Necessary process, irreplaceable dignity
Last week, my creativity students took their first steps in independently carrying out human-centered design. We began with brainstorming about pain points, or visible struggles that the students had seen or experienced.
A common pain point emerged in my three classes: the students would constantly be belittled for choosing to be communication majors. They always had to justify their choice of university major before relatives who thought of communication as “just talking.” They became the default slide deck creators for group projects in their core classes because “you guys are good at designing things.” They were always told that they would be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
Even I had once been on the receiving end of such misconceptions. At a team meeting for a research project, someone mentioned that I specialized in science and risk communication. One of the researchers piped up, “So you’ll make a video about our work!”
“No. I will study how people understand the world, which has implications for how they understand what is communicated to them,” I retorted, trying not to sound like I wanted to give him a high five. In the face. With a chair.
Our communication majors have borne so many stigmas. Your work must be easy! Except we read across humanities and social sciences fields, and some of our research requires statistics. Your lessons are about writing and speaking well! Except we begin with and concentrate on the framework and context in which those skills will later be used.
You guys make things! Except we first have to carry out social science research: to examine what people understand about the world or how they interpret reality or how they perceive their role in the networks of power in which they participate (depending on the philosophical paradigm that we choose).
Then there are the theories, the methods, the analysis—and then, and only then, do we determine what skill is needed. It might be an article to read, a talk to listen to, an infographic to learn from—but it can also be a workshop to push participation in community endeavors, or a conversation to engage multiple stakeholders.
It’s easy to reduce our field to production absent deliberation when one doesn’t know about the sausage making, the messy backstage, the years of trial and error. It’s easy to call a field “replaceable by AI” when one perceives the process as unnecessary—when one thinks that removing the process equals efficiency.
My work in the research team led me to more projects, one of which eventually became my research on the communities hit by Typhoon “Yolanda.” My team and I traveled to different municipalities. We asked how people understood the warnings, and never assumed what people knew or cared about.
What we found was surprising: one barangay had always understood the term “storm surge” and ignored “daluyong,” which people called “a sleepy word that no one cares about.” Another barangay relied on their knowledge of the sea to tell them what kind of storm was on the way. Another barangay used the news as a springboard for community discussions on when to evacuate and who would contribute what at the evacuation center.
No matter how many times the local government insisted that people simply needed brochures or tarps or “just more scientific knowledge,” we never once heard a demand for videos or infographics or information. Communities wanted presence, precision, and elected officials who were people first.
In one community, our focus group discussion grew heated. After an hour of gentle conversation, people found the courage to speak about how they resented their local government for not being organized during evacuation, for playing favorites when distributing relief goods, for talking too much and doing too little.
In an hour, our participants began to cry. We, the researchers, allowed them to: we listened to their stories, and, when we sensed that they were ready, pushed the conversation so that they could talk about their ideas for better evacuation, better relief goods distribution, better governance.
The ideas flew: make lists of who needed what, make a map and abide by the rules of where to evacuate, barangay officials must work closely with their citizens. In the end, the group thanked us for allowing them to air their anger. They had never had the space to grieve, they said. They had never been given the chance to talk about what they thought would make a better world.
They had never been asked to dream.
This, too, is the job of communication: close interaction, a discussion that probes a problem beyond what other fields have attempted, the ability to make people speak so that they can hope.
Many think of my field as superfluous, frivolous, substitutable by AI. Communication, however, is not only in the product that can be replaced. It is in the irreplaceable process, in the interactions that people have always craved—in the human being whose dignity should be at the center of all our work, but who now risks being forgotten.
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