The CareCapsules: Understanding the people who care during the pandemic.
As a Reach Network partner, delao design studio started a collaboration on the Care Capsules project led by Reach partner The Care Lab, an international network of activists willing to transform Care through human-centred design practices in the health, social & education domains.
The Care Capsules project is a global design research collaboration as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Reach partners from the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Russia collected and analysed stories to learn about emerging care roles in our communities and determine how we provide care to one another.
Through deep-dive interviews with a human-centred design approach, our studio attempted to understand a Mexican perspective around concerns on the pandemic situation that might influence the new understanding of caring and the transformation of our social needs. Between June and August 2020, we interviewed people considered vital workers during the pandemic, like caretakers, food delivery people, cleaning professionals and local food merchants.
In each interview, we talk about participants’ first reactions, how this has changed their personal and professional lives, how this diminished some topics considered taboos or generated new ones, some of their concerns, and how they are coping with this situation. These conversations also served as space for them to unburden their thoughts or concerns and to make some reflections about them.
By listening to the participants' personal experiences, we encountered medical services, mental health, internet access, and working conditions coming to light through the pandemic. Most of these issues, we found, involve inequality in one way or another.
First, internet access has become essential to society during isolation, but economic conditions don't allow them to buy technological devices or pay for internet services for some families. Some participants mentioned struggling to continue their studies since public education is losing its quality or keeping their jobs during this economic crisis.
Secondly, medical services are a priority during the pandemic, but most people lack access to it, and public services are in poor conditions. Besides, many people don’t have work benefits in Mexico, including medical insurances, suitable working conditions regulations, or restorative measures. None of the interviewed people has medical insurance, and some have been struggling to find medical assistance. Those participants who took care of someone with covid mentioned that they couldn’t even get tested because it was too expensive. They had no opportunity to get medical services as there was no room at hospitals.
Finally, mental health is a difficult topic in Mexico, and it isn’t commonly discussed since it’s considered private, and there is still a lot of judgment around it. For the same reasons, many Mexicans don’t think it a priority, and many others can’t pay psychological attention even if they want to be treated. An elderly caretaker who was interviewed shared her patient's fear of getting the virus and the mental issues that social restrictions have been causing, like lack of emotional affection, lack of communication with their families, and social conflicts with other patients. Another participant mentioned stopping his mental treatment since now; mental health isn’t a priority for hospitals, and psychiatrists don’t want to see their patients because of their fear of getting ill.
When the study was held, we found that these conditions also are a cause to diminish the social trust in governmental management, as many people feel measures aren’t being enough. There’s no government’s financial help for all those who are losing their jobs or companies—adding misinformation, conspiracy theories, and popular myths that might make people deny the virus's existence. This lack of trust affected the efficiency of the government's measures. It increased the interest in mutual aid responses, almost as shown after the earthquakes in 2017 and 1985 when the government helped just a few victims. Still, communities were the ones who helped to rescue some of the people who were trapped and help them with donations to rebuild their homes.
These conversations helped us better understand what is happening in our country and how we can propose solutions that can be effective for our context. Furthermore, as these interviews were part of a global collection of more than 50 personal stories gathered by Reach members, it also helped us as a way to understand the international situation and how can we learn or share knowledge with other countries.
As part of this study, Reach hosted an online discussion for Wayfinder, a social innovation community, where care was discussed. New contributions emerged for the understanding of current themes around social innovation.
Reach Network is looking forward to defining potential next steps that include the publication of the research conclusions and finding potential collaborators interested in developing new solutions.
International collaborations like these are significant for delaO design studio. It allows us to bring local perspectives into global research and let us as a studio have a better understanding of our culture and society. Moreover, being part of Reach Network led us to learn from our partners and be part of global discussions that continuously improve our research approaches. Reach is a worldwide network of agencies specialising in human-centred design research and service innovation.