A human-centred approach to digital innovation

Abhay designed the Techlab format and was one of the lead consultants. His role was to mentor the participants across all three phases of the Techlab so they could incorporate the new impulses into their work and develop new processes.

I feel that practitioners in the cultural sector are always being told that what they’re doing isn’t good enough. Couple this with the idea that someone from outside your field is going to offer you their expertise on a job you do with great dedication 24 hours a day, no wonder people can be defensive.

In the Techlab, we are aware that all we can be are useful outsiders, that we can never fully understand the work of socio-cultural practitioners in the way they do. What we can be is curious about it. Therefore, the key advice to all the Techlab consultants was to enter conversations in discovery mode. While this was a lab about digital technology, it was essential to run it with a human-centred approach.

Create room for playfulness
The Techlab consultants were given a minimal brief about the participants and their work beforehand. I also spent the first half of the Techlab meetings asking people questions about themselves and their lives. We weren’t trying to diagnose anything, we were just trying to find out what brought them here and how they approach their work.
As socio-cultural projects are often tied to people’s own experiences, they can also be emotionally loaded, reflecting the practitioner’s value system. I tried to insert some playfulness into the design of the Techlab as well as the exchanges between the participants and the consultants, so we could start to separate the project and its uses from the good intentions and personal histories behind it.
These relaxed conversations allowed the practitioners to start talking to the Techlab consultants about their project for itself and not as a way of proving their self-worth by explaining the reasoning behind it.
Your vision is not the most important part of your project
There was genuine innovation to be found in the projects of the Techlab participants, but it was buried under so many stories about what the project meant at a personal level and how participants hoped it would impact people’s lives. Sometimes when we started to strip away the good intentions as the main part of the narrative, the end result was a great technology that could be used by a great many people.
What remains when good intentions are removed from the equation
As odd as it might sound, we encouraged the participants to get rid of their vision and goal. That is only for them to know. In the context of the project, it was irrelevant. Instead we asked them to focus on the next step. We found that this narrow focus brought with it a sense of relief. The truth is that while your greater vision and goal may be a driving factor for you, it’s also a distraction and, after a point, irrelevant to what you actually have to do. To think of the product as a product, without the greater vision weighing it down, allows you to take smaller, more manageable steps.
Scaling down the problem
At some point in the conversation, you do have be fairly direct – I ask people what their good intentions are, to make a list of them and to put them aside. So, you want to save democracy and you want to empower people, if you put all of that to one side, is there actually a workable project, a product there? There can be a certain awkwardness, it’s true, in having to ask clear and direct questions but instead of being demoralising, it’s like letting go of the burden of having to deliver big-ticket items. They can now move forward in more practical ways.
It’s paralysing to move forward when your project has so many different parts, if in your mind, you’re trying to save democracy. What we do is scale the problem down to a tiny level. This clarity allows for agency and choice.
A lot of people came celebrating ideas but our interest at the Techlab lies in how to turn an idea into action, how to figure out if it’s feasible and desirable and what the next step is to make it come alive.
I have had a multidisciplinary career and I choose to work with many different sectors. I’m trying to make the project comprehensible firstly to myself. The newness of the framing disarms a lot of practitioners. It allows for that mindset shift that allows them to ask these questions of their own projects with curiosity, and without self-judgement or fear of selling out.

Another important point is that at the Techlab we don’t hold you accountable to your answers, it’s not a test, you’re just thinking along with us. In the next meeting, you can say, “this is now where we think we are”. The whole point of is to get to the next stage and to be left with transferrable skills.