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By: Moosa Khan
Tags: Service Design

Still from The Karate Kid (1984)

In the 1984 coming-of-age film Karate Kid, there’s this moment where a frustrated Daniel LaRusso confronts his sensei, Mr. Miyagi. After agreeing to train Daniel in Karate, Mr. Miyagi has only gotten Daniel to do laborious chores around his house, like painting the fence, sanding his wooden floors and polishing his car. An impatient Daniel cannot take this anymore and demands that his training begin. Mr. Miyagi, patiently tells him to mimic the movements he has been repeating for days as part of the chores —

“Wax On, Wax Off”

“Paint the Fence”

“Sand the Floor”

As Mr. Miyagi makes sudden attacks to prompt him, Daniel’s muscle memory kicks in and he uses each movement to block a different attack. Daniel realizes that he had been practising Karate defence techniques, without even realizing it.

As we transition into our final terms and major project proposals, this story becomes a vivid reminder that the myriad design methodologies and approaches that we applied across units and extra-curricular activities; be it Human-Centered Design, Systems Thinking, Participatory Design or Research through Design; were all preparing us Service-Designers-in-training.



But it doesn’t just stop at the methodologies, what we also learnt was empathy, allyship, acknowledging our privilege, challenging our biases, valuing resilience, empowering communities for communities, prioritizing equity, speaking truth to power, thinking a decade ahead, having authentic conversations with peers, trusting the process and using design as a force for positive change in a way that I for one, did not previously fathom design could be.



I recently wrote in one of my previous blogs how I chose a squad topic that had little to do with the focus of my Major Project because it gave me the opportunity to exercise allyship by working towards spreading awareness on women’s safety. Knowing that I could use my expertise and privilege to work towards the benefit of a group, or gender gave me the confidence to address problems that are bigger than me, and in theory beyond my understanding.

All the above in some way has influenced my Major Project Proposal, both in terms of the choice of topic, as well as the methodology and approach.

For my Major Project Proposal, I will be focusing on addressing misinformation in public health discourse, within the borough of Southwark through health literacy interventions. While misinformation has been a hot topic for some time ever since the 2016 American Elections and the explosion of fast mobile internet, it has hindered civil society’s ability to accept evidence-based science over emotional half-truths.

Medical misinformation has even thrived in consumer brands, advertising, pharma and alternative medicine and treatments, becoming an accepted part of the social fabric and endorsed by the state(like homeopathy).

But in 2019, when COVID19, captured the global consumer’s mindspace like never before, a lot changed.

With the COVID19 pandemic, there has a surge in conversations around topics related to public health. Vaccines and COVID aren’t just trending on Twitter, they are now part of the social platform’s UI with COVID19 disclaimers dotting posts that even have stray mentions of the pandemic. The unfettered flow of misinformation also led Twitter to implement in-built fact check mechanisms like the Manipulated Media tag.

While the conversations around vaccines, treatments and new variants are not always pleasant given the circumstances, for evidence-based sciences this presents a golden opportunity to gain back the collective public mind space lost to pseudo-scientific narratives that rest largely unchallenged on the worldwide web.

To put this change in perspective, currently, as per a recent survey, faith in vaccines in the UK is at an all-time high with 9 in 10 respondents saying they trust the jab. Compare this to 2015 data which shows that 40–49% of respondents believed Vaccines are safe and effective.



But as a designer, it is not enough to merely spot an opportunity to address a wicked problem. One must act on it. And to do that one needs a design methodology.



My focus will be on studying media patterns and employing tools of Health literacy accordingly to address how healthcare misinformation is shared, processed and dealt with by Southwark residents.

Keeping the focus in mind, the methodology I follow should allow me to:



Conduct Research >>Design Prototypes >> Test them>> Iterate >>Inform my understanding of the Problem>>Expand Research and Repeat

Rather than come up with one all-encompassing solution, through this project I intend to test and identify an array of possible solutions. Being aware of the systemic nature of the problem at hand it would not be ideal to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution to it.



A two-pillar methodology could help me achieve the same:



PILLAR 1: DESIGN & TESTING via Research-through-Design –Co-Designing MVPs in the form of tools, experiments and probes and testing them will be a part of my research methodology. This cycle will feed into the final service design.

PILLAR 2: ANALYSE & EVALUATE through Coevolution (Dorst & Cross,2001) — Coevolution involves a constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation passing back and forth between the two conceptual design “spaces” — the problem space and the solution space.



These two pillars will be the foundation on which the service will be built; By creating this bridge between problem and solution, I will be able to evolve my understanding of the problem definition with each new solution that I devise and test.

This two-pillar methodology should allow for theory, research and practice to run simultaneously.



But the question is what could that look like in practice? As I begin testing with close groups, I realise that this approach can be beneficial given the variety of stakeholders across the system that I’ll need to interact with in order to be thorough and objective with my research. It’ll also allow me to try a variety of methods and tools like subversion and even humour.



I started by conducting a little experiment to understand the cultural differences in how medical misinformation is shared. I asked my multi-cultural cohort to share some WhatsApp forwards they received from family or friends with information about COVID.

WhatsApp forwards on COVID-19 from China, Argentina, India and Taiwan

This tiny experiment helped me to expand the problem space and understand that medical misinformation has some common patterns that transcend cultures and geographies such as:



Using Authority through titles (mentioning A prominent Doctor)

Propping a foreign nationality as a medical authority

The sender assuming a sense of authority (grandparent or parent)

Use of UI hacks to add legitimacy (adding a video of a news report)

Using home remedies as a solution (taking steam etc)



This is just the beginning but it allows me to identify behaviour and adjust my understanding of the nuances that inform the problem.

As my understanding of health literacy methods and tools evolves, through reflection on past experiences, reading and conversations with experts on Global Health Literacy, I will be able to employ them in my research, prototypes and testing as well.

One thing that I’m mindful of, is of conflating health literacy with health education.



As Roy Batterham puts it, “While health education is about planting seeds of health information, health literacy is about understanding the soil: it is a bottom-up perspective focused on understanding people as life-long learners and their differences.”



As I conclude this blog post, I hope to keep sharing my progress. Every time that I do, it helps me critically reflect on my process and course correct, which also compliments my methodology for this project.