What did I learn as an Xperimenter at Science Gallery Bengaluru?
What was the Xperimenters programme?
For the last 6 months, I worked with Science Gallery Bengaluru as part of the pilot edition of their Xperimenters programme. The programme aimed to offer young adults the chance to interact with leading experts from diverse disciplinary fields and develop public engagement programmes for people to interface with the sciences.
The four-member cohort was comprised of self-motivated individuals who experimented with interdisciplinarity in their own capacities. I was a visual designer trying to incorporate math, science and computation in my practice. Samyukta was an analyst at a social innovation firm, but was fascinated by board games and media studies. Jyotsna was studying literature and political science, but fancied data visualisation and design. Snehaja had a Masters degree in Organic Chemistry, but was an active member of TEJO: a youth organisation for one of the most widely spoken invented language of all time, Esperanto.
In a span of 6 months (that now seem like 3), we were trained in public engagement strategies, practiced facilitation techniques, interacted with 3–5 mentors from a group of diverse disciplinary leaders and went on to conceptualise & execute two public engagement programmes each.
The work that came out of the programme demands a separate article. This one, however, is an attempt to close this experience for myself by summing up the learnings from a 6-month long intensive and transformative life experience.
How can one possibly sum up a 6-month long experience, that too in critical fashion?
Writing a reflective article has never really been a problem for me. I have always managed to sit down at the end of an experience, vomit my thoughts out on a piece of paper and craft a networked summary of seemingly unrelated thought bubbles.
However, this time, the experience was so vast and diverse. I felt different things at different times and summing it all up was quite the challenge. Every time that I thought of this article, my thoughts seemed to be biased with an emotive response to whatever had been the most recent experience.
Therefore, I decided to mull it over. It took me 60 hours on bus journeys to and fro Mumbai (where I’ve recently shifted to begin my new job) and time spent on menial tasks such as setting up my new home to finally be able to write this article. My thoughts seem to be in place and I hope that this article presents an unbiased reflection of my experience during the Xperimenters programme, when looked at as a whole.
“Reflective thinking is ‘mulling of events’ — to make sense of existing experiences and consider the implications of actions, to create knowledge for future applications.”
1) Is there a ‘correct’ way to solve a problem?
When we initially discussed our public engagement project ideas as a cohort, everyone seemed to have different ways of approaching the problem.
I advocated for (and stuck by) a ‘human-centered’ approach. Due to my formal training as a designer, the ‘human-centered methodology was the only one I had ever known. Design education is obsessed with the IDEO design thinking template and, somehow, it has become a replacement for creative thinking. Thankfully, my cohort was not plagued by the design thinking epidemic and adopted other methods.
Snehaja followed an artistic method. She argued that people could themselves not know exactly what they want, otherwise they would have steps to obtain it. Therefore, it was her job to present an innovative program and take the audience by surprise; giving them something that they didn’t know they wanted. Samyukta, on the other hand, used the freedom as a ship to pursue her own interests. She liked board games and the internet and chose to create a programme that combined the two. Jyotsna developed a programme to try and answer an abstract question that she herself wanted the answer to. Due to the abstract nature of the question, she believed that different people would be interested in different capacities.
The researcher in me became excited about the diversity in approaches to tackle the same problem. I initially set out with the assumption that the design thinking methodology would be superior to all the others, but I was wrong.
All approaches worked and all of them worked well. The audience was interested in all four programmes, but for different reasons. Mine was because it was a question that they struggled with themselves; Snehaja’s because it was wacky, innovative and unexpected; Samyukta’s because it was an interesting combination and Jyotsna’s because everyone had pondered about the creative genius at some point in their lives.
The human-centered supremacy that I was taught to believe in is somehow broken as I leave the programme into a full-time job. Design thinking is just one of the many methods to approach creative problem solving. Assuming one is the best is a surefire way of destroying the flexibility needed for innovation.
2) All great individuals are also humans.
Imagine everyone you admire: that one hardworking friend, the 6-year-old whiz kid in your neighbourhood, the genius who rose to stardom or the 22-year-old who is where you aspire to be. It is easy to think of these people as someone who is made differently, someone with god-gifted talent, someone who just got lucky or someone who had the opportunities that you never had. It is easier to believe that they had it easy and we do it all the time.
However, that’s not true. The greatest individuals, the ones we aspire to be, are also just human beings; plagued by the same human frailties. When we read the outwardly accounts of these people, the fact that they also went through the same human struggles is somehow left out.
Einstein probably had to run around trying to find a decent place to stay. Freud was probably crippled by loneliness. Thomas Edison probably had seepage in his house.
Everyone had so many more struggles, ones that are left out of formal documentation, and yet they made it to where they are. Irreplaceable legacies for generations to admire. And to top it all, they did all of it while being human; just like every single one of us.
3) What really is the iterative process?
At the SGB, I was truly introduced to the iterative process. Every document, every caption, every graphic was thoroughly inspected and subject to change. I understand now that public image is a sustained image, one that is carefully constructed over a period of time.
The attention to detail when presenting something to the outside world is something concrete that I take away from this programme. Making is probably the easiest part, it’s the editing that’s the real mountain to conquer.
In a workshop with Karthik Ramaswamy from the IISc., he took us through how critically one has to edit a research paper. Rounds of re-writing to ensure that it is just right for the scientific community (and sometimes the public) to consume.
4) Is my life only meant to be devoted to work?
Due to the competitive nature of the space and my cohort, I had the honour of working with incredibly driven people. Some worked for as much as twelve hours a day, while one got up at 3 am every morning to make it in time for an overseas fellowship meeting. I was also one of these people, the ones who struggle to draw a line between life and work. All throughout college, this was all my life had been.
However, working with these individuals and seeing them day in and day out, I realised that I didn’t want to end up like them. Pulling off all nighters or working for an insane number of hours day in and day out just doesn’t seem right. There has to be more to life.
In this phase of my life, I wish to strike a balance. I want to have time to work, to socialise, to work out, to read, to grow, to experiment and also sometimes have free time to do nothing. “Too much of anything is harmful”.
I would much rather chase a sustainable work-life than the fast, intense, crash & burn type.
“It’s a sprint, not a marathon.”
5) Chase flexibility, not rigidity.
When my assumption of the human-centered process being superior was broken, I started to observe more things about the people around me.
See, the basic structure of higher education can be thought of as a funnel. By the end of whatever course you pursue, you must align yourself with certain ways of thinking. Over time, this solidifies into the only way you can think about something and your alignment tends to blind you.
Every other way seems wrong, simply because you haven’t ever thought of something that way. I realise that education empowers you with a way of thinking but it shouldn’t be the only one in your arsenal.
In the programme, I came across different ways of thinking. Business thinking, computational thinking, mathematical thinking, philosophical thinking … all different lenses that people choose one out of.
What if you could have many? What if, by the end of your education, you do not just have a thinking cap to put on but rather a full wardrobe of them. Don whichever suits the occasion. This is something that I wish to do: build an arsenal of different ways of thinking and solving problems.
6) Experimentation without an end goal.
In one of my self-led reading sessions, I came across an interesting paper by Mary Lou Maher (from UNC at Charlotte) titled, A Model of Co-Evolutionary Design. In the paper, Mary goes on to explain how solutions and questions could be thought of as symbiotic rather than independent entities.
Work across the world is usually goal-driven, i.e we end up using design as a search process. As Mary goes on to expand in her paper, design can be formalized as search when the goals of the design are well-defined before search commences and the focus of design is not changed until a solution is found. Design becomes exploration when different parts of the solution space are searched or the solution space is expanded through a change in the focus of the design.
Finally, she presents her concept of design as co-evolution by saying that, design becomes co-evolution when the focus of the design can change, and the requirements space and solution space change through mutual interaction. This interaction can add new variables to both spaces, the solution and the requirements spaces.
In the programme, I managed to do 40+ experiments that did not stem from a requirements space but rather evolved into suiting one. And some didn’t even do that. They were just experiments for the sake of experimentation.
By the end of it, I realised that this type of experimentation is vital if you’re ever to strike innovative gold. Whether it’s one idea that makes it big or a thousand smaller ones that add up, co-evolutionary experimentation is something that I want to actively pursue; without being motivated by commercial interest.
7) There are no gatekeepers of knowledge.
The education system, atleast in India, has always loved disciplinary silos. Picking between commerce, science and humanities at the tender age of 15 is something that everyone has experienced. And how can you really blame the system?
It is extremely efficient in terms of management and creating a funnel-like structure. However, what is traded off is the ability for, say, a humanities student to ever formally pursue science. Or vice-versa. Forget pursuing, it becomes hard to even be fascinated by another discipline as you grow older.
The Xperimenters programme happened at a great time in my life. I was in my final semester and just like every single person from my batch, I was about to enter my disciplinary silo: that of design, specifically Product Design. However, having the ability to work at one of India’s premier biological institute as someone who came from ‘design school’, interact with biophysicists and computer scientists and visiting laboratories led to the crumbling down of these disciplinary walls.
No longer was I intimidated by scientific knowledge or mathematical concepts. In my free time, I could be found in the NCBS library reading a book on computational biology or messing around with concepts that I saw on one of the whiteboards.
There are no gatekeepers of knowledge. With the internet and amount of publication available online, you are free to pick up whatever you find interesting. The only gatekeeper is your formally educated self.
This article would have been impossible without the support of the Science Gallery Bengaluru team, the Indian Institute of Art & Design, Aditi Jain who pushed me to write more and Alina Khatri for being my unwavering pillar of support.
In case you are curious about the work done, you can check out this blog documenting my whole journey, this explainer video for one of my projects or the Xperimenters page on Science Gallery Bengaluru’s website.
For Ram, Sumeet, Atreyo, Kriti and all my juniors who wish to make a dent in this world. Go out and make it happen for yourselves.
