Dilemmas during the design process

I was at a Wellbeing in Low Income Communities workshop at Helsinki School of Economics this week, where we got to grips with one of the field’s core challenges: ethics.
Businesses entering into BoP markets are often faced with an ethical dilemma. How does their offering match the market’s culture? Will their offering have an undesired or even negative effect because it fails to address the value gap?
Prabhu Kandachar, professor at TUDelft, told a story that illustrates this ethical dilemma perfectly. A company developed an affordable ultra-sound scanner for the Indian market. It was meant to improve pregnancy healthcare and pregnant women’s quality of life. But the company soon discovered that the scanners were being used for gender selection.
How should the company deal with this? Stop designing? Seek answers from the ethical experts? Keep designing, learning and trying to solve something that seems unsolvable? Or proactively attempt to design new behaviour patterns and value sets in the country so the product is used as intended? That’s according to a western value set, at least.
As a designer, I think the way forward is focusing on context. Address and understand the underlying contradictions – whether they be cultural, economic or social – and make the solution fit. And most importantly, remember that policies and visions alone won’t bring tangible differences to users’ everyday lives – to achieve this, we need well-designed products and services.
But as we all know, this takes time. And doing something is far better than doing nothing – especially in healthcare, where a well-intended product can suddenly affect basic human rights.