Summer in Beirut: Tools in Translation
My expectation from Beirut was for it to be much similar to India. However, that wasn’t the case. Beirut to me was a melting pot of eastern and western culture. At the first glance, the honking and traffic took me to streets of New Delhi while Hamra Street, café culture and the English speaking younger population reminded me of the US. It was an interesting experience. All four of the team members lived in a single apartment and only one of us was fluent in Arabic, Armenian and French (the three main languages of Lebanon). Interacting with a variety of people, trying to submerge in a new culture and exploring the vast topic of trust. Trust in various forms and how it changes was an intriguing topic to discuss with people especially when the first reaction of everyone used to be “Trust? What about it?” (Eyes wide open with curiosity and sometimes even a smirk!)
To me the most important aspect of the project was understanding when we needed most help in the process, how we resolved problems and co-creating design tools with the local population. That’s the key to any experience. It would have been a nightmare without our Lebanese friends in Beirut who actively supported us not by just being our translators at times but really giving us those meaningful insights into the culture helping us understand and absorb it through our work. I cannot imagine how it would have been if my two Lebanese friends weren’t there when Hezbollah detained us.
While exploring the notion of trust in Lebanon, we also explored how deeply it is embedded in our work as human centered designers. When we first start gaining insights into a project, diverge upon its context in a larger environment and start connecting the dots, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed. Sometimes the information pool or the related fields are so vast, we start doubting whether our research will have a meaningful outcome or not. Being a designer, the key is to trust the process that it will lead us to a clearly defined problem and help us have a measurable impact by the end. While the process is daunting and vague at times, synthesizing our learning, failing fast and failing often gives us valuable insights that help us understand more and proceed further in the right direction.
One can’t attempt to overly prescribe the process and that makes it difficult to talk about the work emerging from it. This human centered process of design is rigorous and dependable but the vagueness it sometimes carries makes it difficult to get buy in from the stakeholders which affects its success. While our research, we struggled with processing all the information and stories we collected in a meaningful format. Scaling and developing a measurable metrics for our learning objectives would be my next steps for this experience. It was a lot of learning, an entirely different culture and the same design process.