Learning Through Community

As design students, we spend a lot of time talking about empathy, understanding users, and designing for people. These ideas often exist within projects, exercises, and classroom discussions. During my community project with SEARCH and NIRMAN in Gadchiroli, I had the opportunity to see what these ideas look like in practice. Instead of returning with a list of solutions or outcomes, I returned with a set of questions that slowly shaped my understanding of community, healthcare, and design.

What does SEARCH do?

SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health) in Gadchiroli was founded in 1986 by Dr. Abhay Bang and Dr. Rani Bang. They work with marginalised communities — rural, tribal, women, and children — to identify health needs and develop community-empowering models of healthcare. These models, aimed at reducing disease, poverty, and suffering, are rigorously tested through research.

What stood out to me was how deeply connected the organisation is to the communities it serves. Rather than creating solutions from a distance, SEARCH spends time understanding people’s realities and building systems around them. Whether through research, community health workers, outreach programmes, or the Mobile Medical Unit, every initiative seemed to begin with the same question: what do people actually need, and how can services become more accessible to them?

What does NIRMAN do?

While SEARCH focuses on community health, NIRMAN focuses on youth development.

NIRMAN is SEARCH’s youth initiative for young people above the age of eighteen. Through workshops, discussions, and village visits, it encourages participants to reflect on their purpose, values, leadership, and role in society. Unlike conventional career-focused programmes, it places greater emphasis on self-reflection and meaningful social impact.

A recurring theme throughout the workshops was purpose. Through conversations with community members and fellow participants, I was encouraged to think about what gives people a sense of direction and how they can contribute to society in their own way. We also discussed practical topics such as managing money, setting goals, and creating realistic action plans to achieve them.

One of the most meaningful parts of my experience was visiting nearby villages and interacting with the people who lived there. These visits encouraged us to understand people’s daily lives, aspirations, and experiences. Communities are shaped not only by their challenges, but also by the values, ambitions, and relationships of the people within them.

Mobile Medical unit

How different can healthcare be when it is designed around a community?

This was perhaps the question that surprised me the most.

One of the first things I felt when arriving at the SEARCH campus was discomfort. The campus was calm, welcoming, and thoughtfully designed, yet it felt unfamiliar. As someone who grew up in a city, I have always associated comfort with modern buildings, polished surfaces, and institutional environments.

SEARCH challenged that idea completely.

The architecture of the campus draws heavily from the villages it serves. Buildings use local materials, open spaces, sloping roofs, and textures inspired by hand-plastered mud walls. These choices are not decorative. They respond to the local climate and create an environment that feels familiar to the people who visit the campus.

At first, I viewed the campus through my own lens. Then I realised something important: the space was not designed for me. Patients and families travelling from remote villages arrive in an environment that resembles their homes rather than an unfamiliar institution. What felt unusual to me felt comfortable to them.

This idea became even clearer when I accompanied SEARCH’s Mobile Medical Unit (MMU) on a field visit. The MMU consists of a doctor, pharmacist, laboratory technician, and administrative staff member who travel to villages providing consultations, medicines, and basic healthcare services.

Travelling through remote roads and villages made me realise how difficult healthcare access can be for many communities. For some villagers, visiting a hospital can involve long journeys, travel expenses, and time away from work.

However, the biggest challenge was often trust. In many remote villages, healthcare workers must first overcome hesitation and deeply rooted beliefs and superstitions against science before medical advice is accepted. Trust is built slowly through consistent visits and collaboration with local ASHA — trained local women who connect communities with healthcare services, awareness programmes, and government schemes.

The medicine may be the same, but the experience surrounding it is completely different. SEARCH adapts healthcare to fit people’s lives rather than expecting people to adapt to the healthcare system.

Built in infrastruture for comfort of patient’s family

What does it actually mean to involve the user in the design process?

Before this visit, user-centred design felt like a classroom methodology involving interviews, personas, and user needs. At SEARCH, I saw what it looks like when user-centred thinking becomes part of an entire organisation.

It is not simply about asking people what they want, but understanding how they live and shaping services around their realities. The architecture reflects local homes, the Mobile Medical Unit travels to villages instead of expecting villagers to travel to hospitals, and community health workers spend years building relationships and trust. Each of these decisions emerged from understanding people first.

This was one of the strongest connections I found between the project and design.

What does it take to make someone comfortable?

This question stayed with me throughout the project.

Initially, I thought comfort was about convenience. After spending time at SEARCH, I began to see comfort differently. Comfort can come from familiarity. It can come from hearing your language spoken, recognising materials and spaces, being welcomed without judgement, or interacting with people you trust.

Comfort is what drives people to come to the SEARCH hospital after travelling for hours and passing several others on the way.

“They are good, they are the best. They talk to us properly and listen to us.” — Patient at the hospital

Another piece of advice I heard during my stay captured this idea perfectly:

“Sit with them, wherever they are sitting. On the ground, if you have to, if you want them to answer your questions without hesitation.”

My initial discomfort on campus eventually became one of my biggest learnings. It helped me realise that comfort is not universal. Different people feel comfortable in different environments, and good design acknowledges those differences rather than ignoring them.

What does this have to do with design?

At first glance, healthcare and youth development may not seem directly connected to design. Yet the more time I spent observing SEARCH and NIRMAN, the more I realised that design was present everywhere.

Whether it was the campus architecture, the Mobile Medical Unit, community outreach, or NIRMAN’s workshops, each initiative began with observation, understanding, and years of iteration rather than immediate solutions. Even the simple hand-painted signs in villages reflected this thinking. Instead of elaborate posters, they used familiar visual language that people would actually notice and understand.

Through activities such as tree counting, studying composting practices, and creating health-awareness presentations for school students, I learned the importance of observation, documentation, and communication.

Counting trees across the 45-acre campus helped determine resource requirements such as water and manure.

Studying composting practices became an exercise in balancing scientific recommendations with methods refined through years of experience and trial and error.

Creating presentations on malaria and diarrhoea for school students taught me how communication changes when designed for a specific audience. By using simple illustrations inspired by newspaper comics, I tried to make the information feel familiar, engaging, and easier to remember. Small decisions can play in helping people connect with and retain information.

This connected strongly to many ideas we explored during our first year, including empathy, systems thinking, participation, and user understanding. The experience reinforced something that is easy to forget: before creating anything, we must first learn to listen.

What changed for me?

Design and systems take patience. Meaningful systems take time to build. The work done by SEARCH today is the result of decades of effort by everyone involved, from the founders to the people working on the ground. Some ASHAs spend years earning the trust and respezct of their communities.

Most importantly, I left with a deeper understanding of empathy, seeing it not only as part of the design process but also as a more thoughtful way of engaging with people.

A valuable aspect of NIRMAN was meeting like-minded people from different backgrounds who shared a desire to make a positive impact. Many participants had travelled from different parts of the country and brought unique experiences and perspectives. Listening to their stories reminded me that there is no single way to create impact.

I carried back more questions than answers. Yet those questions became the most valuable part of the experience. They encouraged me to think differently about healthcare, design, and community, and reinforced the idea that meaningful change often begins with understanding before action.

I would like to thank the NIRMAN team, specially our mentor Anushka, SEARCH foundation and my constant companion through this, Narayani Chapalgaonkar.

By Khushi Mehra.