Designing research activities for a socially and linguistically diverse demographic
Participatory Research
PROJECT:
Enhans: Part I
(2019)
MY ROLE
Research Design,
Research Synthesis & Insights
TEAM:
8 students from Srishti Institute
of Art, Design & Technology
The Context
Enhans, is a communication system designed to help reduce doctor-patient miscommunication at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore.
NIMHANS caters to patients from across the country, with a large percentage coming from small cities and rural towns. When we spoke to the doctors, they presented a need for multilingual audio-visual aids that could help them communicate with patients. Owing to the diverse audience, it felt important for us to conduct an inquiry to gain a better understanding of the people we would be creating for, before we began creating the content.
Complex
Medical
Information
Diverse
Educational
and Economic Backgrounds
Seven
Languages
The Challenge
TO FIND OUT..
-
What kind of medical literacy does the audience have?
-
How do they describe common medical conditions in their own language?
-
What information is most important to them?
-
What visual language are they most comfortable with?
FROM A DEMOGRAPHIC THAT..
-
Speaks multiple languages
-
May not be able to read and write
-
May be hesitant to talk about their lives
The Activities
We developed new activities and tweaked existing ones to suit the goals of our inquiry. Our aim was to use engaging activities that relied on various modes of communication (listening, talking, watching, drawing), and could encourage participation and conversation in a natural way.
Through the entire research process we interacted with roughly 75 people aged between 25–50 years, and conducted activities in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.
swipe through to read about all four activities
Card Sorting
Participants were given cards with images and phrases showing various problems one could face during a hospital experience. They were asked to sort these into three categories, from least to most important in their experiences. We used this activity to understand the priorities of the audience.
Some things worked..
Since most of our activities involved hands-on engagement and had an element of play, participants were able to quickly get comfortable with each other and with us. Not only were we able to generate the insights we hoped to, but we also got the chance to have conversations about their needs and concerns when it comes to receiving medical information at a hospital.
Observations during ‘Image Show and Tell’ helped us develop a visual language for our videos. We learnt that while it was important to be realistic in terms of form and colour, using easily recognizable icons (such as the symbol for heart) aided understanding. Through ‘Pictionary’ and ‘Video Show and Tell’, we were able to put together a bank of colloquially-used medical terms in various regional languages.
..and some did not
Looking back, I can see now that more insights came from the conversations and interactions we had while conducting activities than from the numbers or specifics of the responses we collected.
In an attempt to do justice to the overwhelming amount of responses we had collected during research, we spent a lot of time trying to collate, synthesize and quantify our findings. We started looking at it like ‘data’ instead of learnings. While we thought it was essential to record every detail while conducting the activities, we realized later that eliminating information we didn’t need was as important as highlighting what was really relevant.