Jogi Panghaal: Designing Centredness in Products and Services

Jogi Panghaal is concerned with the shift from product to service design, with a special focus on how craftsmanship and traditional artisan communities can be an inspiration for the design of services in current modern societies.

Panghaal works with artisans to use their traditional skills to find new markets for their old/new products as well as that he works with industry to enhance concepts of design. For many years Panghaal was a contributor to Doors of Perception, a conference and network in which design, industry and social science collaborate to develop new ideas for service design. Panghaal graduated in Product Design from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India in 1977. He co-founded Lifetools in New Delhi to provide product design and communication services to communities, both rural and urban that needed design help. Mr. Panghaal has been a visiting teacher at National Institute of Design in India, ID, at Les Ateliers Paris, at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Jogi Panghaal argues that while interacting with material the human being changes the material , and the material changes the human being. The senses get skilled early in life when human beings learn to distinguish between light and heavy, soft and hard, more fragile and less fragile and so on.

The moment one touches material, this material becomes present and it communicates it qualities. How these qualities are perceived is dependent on the way the senses of the human being have been trained and the experiences one has had. Like natural material, also the interaction with technology deeply affects the human being’s presence in the world. With the same skills of the hand for instance one can interact with natural materials and technology as well. However, the use of technology changes deeper concepts of behaviour, like how and when to make decisions for example. When making new things, the interaction with the material is playful, exploratory, testing the possibilities of the material to see what is possible. Such an attitude is part of the survivor’s kit of any human being.

Learning the skills to work with the material is a process of inducing in traditional artisan contexts. It is about learning the body language of approval and disapproval and finding the sense of one’s self to be able to relate to the environment. Centredness is an important concept in the daily physical practice of the artisan and it is also a quality of the products that are made.

Even more important is that it creates centred communities. A centred person creates a centred object, which will centre the users and as a result the community gets centred as well. In a technology context only reference to physical and sensorial qualities can be made. Up until today the sensorial experience of technology and the experiences one can share in online communities with others are still secondary to sensorial experiences one can share in real life contexts. A quality like centeredness may be approached in technological environments through knowing more and having more engagement, even though it is still very distant from the original experience of centeredness

The way references and values will be understood in a technology context is highly dependent on how a human being is grounded in his or her life. A quality experience creates a search in you to look for quality experiences in other areas of life as well.

When making reference to profound experience, these references cannot be exhausted since one makes reference to what one could be looking for. Through references to profound experiences the search for quality is shaped. In a technology context only reference to physical and sensorial qualities can be made. Up until today the sensorial experience of technology and the experiences one can share in online communities with others are still secondary to sensorial experiences one can share in real life contexts.

In traditional artisan’s context, where the user and the maker shared time and place, there was an immediacy to the cycle of quality of the work. Craft had its very own consequential: an artisan made something, a person used it, the problem was immediately told, the object was improved, the artisan became a better craftsperson.

With the abstract concept of the market, this immediacy has faded. The senses become less skilled, quality easily travels away and other quality control mechanisms like statistics have come in place. However, when having to address crisis, the senses are crucial indicators for survival. Sensorial trial and error, pattern recognition and analysis, define a persons wits to survive.

With the new technologies there are new possibilities for service design and these can bring some values of the material to the technological realm. Synchronicity of the voice, sharing a rhythm and personalization of online environments, are some of those features.

When tuning witnessed presence, ‘sensing it’, between human beings and machines the principle of the handshake could be applied. Both move 50% towards each other. The machine can recognize and anticipate the human being. In this anticipation user values are first. Features like historical awareness can be interesting, but are not part of the core experience.

When designing new work one looks at values and locates something in a particular community and see what shape the hardware and the technology. It is an interesting question to reflect upon the effect of this way of ‘informing the form’. To be able to inform the form, the community does not have to have consensus as before, on what values should be represented. Today’s technology is capable of materializing many ideas and forms. It is a question of self organization and self ordering now.

View full transcript including film fragments here

Hereunder the transcript in text.