Un-Ethicalities in the built world
In association with
Royal College of Art
Year
2020-2021
Location
London
Keywords
Corruption
Construction
Education
Systems
Service-Design
This study was inspired by own experience of playing multiple roles in the Indian construction industry and coming across unsettling systemic issues, that spared a desire in me to look for answers. This bought me to RCA. Here I look at corruption from a systemic lens through the eyes of a service designer, to identify gaps for intervention in a sub-system.
The value of global construction output is expected to increase by $8 trillion to reach $17.5 trillion per annum by 2030. It is difficult to determine precisely the value of losses through corruption, but estimates tend to range between 10 and 30%.
Mathhews, P. M. (2016, February 4). This is why construction is so corrupt. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/why-is-the-construction-industry-so-corrupt-and-what-can-we-do-about-it/
Abstract
This paper studies ‘Corruption in the context of the Indian construction industry’. It uses a service design mindset to analyze the problem from a systemic view. For this a series of confidential interviews centred around ethics, with national and international industry experts, students and construction-professionals, journalistic reports against bad practices and articles calling out for change are used, to locate pain points and gaps within this wicked problem. The problem as defined is: the burgeoning of corruption amongst young professionals in the industry due to an inability to identify systemic flaws which in turn bars them from breaking out. The hypothesis proposed is: the possibility of delegating part of the responsibility of limiting the future of corruption to educational institutions. To get to this, first corruption is explored through multiple lenses of business, economy, psychology and more and then narrows its focus down on education through exploring a sub-system between educational institutes-judiciary councils- market norms. This paper does not propose any solutions to the problem of corruption, rather provocates the reader throughout using many critical investigations. The aim of these provocations is for the reader to imagine a future generation that limits the survival of corruption.
Feedback
This paper was awarded with a 'distinction' and archived in Royal College of Art's Library.
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The formal feedback as received was:
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"A strong dissertation that tackles corruption in India's building industry, adopting a service design approach and looking at the problem from a systemic view. It effectively introduces the subject by a fictional account of the process of building a house from the owner's view, describing step by step the scenario of encountering corruption and malpractices along the way. This speculative account sets the stage for a critical analysis of the diverse and complex factors involving the building industry in India, effectively drawing arguments from interviews with anonymous industry experts and students, reports and journalistic articles on the subject. The thesis first offers a general view before strategically narrows its focus on the situation faced by young professionals in their early careers, signalling the education system as the locus for fostering ethical practices.
The thesis is well-argued and articulated originally, experimenting with writing styles and a dialogic format that effectively introduces different registers, making the reading engaging, self-reflexive (about the author's assumptions) and inclusive of the reader. Although the author claims not to offer solutions as the outcome of her research, she concludes by suggesting the need to introduce and reinforce ethical codes from early university training to prepare a new generation that would set off to eradicate corruption. While the author recognises the complexity and multiple involved factors, economic ones at the core foundation that would lie beyond the power of a new generation, however, she casts her vote for a bottom-up approach as one way to tackle the problem."
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(Vicente,2021)
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