Ryan Bowler holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Design Informatics. He is passionate about inclusivity and representing diversity in user-driven design.
Interviewer: How would you describe Design Informatics?
Ryan: Design Informatics is designing around information and using data information to influence design. That’s the way that I’ve interpreted or looked at it, there’s many ways that you could probably consider it. It could be things like looking into artificial intelligence and information that comes from that to inform the design process or creative process. It could be designing around data or information. So data physicalization, using things like Lego blocks to inform an idea of data to then use that as a form of data. It’s visual and creative and tangible. It could be data visualization, usually digitally not physically. It moves into things like processes or robotics, and community and culture, health, everything. Design informatics works with a lot of external partners, things like in health, policy, governance, the future of technology, loads of that kind of space. Using information to inform design or design to inform information, and vice versa. That’s the way that I’ve always interpreted it.
Interviewer: What areas of your research are the most interesting to you, or that you focus on?
Ryan: Definitely inclusivity, usually inclusion around people with specific health conditions, or who might class themselves as having a health condition. That wraps into the idea of time, and what we class as temporality. There’s an interlink there between time and inclusion, and society in terms of how society uses time to organize and calculate things. When you’ve got a certain health condition, sometimes you can’t fit into very niche ideas of time. The best example is like a nine to five job. A lot of people might be able to do that job, but for someone with a health condition, time might be different for them and they might not fit into a nine to five. Therefore there’s a rigidity that then becomes systemic. Because they might not be able to do that nine to five job, then they might not get paid, and now money’s tied to time and it starts to become this idea of exclusion.
Where inclusion in time comes into the place, you add the components of technology and design. I specialize in human computer interaction which is just how people interact with computers, really. But when you look into it in depth, you start looking at things like digital calendars, clocks and these kinds of things. They’re designed around old concepts of the Gregorian calendar and all these kinds of things that we still hold today, which don’t ever consider the “what ifs.” I look at technologies and look at how they use time in an exclusive way and I try to find ways to reiterate that design process, to inform a way that could be more inclusive.
My own research came down the path of being uncertain around health. Digital calendars always try to strive for certainty with time, being in a space and a place at any one given time and things like that. Whereas people with certain health conditions are perpetually in uncertainty. So how can they marry themselves up to this idea of time and calendars, which require certainty? And designers are potentially perpetuating exclusion through the use of time, or time artifacts within technologies. How can we change that status quo to be more for people who do require uncertainty and certainty? Because don’t get me wrong, people do need certainty, right. There’s a lot of certain conditions or health conditions specifically where people need rigidity, they need routine, they need those things. So it’s not about taking away that certainty, but it’s about including points of uncertainty for different ideas of health as well. So they’re all interesting parts of it, but it comes down to inclusion and human computer interaction and time.
Interviewer: Looking closer at the relationship between time and health and inclusivity, how do you think these concepts inform each other when defining what it means to be healthy?
Ryan: Yeah, I think there needs to be a more focus on the idea that time is not always a physical artifact. Time can be biological, it can be the body. Time is wheelchairs. Time is being temporarily unwell or injured. It’s these ideas that time is usually this artifact moving in a linear process that’s going in one direction, and people need to keep up with it or else. Whereas actually, there needs to be more focus on the internal ideas of time in terms of the biological concepts of time, such as relapsing if you’ve got a certain health condition where you relapse out of time, that could be a week or two weeks. And you’ve got to think about time in the ideas of social barriers of disability. An example is someone might be able to just walk in the door, but someone else in a wheelchair has to move around to the back of the building to get in. Therefore, that’s another five or ten minutes added to accessibility. So time, in reference to the human body, becomes very different to each contextual, ontological experience.
I did a talk about the materials of time and health, disability specifically. Any chronic condition is time. For instance autism is time because of social anxiety individuals get into space quicker, you know, not being able to stand at a bus stop for so long. And because you can’t catch the bus and get to work, these become points of systemic exclusion. We need more focus on these nuances of time in different health experiences. This research should start to help change policies and buildings and environments and design in general to enhance inclusion. It comes down to the concept of social disability where society creates disability through barriers. Whereas people class themselves as having impairments or health conditions, but that disability is actually created by society, it’s not an individual experience. The World Health Organization just recently, or not too long ago, changed their definition of disability as being socially created, not independently made or born with. So society should be inclusive enough that they don’t have the feeling of disability because of a barrier that they’ve encountered.
And this is where my idea of pain comes in is the idea that anyone who feels excluded from an idea of pain or any way, that’s a form of disability and exclusion. So the social barriers of disability and the social model of disability I think is a really nice example of looking at how disability is not human creative, it is socially created. So we change the social model to create more inclusion and disability should start to reduce because it becomes all encompassing for as many different diverse people as possible with different diverse health conditions.
Interviewer: You’re not just looking at symptom management, instead you’re getting down into the real systemic roots of the problem and how to fix it from the ground up.
Ryan: Yeah, because you have to deal with the social systemic issues of health. While health is holistic in a sense, there’s lots of little components to create the idea of health that all need to be looked at and all need to be, yeah, considered to deliver the right health plan for a certain person. For instance, not everyone wants facts or what a physician/doctor classifies as healthy. The idea of a “healthy body” or the “ideal body.” It’s this idea that you should be in a certain point in time, at any given point. You should be born, you should “develop correctly,” you should then be able to get to school, you should then be able to go through puberty etc. Time and health come around reproduction as well, it comes around ideas of being in certain places, certain points. And that in itself starts to create these social injustices towards people who might not actually live accordingly because it’s all embedded in this heterosexual idea of time. And so some people might not be able to do those kinds of certain temporal points in time, these milestones to hit. So that all comes into play as well. There’s a certain idea of time and health linked together, that you should be hitting certain points, you should go through the aging process, you should go into retirement and you should die. That always fascinates me.
A big one is feminist theory on time, looking at the idea that you should have children at a certain point or you should be married. These temporal points of when you should alter your body through maybe pregnancy and these types of things, or the social pressures and moral judgments that come through of not having a child and things like that. Whereas for men, it’s not the same, right? You can usually get off as being like a bachelor for that kind of thing, right? So there’s loads of these kinds of ways that time and health and social points in time go down to a kind of discrimination as well: men versus women and heterosexual versus homosexual, ect. So really, really interesting history around time and health in general, like there’s loads. There’s actually been an uprising, in a sense, where people are using the term “Crip Time.” So it’s a reclaimed word as an activistic statement, almost like queer time or queer theory. It’s a derogatory word that once was used to penalize someone but is now used by that group to use as an activistic term on the idea of biological health. So a really nice uprising movement in both the academic space and the activist movement space and in disability theory. So really, really interesting.
Interviewer: For you, what does it mean to be healthy?
Ryan: Even though I never felt physically as such for a long time, I think there are a lot of other nuances to health and personality. It’s walking the dogs and doing that daily routine to keep up the physical idea of health but to the degree that my body can cope with it. It’s the idea of family and friends, but to the degree that not having them too much there because that could also drain my health. It’s that balance between that social connection for the mental idea of health, but not too much that it starts to physically drain you. So it’s that balance as well between the social and the other things that give you health like healthy feelings, versus the things that can also take away your health. For me personally, it’s a balancing act and I have to do a lot of management and decision making and choice making of stressful events – do I get into them or do I not? My life is usually oriented around the keeping of health, an equilibrium as such. But then also trying to engage in and keep those really healthy things like family and friends there. So it’s all about mental health as well, and happiness. And well being can be loads of different things for different people. That might be for some people walking their dogs, it might be spending time with their children and maybe writing a letter or breathing or doing something like a hobby or an after factor creative process. And I guess that’s something I should add to mine actually is like, just being creative. I’ve noticed that when I’m not doing something that I love, or enjoy in terms of creativity or process, I can go into depression.
It’s also about being there for other people’s health as well. You’re a component in other people’s health. For instance, a partner might be sad or down or in depression. You are something that can also help balance their health or be there for their health. So you also have to look at yourself as a component of health as well. I think I hold that quite truly to myself in that everything I do, or anywhere I do something, I could change someone’s mood, which is also to me an idea of health, right? Because that can increase stress, decrease heart rate, it can do loads of different things. So I think it’s also trying to keep healthiness around relationships and family and friends and understanding what’s worthwhile in terms of worrying about something and what’s not. I always say this to my mum, “it’s not worth your worry”, like it’s not worth your time. You have to protect your health, and it’s trying to weigh up those values.
I think it’s okay to hold back and protect yourself and focus on yourself and it’s also about being selfish. Because while you are a component of other people’s health, it’s okay to be selfish and protect points of your health. And that can be mentally, physically, emotionally. I think that’s the biggest one that I take away. Being selfish about your health, it doesn’t mean that you’re a selfish person, it means that you’re being selfish to protect yourself in terms of your health, because otherwise, what do you do? Help yourself before you can help someone else. So I think it’s also protecting people and not making them feel guilty as well for what they can and cannot do.
Thanks, Ryan!
–The Culture + Health Team