yet affordable sanitary pads for women of the rural areas and poor strata. Lakshmikant’s Pads are sold under the brand name of “Pari”.

Throughout the movie, Lakshmikant was seen empathizing with his wife to find and solve problems. Out of all of his solutions, what made this particular product successful, sustainable and fame worthy? It was the process. He was forced into a situation where his only way out was to follow the design process properly yet unconsciously. In our daily lives, we use the design thinking process in certain ways without even realizing it. From ‘struggling to remove a stain from a white shirt’ to ‘suggesting someone a new magazine subscription based on their needs’, we are constantly either the person devising a flow or are a part of someone else’s process.