My project attempted to understand how one can restrict privacy invasion due to increasing use of ubiquitous technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), with a specific context of tagging employees in an organization for the motive of monitoring. The project focussed on design thinking, how elements affect each other and investigated a variety of design intervention that may be applied in the Indian context.
It was clear from the beginning that this project would be highly research focussed. The idea was to explore the design problem rather than solve it. As there are not many examples currently, which show clearly an invasion of privacy, the area of focus remained employee identification at the office, and the issues revolving around it for purposes of contextual research whenever necessary.
A single or tangible product would not have served the cause, and, hence, a series of ideas that came from different perspectives was necessary. I developed a series of design research items inclusive of models to protect privacy, approaches to encourage participatory design of monitoring machinery, quotients to measure privacy, patentable RFID tag, and trends to define privacy in the future.
The process that I used for the project simply involved divergent thinking, through understanding the scope of the problem, trends, people’s attitudes, various approaches to the solution, writing academic papers, talking to experts, and publishing the results to as large an audience as possible. This project is an extension of a personal passion towards protecting privacy.
Some of the best design solutions were not ideas thought overnight, but the result of painstakingly iterative ideas that grew one over the other, influenced by what I was exposed to. Sometimes, this took place in seconds, sometimes in years. The key was to pursue against all tides.
