This peer review paper will be presented in the 2012 Design Research Society (DRS) International Conference at Chulalongkron University, Bangkok, Thailand on July 1-4, 2012.
To find out more information about this conference, please visit the following website http://drs2012bangkok.org/index.php?page=About-DRS-2012
Abstract
This paper focuses on the roles of designers for enabling sustainability of livelihoods in disadvantaged communities. This paper was drawn from my doctoral research which I completed with communities with people with physical disabilities in Amphoe Phrapradaeng, Samut Prakran province in Thailand between 2007 and 2010. The main objective of this research was to find ways to enable the people with physical disabilities in one particular disadvantaged community to attain sustainable livelihoods and to continue flourishing long after the completion of the research project.
This research was guided by three main research question; what strategies and tools designers should use in order to enable themselves and the community to undertake a collaborative investigation, how these strategies and tools were used in order to achieve research objectives, and what role and contribution of designers are as design researchers for enabling the community to attain a sustainable livelihood. To achieve a real outcome, this research was designed to investigate a real-life situation of a community of people with physical disabilities in Amphoe Phrapradaeng in the Samut Prakran Province in a semi-urban area of Thailand as a case study because the research was embedded in this community. This was a collaborative research with nineteen community members of this community.
The research methodology of this research project was Participatory Action Research (PAR) by using the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) for data collection and evaluation of the effectiveness of the implementation of this research with the participants. This research has a basis in the theoretical frameworks established in the field of Human-Centered Design (HCD), which is a specific approach to design, and Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) which is an approach to sustainable community development. The activities of this research were multiple cyclical processes. These processes were composed of a group discussion for reflection and planning a new action, the taking of that action, observation, and then a group discussion for reflection and planning a new action. These activities were set up through a series of four workshops because they were designed for facilitating, enabling, and empowering the participants to improve their capabilities to reach their full potential to achieve a sustainable livelihood.
The research outcomes have shown the participants and their community discovered an alternative livelihood that could enable them to reduce or avoid vulnerability in their community and become more self-reliant. After the completion of this research study, they still continued to improve their capabilities and are pursuing a sustainable livelihood in their community. This research also revealed that PAR integrated with HCD and combined with SLA were shown to be effective strategies and approaches because they facilitate the knowledge transfer to the participants and their community and enable them to generate and implement their own idea. Reflection, traditional visualization, and the communication skills of designers were essential in such research because reflection enabled the participants and to recognize a change in their community explicitly. The visualization and communication skills of designers were very sophisticated and powerful tools in this process because they made complex situations or problems easy to understand and made new ideas and potential solutions visible during group discussions for reflection and planning.
In conclusion, this research has shown that these research strategies, approaches and tools would not work effectively unless they were operated by designers who work as design researchers and have a mindset for and behaved as an agent of sustainable change. This role is not a catalyst because it was innovatively, consciously, intentionally responsible for enabling people to have a sustainable and satisfying livelihood. A sustainable change agent should be mindful and work responsively to support local people, especially disabled people, to attain their goals. However, the project itself was a catalyst because it sparked a new idea for the participants and their community, showed them how to identify their own problems, let them generate their own solutions, and pursue a sustainable livelihood that they designed for themselves.
