Everyday choices
Nitin Sawhney, how do we cooperate in times of crisis? Professor of Practice examines the role of technology and cooperation in crisis using transdisciplinary human-centered design practices. Text: Paula Haikarainen Photo: Veera Konsti Your field of research is HumanComputer Interaction (HCI). What is most fascinating about it? I tend to think of Human-Computer Interaction in parallel with Human-Centred Design. These increasingly affect almost every facet of our lives – and of society. Human-centred design practices are embedded in most of the everyday digital appliances and services we use today. Various health and wellness applications, devices and services, like smart watches or the Koronavilkku application, released by the Finnish institute for health and welfare, are all developed using thoughtful HCI and human-centred design research. It’s inescapable that we need to make new technologies and services more evocative, engaging and better suited to our lives. The field is highly trans-disciplinary and continues to evolve: it has sociologists, anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, product designers, computational data-scientists, and AI researchers among others. This is what excites me most: collaborating with people from so many different domains, who deeply care about understanding and enhancing human experience. You cooperate with artists, activists and social scientists. Which aspects of their thinking would you like to introduce to the field of technology? Working with artists and activists is rather liberating, because it changes how we critically engage with society outside the academic ivory tower. Artists can take a visceral or emotional approach to something, but they challenge our logical assumptions while channelling their sensibilities to create very unexpected outcomes. I always tell my students that if we don’t find something unexpected then what are we really trying to do in our research? Science should always be examining the uncertainties in our lives, and that is something artists are confronting all the time. 48 / AALTO UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE 27
The role of activists is also very crucial. When there is so much injustice in the world, activists take many risks to expose these fractures in society, offering an important reality check for scientists, helping us recognise that we cannot take a neutral position. I’ve come to believe that creating technology and engaging in design is always political.
ricanes to social and economic protests; what’s extraordinary is how people who hardly know each other would quickly self-organise to take action in neighbourhoods. When there was no power in parts of the city due to flooding, grassroots communities were the first to provide relief on the ground, well before the city could effectively deploy emergency resources. Starting from your childhood, crises So, in addition to technological tools have often had an impact on your life. and infrastructures we need to nurture You have, for example, had to emisuch resilient human systems to emerge grate because of social upheavals. and thrive. Has this taught you to be prepared for surprises? When I was a child, we This summer, you organised moved from New Delhi to Tehran, and the highly topical course Humanof course, a revolution spurred in Iran Centred Research and Design in in the seventies, so we had to uproot Crisis. How did it succeed? It was ourselves and relocate again. While livoffered as an online course with a transing in the Middle East, I started to realise disciplinary approach; we invited disasthat crises are just a fact of life. There are ter management experts from the Finnmany moments that we simply find ways ish Red Cross as well as design researchto confront and build a kind of resilience, ers and data scientists. We also had gradbut we also have to recognise that we can uate students from computer science, learn something from every crisis. arts and design, and all of them were A crisis often brings out the best in engaged in thinking about the ways we humanity and helps reimagine how it can find intersections across fields in can transform us. It offers an opportudealing with crises. Just having them in nity to recalibrate society; an opportuconversation with each other, reflectnity to devise more inclusive and integra- ing on how to make sense of recent crises tive solutions, rather than just addresslike the pandemic, wildfires and social ing only one aspect. For example, during protests from very different perspectives, this global pandemic we’ve begun to pay was extraordinary. attention to the health and economic We discussed the wider ecology of disparities around the world, and our actors and stakeholders, as well as relationship to wildlife, ecology and the values, ethics and power structures the climate; all of these unfolding crises embedded in technology and design. This are inter-related. kind of political and social criticality was embraced by the students. All of the Do you have a personal toolkit for course content is available to the public crisis management? What does it (hcrdcrisis2020.wordpress.com), and we include? It varies from place to place hope others are inspired to draw on this and each context needs adapting. In any work. • crisis situation a lot of the work is in the planning and preparation. But generally, when you are in the middle of a crisis, you have to rely on good cooperation with others. Read the longer version of While living in New York City, I witnessed many crises from storms and hurthe article