Design Concepts & Concerns

Concept Mela. Awesome conclusion for DCC2010

2010-04-03T07:28:00.000-07:00

Six New Design Schools for India

Image: Groups of students with their models and metaphors to explain their concept for the six proposed design schools for their chosen regions of India. We hope that the National Design Policy administrators are listening

The "Concept Mela format was used again after several years at the end of this DCC class for the Foundation students at NID. Media showed interest and many visitors interacted with the students. They are preparing a package that will be made available to policy makers and stake-holders alike. This is an attempt to create the future in design education, see the paper, "Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education" (2005) download pdf file here.

M P Ranjan

Concept Mela 2010: Six Design Schools for India

2010-03-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Prof. M P Ranjan
Five years after the last major Concept Mela where NID Foundation students shared concepts for sector specific design institutions we have given the theme of designing six new schools for six regions of India – North, South East, West, Centre and Northeast regions.

Image01: Poster designed to invite feedback in the Concept Mela format at NID

The Concept Mela is scheduled to take place on 26th March 2010 in the NID Foyer and six groups composed of the 88 Foundation students from 3.00 pm tpo 6,00 pm IST. We look forward to a stimulating evening of presentations and discussions with visitors, students and faculty from NID and a number of other schools in Ahmedabad. The presentations will continue on the next day, Saturday 27th March 2010, from 10.00 am to 12.00pm.

Image 02: Students at work over the weekend at NID working on their respective concepts as well as in sessions with experts and teachers in their groups.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Business Models for Designers 2010: Learning from the Field

2010-03-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Learning from the Field
Prof M P Ranjan

Learning from the field as a part of the design pedagogy at NID includes a live assignment that provides training in observation and interaction with persons and situations from a particular context. Here, in this course, we asked six teams of students to visit selected situations in the city of Ahmedabad to look at selected street food vendors over a period of three or four days in which they would watch, interact, record through field notes and sketches and build models to refine their understanding of the situation being studied, all carried out in an iterative manner. In this case the business models of a category of entrepreneurs called street food vendors. This year, as in previous years, we assigned the six groups to the categories of street food vendors who would be active at this time of the year. These six include – Fruit and Juice vendors (Juicewalla), Tea vendors (Chaiwalla), Pani Puri vendors (Pani Puri walla), Pav Bhaji vendors (Pav Bhaji walla), Omlette vendors (Omlettewalla) and the Fried Bhajiya vendor (Bhajiya walla). Download presentation and paper titled "Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education" presented at the EAD06 conference in Bremen, Germany in 2005 which describes the course along with a visual presentation and embedded slide shows inside the pdf show. Zip file 53.8 mb with pdf show and full text and linked movies.

Image01: Metaphor chosen by the Juicewalla group was Street Car Racing with pit stops and racing events that were supported with poster presentations of a variety of juice vendors in the city of Ahmedabad. the thumbnail images show how the team members came up to the models and explained their understanding to the full class.

Download pdf picture album of Juicewalla group PDF file 5.8 mb

Image02: The Chaiwalla group chose the metaphor of a Football match and they presented a dynamic image that had players coming in as cut-out images and made for a compelling presentation. The team wore team T-shirts and badges for a group identity.

Download pdf picture album of Chaiwalla group PDF file 12.6 mb

Image03: The Pani Puri group used the train of gears as their metaphor and theirs too was a dynamic show since they came in one by one and added a new yellow gear as they shared their insights from the field.

Download pdf picture album of Pani Puriwalla group PDF file 5.3 mb

Image04: A very Indian metaphor of a Masala Dabba or Masala Box for Indian spices was used by the Pav Bhaji group and the show went through many layers of unfolding from each spice sub-box. The lid too had some problems that were shared at the very end.

Download pdf picture album of Pav Bhajiwalla group PDF file 4.8 mb

Image05: The Omlettewala group chose the metaphor of a Music Boom Box and performed a skit to illustrate some features.

Download pdf picture album of Omlettewalla group PDF file 4.1 mb

Image06: Finally the Bhajiyawalla group stole the show by presenting an huge Ten Rupee Note using both sides of the note as their metaphor. Their explanation was that whatever happened to the costs of ingredients the Bhajiyawalla always managed to Price their product at Rupees Ten. Good insight from the field, a strategy to remember.

Download pdf picture album of Bhajiyawalla group PDF file 3.6 mb

Understanding Business Processes:
Building and delivering business models are now an integral part of our understanding of design in India. We therefore innovated this assignment in order to give design students an understanding of business processes. Groups of students are asked to study the work of local street food vendors and to conduct observations and interviews with numerous such service providers in order to understand their business processes and to map the same in the form of a presentation to the rest of the class. The local “Chai-wallah, the omlette-wallah, and other fast-food vendors on the streets of Ahmedabad become subjects of their study of micro-enterprises which have all the business processes and strategies of a multi-national, albeit at a much smaller scale, and at much more comprehensible scale of operation. Students build a visual model of their observations and findings along with a smattering of business terminology to explain the cash flows and business strategies adopted by each of these micro-enterprises and leads to a better understanding of business processes as an area of study. The presentations are used by the teachers to instruct and inform the students of the relevance of such studies and the possibility of scaling up this study to medium and large businesses in principle. This is perhaps a painless way to learn about business and the understanding exhibited by our students is quite remarkable.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC 2010: Foundation Batch 2009 -10

2009-12-30T06:26:00.000-08:00

Convocation Week: Curtain Raiser Assignment

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image01: DCC Black Board generated through class brainstorming on the key words associated with “What is Design?”

Once again we return to the Foundation batch at NID to conduct another course of the Design Concepts and Concerns and this year we have as many as 90 students in the Foundation year two batches since the NID student intake has once again expanded this year. There is another change in the time table this year to accommodate the Holi festival and we have agreed to have this course in two parts with the first part as a one week module that coincides with the NID Convocation week in early December 2009 and the second part as a four week module that comes after the Holi festival during the month of March 2010. We have therefore changed the sequence of assignments and tried to use the presence of over two hundred NID graduates on campus at Paldi who have all come to participate in the convocation ceremony. This would give the Foundation students an opportunistic occasion to meet them in an assignment format that would help them discover and articulate something more about the fields of design that they themselves would be entering at the end of their Foundation programme at NID.

Image02: Course introduction to teachers, course content and teaching approaches recorded in class and supplemented with images from the class on day one looking at the students in the class. Part one of the session as a YouTube movie based on the voice recordings in the class. Part one.

Learning by doing and learning through team work are the two major pedagogic strategies that the DCC course uses and these journeys are documented visually and these images are made available for future reflection so that learning is a continuous process, like a slow fuse still left burning as the semester progresses. The course teachers, Ranjan, Rashmi, Gayatri and Shashank met together and decided to use the NID Convocation event to place the Foundation students in a context where they could work as a team and find out as much as they could and in an as deeply connected manner as they could the many dimensions of the design disciplines that were offered at NID through an engagement with what they already knew and through meetings with senior students and graduates from the disciplines that they were assigned to study in some depth. The time available was les than a week since the students had still to put up their Convocation display for the Foundation Programme as part of the series of exhibits that were planned across the campus at NID. They therefore had their tasks cut out for them to plan their time and divide their tasks and work as a team to try and first discover the contents of the disciplines and then work together to visualize these into a coherent model that would help them share their collective understanding of the chosen subject with the rest of the class and the teachers at the end of the assignment.

Image03: Part two of the voice recording of the first session before the group brainstorming session supplemented with images from the class, this time looking at the teachers. Part two.

The course started with a round of introductions to the teachers and a morning of discussion on the topic of What is Design? The black board was used to capture brainstorming responses for students and as the black board filled up with words offered by the students the numerous dimensions of design came out in the open, as an external map of what was collectively held in the minds of the class fellows. Some of the words were new for some while others were more or less common for a class of the NID Foundation Programme student who had completed one semester of basic design education that dealt with composition, drawing, colour, geometry and materials – all foundations for a design career – and they had many a discussion with teachers and seniors in their past months at NID, in a rich design learning environmemt. The first part of this discussion is recorded in the two part voice recordings that have been supported by images from the class in the form of a quicktime slide show, however here the black board brainstorming session is yet to follow and at the end of this session the class was divided into six groups, each assigned at random, by pick of lots, to one of the six design disciplines that could be broadly described by the terms listed here: 3D Products, Image and Graphics, Fibres and Textiles, Exhibition and Space, IT and New Media and Motion Picture and Animation.

Image04: Three groups as seen on day one and later after their model building based on their collective exploration of the chosen disciplines of design.

The student teams went into a huddle and prepared themselves for the period of field based interviews with NID graduates with the specific aim of trying to understand the various dimensions of each of the disciplines, their tools, processes, knowledge and skill sets and attitudes and finer sensibilities, that each of these disciplines would need to process in order to work effectively in the space that they usually worked in. This collective process of exploration, brainstorming, articulation and expression bring with it a sense of dep understanding of the subject at hand and the whole process is quite memorable for all the participants, if they have immersed themselves in the process over the limited time period that was available at hand. The week went by very rapidly and at the end we had six very rich presentations that were played out in front of the whole class, and each presentation was recorded in images and voice capture and these were all made available for the students as digital files placed on the DCC2010 server on the NID intranet.

Image05: Three more groups as seen on day one and later after they had completed their group assignment of building models of the chosen disciplines of design.

Prof. M P Ranjan

DCC2009 Water Paldi: Ice, Steam & Drops

2009-09-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

Ice (Frozen) – Steam (Hot) – Drop (Wet) : Many forms of water to joggle the imagination

Prof M P Ranjan

The theme for DCC 2009 continues to be Water even though the precipitation has improved in the delayed stage of the monsoon in India but the damage has been done and many farmers and village inhabitants have lost their means of livelihood and they feel the crunch when the dry spell continues beyond a point of no return.

Image01: DCC2009 BlackBoard at the opening session at Paldi for the fourth batch of PG students from Ceramic Design, Furniture Design, Graphic Design and Film and Video Communications. Thye brainstorming session and participative exploration of the question of “What is Design?” resulted in a large list of words that students brought up during the session.

The session itself was lively and many of the words were accompanied by a brief explanation and with some examples that could clarify the context in which these words were being offered during the class discussion of the subject of understanding design as we know it today. We lost one day in this two week course since the opening Monday was a public holiday due to ID celebrations. However we felt that we could still forge forward and in the evening the students were asked to form three groups and try and categorise these words into a coherent structure that would make sense to themselves as well as to all of us.

Image02: Three models were created by the three groups (as yet unnamed and identified only as Group 1, 2 and 3) and they presented the structure that they had evolved overnight through group sessions and the three groups had different models to offer.

Group 1 had chosen the Newtonian colour wheel to try and arrange the words and they had a dramatic presentation with the colour wheel that was mounted on the ceiling fan!! And at the end they turned on the fan and we saw WHITE!!, at least in the centre…. The Group 2 used the NID symbol as their metaphor and for some reason they added a lot of gears in the diagrams and many of these did not fit each other, but their logic was impeccable and based on their dialogues that led them to describe the stages of design as – Need, Imagination & Decisions – NID and to add to the image they had a base that stood for Context and an outside gear (which did not fit) but stood for Change. Group 3 had a flow chart that was logical and echoed Prof Bruce Archers model of the design process and these transported us back to the early 60s and the mid 70’s when the design methods movement was taking shape with the thought leaders – Archer, Jones and Alexander – gave us interesting views of design as they had gleaned during their research and deliberations in the early days of design methods.

At the end of the presentations we drew lots to decide which of these groups would have the themes assigned for this batch (DCC2009 PG Paldi B4), namely – Ice, Steam and Drops – the sub-themes under water that they have to investigate through a process of sense making and understanding development. The process includes articulating what the group already knows about the theme, based on their three types of memory that have been built over a lifetime of experience. Direct experiences, Related experiences and Imagined experiences. Sensory knowledge, Knowledge acquired from others and from sources and the fantasies from their own imagination and dreams of the past. Tomorrow we will see the first stage presentations of all three groups and I look forward to it.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009 Water Bangalore: Rivers, Lakes & Aquifers

2009-09-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Rivers and Streams, Lakes and Ponds, Aquifers and Wells: Flowing, Standing and Underground

Prof M P Ranjan

Image: Composite view of three groups of Bangalore DCC students across three stages of their explorations of the theme of the course, Water – Riivers and Streams, Lakes and Ponds, Aquifers and Wells. Top row: Aquifers and wells, Middle row: Lakes and Ponds, Bottom row: Rivers and Streams

This was a very stimulating week for me at Bangalore with the wonderful weather and the daily rains in the evening time. I was also multitasking and working on my paper for the Istanbul Conference in October 2009 and I used the weekend to prepare my first draft and crystalise the research that had been going on over the past two months or so. The teams from the three disciplines at the NID Bangalore joined the course and there was a great deal of enthusiasm that was visible and all students participated with huge contributions both individual as well as collective. The results were visible and the theme of water across the three chosen areas of focus that was given to the students of DRE, DDE and IID at Bangalore were dealing with water on our land: Flowing, Standing and Underground

All three assignments were carried out with great enthusiasm and the results were remarkable. The groups explored the structure of the problem and started as usual with what they already knew in their lifetime of experience through a process of brainstorming and articulation followed by many iterations of discovering structure and finding the categories that could make sense of all the dimensions that the groups had identified. The second stage was very rich with expert interactions in the city of Bangalore and field visits to get first hand feel of the issues and perspectives in the domain of water and its uses and the effects on both environment and people. The third stage of building design opportunities was quite massive with each group producing over five hundred sketch concepts across many categories of action that they felt would be needed and could produce value. These were presented and the last assignment of individual development of one design opportunity for more detailed exploration and scenario visualization was taken up on the last day of the class. Seeing the 1500 thumbnail concepts of how water issues could be addressed with design was indeed stimulating and we need to capture these for further work in the days ahead. However I had to leave town for Jaipur on Friday morning to be with the IICD, Jaipur at their second convocation on the 12 September 2009. Back at NID Ahmedabad on Sunday morning I am awaiting the images from this visualization task at Bangalore and I am sure we will see 45 rich concept explorations that are both imaginative as well as rooted in practical realities that we all face today. I look forward to seeing the last stage soon with data feeds from my co-teachers at Bangalore, Nijoo Dubey and Priyanka Choudhary.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009 in Bangalore: Water again: Lakes, Rivers & Wells

2009-09-01T03:04:00.000-07:00

Prof M P Ranjan

Bangalore Group starts DCC with Water as their theme with focus on three subjects of 1. Lakes & Ponds 2. Rivers & Streams and 3. Aquifers & Wells.

Image01: DCC blackboard and white board after the discussion on what is design and a few design experts known to the student group. Most of the words were contributed to by students as part of the discussion on the question of “What is Design?” and who are the designer experts that you have heard about.

This helps break the ice and a good deal of discussion about design, its attributes and activities as well as the disciplines that it draws from are discussed as part of this session. It also helps set the stage for the set of assignments to follow.

Image02: View of the Class in the NID Bangalore conference room during the first session

Three groups were formed by assigning one student to each group from the photo list that is available in such a way that each group has and even distribution of members from each discipline. At Bangalore we have three disciplines at the PG level, namely, Design for Retail Experience, Design for Digital Experience and Information and Interface Design.
The session at NID Bangalore was conducted in the Conference room with black boards, white boards and digital projectors used for the lecture presentations. The modules of Understanding Design (download pdf file) was followed by sharing the IDSA lecture titled “Giving Design back to Society: Towards a post-mining economy”. The models used were explained and after the lunch break, after much delay we reassembled and formed the groups. I intended to show the students my EAD06 lecture titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education”, however fate intervened and the power supply failed us and we switched back to the white board and continued the description of the assignments and the team formation process. Lots were drawn to make the assignment of the groups to the chosen subject truly random. These presentation pdf files can be downloaded from the links above and below here:
EAD 06 presentation pdf file and eight linked quicktime movies all as one single zip file 53 MB in size

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping: Experiencing Synthesis

2009-08-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping: Water in our lives across sectors of action

Image01: With a large image of the planet Earth and an exaggerated drop of water at the centre the water in industry team grouped their design opportunity thumbnails in four broad clusters. The individual scenarios were then drawn up and presented with each member coming forward to explain their concept and the associated scenario illustration.

The assignment of exploring and discovering a large number of possible approaches and opportunities in the product, systems and services space that impinges directly or indirectly on the area chosen by the group may be a good way forward, particularly since they would have gone through at least two rounds of exploring the field and understanding its dynamics and its structure. Through this assignment the students get a feel for the early stages of design thinking and action, particularly in visualizing potential design opportunities and in experiencing the articulation of scenarios in the formulation of design ideas and avenues for action. The structure of the design situation becomes clear through the brainstorming and categorization assignments that have been carried out by the groups and these have been shared with the whole class. Having done this and after having experienced the sorting and organizing for a good deal of time the student is quite clear in the mind as to what the particular sector holds and offers as well as what as an individual they would like to focus their subsequent efforts.

Image02: The design opportunities in the domestic use of water was shown in the form of bubbles from a fish, not a very effective image, but it helped the group organize their thumbnail representations into four or five broad clusters. The group members then came forward and showcased their individual scenarios with this large image as their backdrop.

This is an assignment that gives the group and the individual student an insight into how design opportunities are visualized in a number of iterative stages and it also gives them an insight into the role of external models and discourse with colleagues in the process of design exploration and conviction building when the process of form and structure discovery is still in progress. Visualisation with the use of draft thumbnails is introduced to the students at this stage. Since we are looking at quick and expressive external images that could capture a gist of what is passing through the mind of the student this stage does give all students a glimpse into the minds of their colleagues and it is a revelation when a huge variety of concerns get disclosed that are not usually present in the verbalizations and dialogues within the group.

Image 03: The group dealing with water in public spaces came up with an illustration of a railway train and they used the clouds of smoke from the train’s chimney to cluster the design opportunity thumbnails that they had developed as a team. This was then used as a backdrop to showcase their individual design scenarios to the rest of the class.

The variety that emerges in the expressive form of what may be seen as one single word concept is another lesson to be learnt here. Many student produce huge variety of concepts based on the same starting point and it is a clear showing that in design individual expression can be influenced by a very large number of personal factors as well as biases. With the use of a format provided all the students of each group settle down to make sketch proposals for what they felt could be an opportunity in the particular sector or area of work. In this case the students worked as groups looking at possible design opportunities in the four areas of focus that were assigned to them, namely, the role and impact of Water in the following areas of focus:
1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image4: The last group dealt with water in agriculture. They used the literal clouds on top to show the raining down of design opportunities in four broad clusters or groups of ideas as design opportunity thiumbnails cascade down from the clouds above. The categories that they used include the farmer, the Government, water and issues, the headings unfortunately did not tell us very much about the contents below.

The individual scenarios were carried out on DIN A3 size sheet of paper so that the students could have adequate space to explore the idea through a number of iterations but not all the students understood the need for sequential drawings and the manner in which their thoughts could be captured as they occurred on a large sheet of paper. However after the presentations their understanding of the process of visualization and discovery was better that when they began, but still a long way to go, and this would need constant practice. Design learning is also a function of knowing and doing and the internalization of the process and the emergence of designerly ways of thinking and visualization can be seen to have begun but not as yet fully achieved. Individual student visualizations are shown in the images below and these are categorized into the four groups that they belonged to as listed in the image caption below.

1. Water in Industry

2. Water in Domestic Use

3. Water in Public Use

4. Water in Agriculture

Image 05: Stills from an online video offered by Nature Magazine about the water hot spot developing in western India with severe water stress and ground water depletion in the States of Rajasthan, Punjab, Harayana and Delhi which also happen to be the food bowl of India.

While the DCC course has been addressing the various issues of water in our lives across many domains and verticals we have constant news flows about the shortage of water coming from many sources. The latest one is the result of a six year long satellite based study conducted by a consortium of scientific institutions led by NASA. The alarming video can be watched at the Nature Magazine website at this link here. I have also made a separate post on my Design for India blog to raise the issues that this holds for the design community in India and how we can rally to address these real needs on the ground and how well we are currently prepared to face these realities. The blog post on this issue can be seen here at this link below.
Design for India

Prof M P Ranjan

Insights from the Field: of "experts & "visual narratives".

2009-08-06T03:22:00.000-07:00

Meeting “experts” and making “visual narratives” from the field

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image01: Four teams dealing with Water: Industry, Domestic, Agriculture and in Public Use – in front of their models that show the current level of understanding after having met experts in the field over the long weekend of research in the field.

Teams came back from the field work with rich insights about the topic that they had gone out to investigate through an active contact programme with “experts” in the field. These “experts” are not an academic category but include those people that the team members were able top locate who had a considerable amount of experience in the various sub issues that the team was seeking to learn about.

Image02: Views of the Water in Domestic space presentation showing the models and the rich elplanations made by the team members about the issues and perspectives that they had gleaned from their field research and meetings with experts.

Design uses knowledge that is available and what is available is processed deeply to bring a degree of understanding from which the design mind can launch the search for design opportunities, all visual, both ion the mind as well as in the visualisations that abound in the process that is used to bring clarity and to discover structure and meaning. The four groups met hoards of people in their search for experts in their particular domain and they came back enriched with new insights and many new discoveries and a fair degree of clarity about the domain that they had set out to research.

Image03: Team Industry had a rich visual narrative along with a fairly comprehensive structure to explain their findings from the field.

Learning about team work and about the value of images in this form of research was the key take away for the student teams at this stage of the DCC explorations. The metaphors made by these groups stil failed to capture the richness that was to be seen in the structure as well as the process diagrams from which the team had journeyed through. Perhaps a function of time available and the other activities that competed with the course, such as the Monsoon Fiesta, that coincides with the course at this time in the semester.

Image04: Views of the team presentation from the Water for Public Use.

Image05: Views from the Water for Agriculture team where for some reason the team has chosen a mechanical metaphor rather than a more appropriate organic one.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Visual Narratives: Learning from the Field

2009-08-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Rich Pictures in the Process of Understanding the Design Journey

Prof M P Ranjan

Image01: Group members drawing on a collective scroll laid out on the table while telling their story of meetings with informants in the field.

One group of students at Gandhinagar who were working on the theme of water and Industry came up with a rich visual narrative that is both interesting and makes sense. They had fanned out across Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar and some went out of town as well in search of people, who could be “experts”, who could explain the workings of the water processing and distribution systems of the city, with particular emphasis on what they had identified as industry applications, They came back after each day over the weekend in the field and shared their experiences and face to face encounters and meetings with the people on the ground and this was done in a visually rich manner.

Image02: Group members standing in front of the large scroll that they used by turns to share their insights from the field work carried out over three days in the field.

Each member of the group told their days story in a series of pictures that they laid out on a long scroll of paper that was both wide and long. They sat on the table and talked to each other as they drew the rich pictures on their own part of the sheet and having told their version of the story of the days meetings and the record of their journeys grows and spreads on the sheet. One other device that the group innovated was to draw a star at the point in their storytelling scroll to identify one new person in the journey of information and insight gathering that they had done that day.

Image03: Members came up to the scroll individually and told their story and shared the insights that they had gathered to make their more refined models and the final metaphor.

Having drawn the images they then linked the meta story that they had begun to understand from the growing diagrams on their large sheet of paper. Rich pictures helped in their internalizing the story and in preparing themselves for the presentation that would follow. Each team member came up to the sheet and talked with conviction about their part of the information gathering ventures into the field. Deep learning and clarity of expression gave the group a clear advantage when it came to sharing the findings with the larger group and the whole class was enthused with the breakthrough that the group had brought to the class.

Prof M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

2009-08-02T05:15:00.000-07:00

Water in our Lives: Gandhinagar DCC teams address water again - Industry, Domestic, Public Use & Agriculture

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image00: Blackboard at Gandhinagar DCC 2009 session where students responding to the question of “What is Design?” came up with a whole host of words that were listed as the session progressed and the end result was a fairly wholesome list of terms that could be associated with both the design process as well as with design learning.

Continuing with the theme this year of looking at water from many of its critical dimensions the teams at NID Gandhinagar were assigned the following areas of emphasis for their own journey of exploration and discovery of design and design learning.

1. Water in Industry
2. Water in Domestic Use
3. Water in Public Use
4. Water in Agriculture

Image01: Industry: Team of students looking the theme of Industry came up with these offerings as they brainstormed and organized their discovered words and concepts in a manner in which the team had understood the subject. Their structure was quite rich but their metaphor did not quite make the grade.

Image02: Domestic: The team dealing with domestic issues and perspectives came up with a very rich metaphor to capture the issues that they had discovered from their exploration of their own memories of the subject of water in their own lives.

Image03: Public Use: The team dealing with the Public use of water with a focus on urban applications came up with a very powerful expression of the human body to capture their understanding of the systems of relationships but their structure was not yet fully evolved and the model did not show the relationships although the seeds of the possibilities were touched upon.

Image04: Agriculture: The model was once again a human body but this time more like a Scare-crow in the field which may be appropriate for the subject of agriculture that they were dealing with. However the structure left out many gaps that we think shows the gaps in our own urban understanding of the realities in the rural situations today.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Opportunity Mapping & Visualisation: Water- Storage, Sport & Awareness

2009-07-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

Prof M P Ranjan

Design Opportunity Mapping:

All three groups explored their specific areas with numerous thumbnail scenarios, each carried out with deeo dialogue within the team and committed to the format provided. The groups then categorised these design visualisations as thumbnails arranged into the chosen categories and presented all the sketches around a rich visual model that could support and reveal the structure of their offerings.

Individual students had then chosen one of the team concepts and developed this one into a more detailed visualisation of their chosen concept area and these were brought back to the final presentation event in the NID Foyer on Friday evening, the last day of the course for the Paldi Batch this year.

Image01: Group One - Water: Storage and Delivery

Image02: Group Two -Water: Sport and Festivals

Image Group Three - Water: Awareness of Issues and Methods

Prof M P Ranjan

Expert Inputs: Presentation Stage Two

2009-07-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Prof M P Ranjan
All three groups spent the weekend meeting "Experts" relating to their own areas and in twos and threes went to numerous places in the city as well as conducted focussed research to clarify areas that they were not familiar with in the first round of model building.
Images from their presentations are shown below in the following order;

Group 1: Water - Storage and Delivery

Group 2: Water - Sports and Festivals

Group 3: Water - Awareness of Issues & Methods

Image set 01: Group One. Water - Storage and Delivery

Image set 02: Group Two. Water - Sports and Festivals

Image set 03: Group three. Water - Awareness of Issues & Methods

Prof M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Storage, Sport and Awareness

2009-07-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

Water in DCC2009: Storage, Sport and Awareness

Prof M P Ranjan

Water in DCC: Storage, Sport and Awareness: Results of Assignment One – What we already knew as a group – Brainstorming, Discovering Attributes, Articulating Structure of What we Know, Building a Model of What we Think we Know.

Image01: Group One worked on Storage and Delivery issues and perspectives with Water in our lives.

This group had a faint element of structure in their presentation but the form was that of a tree and many parts of the tree were used but most of their efforts were on the leaves and left many opportunities open for interpretation.

Image02: Group Two worked on Sports and Festivals that use Water in a major way and looked at the impact of their activities on water and that of water on the culture of sport.

This group had a well executed and imposing form of a tree (again) with the roots covering the sports and the leaves dealing with the festivals and the axe in between the trunk symbolizing the problems. The structure was polarized into two broad parts leaving scope for improvement in the next round.

Image03: Group Three worked on issues of Awareness and of major issues with water and methods of dealing with them.

This group had a scattered structure since they tried to use colour alone as a organizing principle and their metaphor of a space view with meteorites in motion around a symbolic planet failed to provide a structure that could support a meaningful expression and the form too was weak in showing relationships that the groups was talking about but failed to show in the connections on the model. The next round should show the way. I thought that this group too had a tree – but this time from the top view – I told them so from my point of view.

Image04: The Big Tree at NID as seen from the second floor window by each of the three groups must have influenced their decisions and the models offered above.

All groups had settled for the easy metaphor by using a tree or space without much structure and a good deal of feedback came up in the presentations and discussions from both students as well as the faculty team of Rashmi, Shashank, Sumiran and Ranjan, which I hope has provided a platform for rich learning by doing.

Prof M P Ranjan

Virtual Water (water footprint)

2009-07-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

The production of 1 kilogram of:
- rice requires 3,000 litres of water
- maize requires 900 litres of water
- wheat requires 1,350 litres of water
- beef requires 16,000 litres of water.

Water is essential part of human life, when we are taking about our daily activity. People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, lifestyle products etc. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint (Virtual water)of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.

The global volume of virtual water flows related to the international trade in commodities is 1,600 Km³/yr. About 80% of these virtual water flows relate to the trade in agricultural products, while the remainder is related to industrial product trade.

140 litres of water are needed to produce 1 cup of coffee while the production of 1 litre of milk requires 1,000 litres of water.

Globally, water is saved if agricultural products are traded from regions with high water productivity to those with low water productivity. At present, if importing countries produced all imported agricultural products domestically, they would require 1,600 Km³ of water per year; however, the products are being produced with only 1.200 Km³/yr in the exporting countries, saving global water resources by roughly 400 billion m³/yr.

The per capita consumption of virtual water contained in our diets varies according to the type of diet, from 1 m³/day for a survival diet, to 2.6 m³/day for a vegetarian diet and over 5 m³ for a United States style meat based diet.

Only about 7% of the Chinese water footprint of 700 m³ per capita per year (m³/cap/yr) falls outside of China, whereas 65% of Japan's total water footprint of 1150 m³/cap/yr is external.

The United States appears to have an average water footprint of 2,480 m³/cap/yr, while the global average water footprint is 1,240 m³/cap/yr (US household use of 575 liters. Their large footprint is primarily because of our beef habit - large consumption of meat per capita).

When we are taking about daily usage products. Most of us consume Bottled water specially when we are traveling. Bottled water manufacturers’ encourage the perception that their products are purer and safer than tap water. Bottled water can cost up to 10,000 times more per gallon than tap water. In summary, the manufacture and transport of that one kilogram bottle of Fiji water consumed 26.88 kilograms of water (7.1 gallons) .849 Kilograms of fossil fuel (one litre or .26 gal) and emitted 562 grams of Greenhouse Gases (1.2 pounds).

The growth in bottled water production has increased water extraction in areas near bottling plants, leading to water shortages that affect nearby consumers and farmers. In addition to the millions of gallons of water used in the plastic-making process, two gallons of water are wasted in the purification process for every gallon that goes into the bottles.

Another example: The Coca-Cola company is the largest beverage company in the world, and according to its own admission, the company used 283 billion liters of water in 2004.It is enough water to meet the entire world's drinking needs for 10 days! If we use the water that Coca-Cola used in 2004, we could meet the entire drinking needs of people who don't currently have access to clean drinking water for 47 days!

Coca-Cola's water use ratio in India is 4 to 1 - that is, 75% of the freshwater it extracts is turned into wastewater. The company has indiscriminately discharged its wastewater into the surrounding fields, severely polluting the scarce remaining groundwater as well as soil.

In India Coke’s mining of more than 1 million liters of ground water per day has parched the lands of some 2000 people within 1.2 miles of the factory. The company’s usage of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes has also been questioned by local residents. Due to the indiscriminate mining, the ground water has become contaminated with excessive calcium and magnesium from the dissolution of limestone that is associated with the groundwater deposit. Nearly 100 people have reported recurring stomach aches, which they relate to the brackish and milky white water that they are being forced to drink. Thousands of farmers across India are struggling to make a living because of crop failure as a result of the water shortages created by the Coca-Cola company.

The impacts being felt by the communities who live around Coca-Cola's bottling plants are no small matter. In a country where over 70% of the population still makes a living related to agriculture, taking away the water and poisoning the remaining water and the soil has had dramatic consequences.

When we are taking about design, it is not just an idea; it’s about the execution of an idea. That involves combination of different kinds of logic, psychological considerations, materials... and water or more accurately ‘virtual water’ (virtual water is the amount of water that is embedded in food or other products needed for its production) which is a essential part of any production. Thus, every product has a water footprint. It is estimated that almost a billion people in the world cannot meet even their basic water needs. Nobody thinks about those people while designing or manufacturing products that have huge water footprints associated with them.

http://www.indiaresource.org/

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/askpablo-exotic-1.php

http://www.waterfootprint.org

http://www.dae.gov.in/publ/betrlife/water/water.pdf

http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/aidaustin/water/water_privatization.pdf

Sumiran

Evolution of DCC course at NID

2009-07-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

Evolution of DCC course at NID: Looking back in 2009

Prof M P Ranjan

Image01: Models and lectures that were developed over the years for the Design Concepts and Concerns course at NID as they stood in 2005 as they appear in the EAD06 conference presentation at Bremen, Germany.

Meena Kadri wrote about the course on her blog, “Random Specific”, and she sent me a link with a question – “Has not the DCC course evolved at NID over the past 40 years or so?” I sent her a brief note and then decided that the question could be answered at some length and perhaps some design historian or research scholar would be sufficiently interested in looking at the evolution of the pedagogy at NID which I do believe has made significant contribution to design education in India as well as in the world, much of which is as yet not appreciated due to a paucity of published references on the processes and personalities involved.

Image02: Cover and contents page of the Design Issues journal of Autumn 2005 dealing with Design and education in India.

The course as it stands now is documented at this blog site and through a couple of papers that I had written, first in 2002 for the Design Issues magazine at the invitation of Martha Scotford who was compiling a collection of papers about design from India for the Design Issues magazine. However this paper that I submitted called the Avalanche Effect was not included in the final edited version and on Mon, 1 Dec 2003 I received a message from Martha Scotford about the rejection and I was teaching at the BCDI in Agartala at that time and I immediately posted it on the PhD-Design list which can be seen at this link here below: Avalanche Effect on the PhD –Design discussion list.
or here at the TinyURL The Design Issues is a very respected peer reviewed journal from the MIT and the reviewers may have thought that the claims made by the professor from India were a very tall order at that time or found some other shortcoming in my paper based on which it was declined. The journal came out with their volume about India and Indian design and this did not include my paper (“Design Issues: History Theory Criticism” volume 21, Number 4, Autumn 2005) The pdf copy of the “Avalanche Effect” paper can be downloaded from here as a 55kb pdf file.

Image03: Select pages from my presentation titled “Creating the Unknowable” showing the series of Assignments that are offered to NID Foundation students as part of their five week course on Design Concepts and Concerns.

However in the same year, in 2005, my paper titled “Creating the Unknowable: Designing the Future in Education” also about the DCC course was accepted by a peer reviewed conference at Bremen Germany, the EAD06 coordinated by Wolfgang Jonas a design thinker at the Bremen University School of Design and I was able to share the DCC pedagogy and the underlying intentions for the first time on a public forum composed of critical design professors. (Download the full presentation from here as a 54MB zip file containing one pdf of the presentation and six linked movies inside one folder) Unfortunately even here my travel costs would not be supported by NID so I had to bear the cost of travel myself showing how difficult it is to get support for design education in India all these years. This lack of official support is captured in my conference paper for the first National Design Summit in India called the CII-NID Design Summit that was held in Bangalore in December 2001. My paper was titled “Cactus Flower blooms in a Desert: Reflections on Design and Innovation in India”. Download the paper and the visual presentation from here as a 14.5 MB zip file containing three pdf files.

Image04: Thumbnails of OHP sheets used for the DCC course lectures in the late 80’s and early 90’s before the course was changed significantly in 1998.

Yes, to cut a long story short, the course dealing with design theory has been evolving at NID for many many years from the original “Design Methods” that was first taught by Prof Kumar Vyas from the late 60’s and the early 70's for Product Design and then in the Foundation Programme and he was later assisted by Prof S Balaram and Dhimant Panchal. A variation took place when the teachers of this course at NID started looking at processes within design in the 80's and it was then called “Design Process”. A version of the course offered to Product Design students at the AEP Level was called “Product Design Process”. In the mid 70's Mohan Bhandari took over the Foundation programme after his stint of study in Germany and he brought in the Environmental focus and the course was still called Design Process when I took over this course in the late 80's.

Christopher Alexander’s papers and in particular his descriptive pages from his “Notes of the Synthesis of Form” were available at NID as cyclostyled papers in a number of copies which I had seen and I even had a personal copy way back in 1969 when I joined the Institute as a student in the first Post Graduate Programme in Furniture Design. These may have been here of many years before Prof Vyas’s course and Alexander did visit India in the early 60’s as part of his research efforts for his first book that looked at an Indian Village as a source of inspiration for his theory about human settlements and design. The cyclostyled papers could have been an early draft of his book which someone may have collected and shared with all of us in NID, I hope we get to know this background in some detail when the research about NID is conducted in some depth.

Image05: Chart showing the evolution of the Design Methods and Design Process course in the 60’s and 70’s leading up to the formation of the Design Concepts and Concerns course in the 90’s.

In the late 90's I changed the name of the course and called it “Design Concepts and Concerns” to bring focus to the broader issues that underpinned design action and learning. This is a very brief statement on a long and involved process of course evolution at NID at that paper is still to be written. Many teachers worked with me from 1988 onwards. First it was Jatin Bhatt and Sangita Shroff who then went on to join NIFT. We then had Rashmi Korjan for a long time and Suchitra Sheth and Laxmi Murthy for a brief interlude. Since 1998 many teachers audited or assisted in the conduct of the course either partly or full involvement and these include Alaxender Bosniak who now teaches in Germany, Dimple Soni, Meena Kadri, Bhavin Kotari, Harini Chandrasekhar, Bani Singh who teaches at NIFT Bangalore and many more that I will have to recall if the list is to be completed. In Bangalore C S Susanth and Jignesh Khakhar joined the course last year and we also had a senior student helping us last year from the SDM discipline, Anand Saboo and so on.

Image06: Table showing the course structure and contents in 1995 when I had used this image to share the development of the Design Concepts and Concerns course in a presentation to the NID Faculty Forum as part of a course critique at NID in those days.

I have detailed digital pictures of the student assignments done during the course from 1998 onwards and there are many xerox documents in the NID Library from the earlier phase that may need to be revisited. In that early phase we did project based assignments after a phase of lectures about design concepts and methods and these projects were done by individual students and that called for individual guides which we fondly called the OPD (out patient department) and here we had Pradyumna Vyas, Vinod Parmar, S M Shah, P M Choksi, S Balaram and several others as project guides for the foundation students as part of the Design process course from 1988 to about 1998 when I dropped the project since it was becoming a ritual and not really contributing to understanding in the student. From here on the course became more team oriented rather than individual focused and group processes and group grades became the norm.

Shown above are picture of an OHP sheet that I had used in 1995 to describe the process and this is a pdf that gives the shift in content and assignments as it stood in that year which can be downloaded from my website. On 15 August 2007 I had made a post on my other blog “Design for India” about this course and we have another description of the course and its intentions and effects at the link below: Design for India – Post on the DCC course.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009: Water in our lives

2009-07-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

DCC2009: Water in our lives

Prof. M P Ranjan

The year has started and another year of courses with new students from several PG design disciplines come to this course at NID. The first batch consists of four disciplines on the Paldi campus of NID and these include Product Design, Textile Design, Transportation and Automobile Design and Animation Film Design. The theme for this year is Water. Various facets of water in our lives are to be explored by these students and for the first Paldi batch we have three sub-themes that are listed below.

1. Water: Storage and Delivery
2. Water: Festivals and Sport
3. Water: Awareness of Issues and Methods

Image01: Blackboard with the preliminary discussions on What is Design? Using words offered by the students as part of the class discussion.

The black board shows the early discussions in the class when we tried to assess the current level of knowledge about design amongst the students of the batch and as the dialogue progressed the board filled up with the words that were used by the students to try and share their own notion of design and what they thought it is. Rashmi, Shashank and Ranjan were involved in these discussions by reacting and adding their own dimensions. We asked the students to think deeply about themselves and their lives to try and see when they discovered the idea of design and found it may be a career for each one of them. The discussions led to both sharing as well as an introspective journey that would continue for some time particularly for the students to discover themselves and find out a bit more about their own beliefs and positions in relation to a variety of human subjects, many of which are intangible and not usually a subject of either active analysis or discourse. What do you really believe and what would you do in a particularly difficult situation?

Image02: Group formation and bonding of groups in three sub-groups before the commencement of the formal brainstorming and structure building sessions that follow.

The action to these situations may reveal our deep seated fears and convictions which we may not be aware of at the surface of our consciousness and this would influence all the design decisions that we were to make in our careers ahead, therefore it would be useful to know, if it is at all possible to know all of it, which may not be possible till we are actually confronted with a particular opportunity or situation that would test this belief in some deep way. Ranjan used his slides as well as pages from the internet to share ideas about design and to introduce some of the key thinkers of the day along with their current ideas about design.

Image03: Books discussed this year in class. The students are also primed on the other resources that are available in digital format and on the internet and appropriate links are shown and provided in this session.

The scholars discussed included Dr Harold Nelson and John Heskett for their books “The Design Way” and “Toothpicks and Logos” respectively. Hesket’s book has been released again as a low cost edition in India under a new title called “Design: A very brief introduction” that is available from many book stores as well as online. Also discussed were the new books by Bryan Lawson with Kees Dorst called “Design Expertise” and another book by Dorst called “Understanding Design” and the teachers shared the long list of 175 attributes of design that is included in the contents of the book for students to look up as a direction finder for their own search for understanding of “What is design?”

We have asked the students to reflect on the question once again quite deeply and get back to the teachers with an email response to the question and this could open up the platform for any further dialogue on the new subject. Our finding from the various responses by the students while the black board was being filled up with words associated with design thinking and action was that they individually knew very little and even that knowledge lacked any conviction. So far three students have submitted their email response and we are sure the others will muster courage to make their offerings as the week progresses and they feel up to steam on the discourse on a subject as complex as design

Image04: Class presentations and group discussions in thumbnail views. The class is held in a large studio with flexible furniture arrangements possible with a lot of softboards available for the posters and visual material for the presentations.

We introduced the course by sharing a slide presentation that was made for the EAD06 conference in Bremen, which was a description of this course that was made for the first time by Ranjan since the course was formulated and conducted at NID over the past fifteen or twenty years. This course has indeed evolved from its origins in the “Design Methods” and “Design Process” beginnings in the early 70’s at NID and the name change to “Design Concepts and Concerns” occurred in the late 90’s and from a scientific and environment focus of the 70’s and 80’s the shift that we made to “Concerns” brought an element of relevance and ideology into the core consideration at the centre of this course offering. This is why we started looking at meta themes and we did shift away from micro problems and in the process removed the kindergarden from the basic design course at NID while keeping the quality of flexibility and the non-prescriptive nature of assignments that design education demands. Another major shift was the design assignments being handled by a team rather than being assigned to individual with the specific intention of encouraging team processes and attitude forming that could support such demands top deal with the typical conflicts that design tasks abound.

Image05: The theme and sub-themes of "Water" with a description of the process of discovery by the group to set the assignment rolling.

The structure of the assignments is therefore collaborative and graded through the following intentional stages.
1. Understanding oneself and ones beliefs through deep thought and articulation of the self.
2. Group processes in exploring a meta theme and discovering what one already knew about the topic so that it could be used as a platform for design action.
3. Outward exploration to fill in the gaps in ones knowledge by meeting and connecting with experts and with resources that are available both published and in the environment.
4. Understanding the processes of categorization and modeling leading to the building of external models to share and discuss ones deep understanding of the meat theme in question and to be able to see a structure that could depict the current understanding of the subject which is open to change through the arrival of new insights and new knowledge.
5. Sensing and discovering design opportunities that are worth doing and elaborating all the latent opportunities through a process of visualisation and discourse.
6. Building deep convictions about possible opportunities through a process of visual exploration and sharing with colleagues, while at the same time it is a process of learning to think and learning to act in design with a future focus on potential and optimistic outcomes.

To discuss this and other aspects of becoming a designer Ranjan talked about the “Design Journey” using the model and a copy of the paper that describes the various modes of thought that the designer had to use and this brought us to the first assignment and the forming of three teams with tasks as listed above. The presentation is expected on Thursday morning and each group woud be given one hour to make their presentation having explored the sub-theme fully through the process of brainstorming and categorization followed by forming structure and giving form in the shape of a suitable metaphor for durable recognition of the theme and its organization that would be reflected in the structure. The students have now started working on the task of finding structure and form of their sub-theme areas through the process that we described above. The group work is intensive through ice-breaking conversations, brainstorming and collaboration, categorization and arguments, finding structure and agreement with some compromises and last of all finding form through a shared metaphor that could show the level of understanding the the group has arrived at through this active process, a real learning by doing. We look forward to the presentations and the deep learning that can be used for future design projects as well.

Prof. M P Ranjan

What is Design?......

2009-07-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

(truthbeauty - image from gapingvoid.com cartoons drawn on the back of business cards)

Over the years I have been collecting descriptions of design from various sources and I thought it may be interesting to bring them out and look at them together.
To begin with there are these insights from Ranjan, these are from my notes taken during many design concepts and concerns classes.

Design is a specification creating process not a specification following process.
(DCC 2002)

Design is like a sponge absorbing from all fields, unlike the others design is looking at questions which do not have one answer.
(DCC 2002)

Design is a resolution of complex variables.
(DCC 2003)

Design is a process of visualising models which express complexity.
(DCC 2003)

Design is a reflexive situation. You are part of the context and you also impose yourself on the context.
(DCC 2004)

Then there are these form various design thinkers. I noted these when I found them to be a fine articulation of an idea or one that uncovers a new aspect of design, unfortunately I have not noted the sources and dates which i can see now would have been very useful.

“Designing is not a profession……it is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way” Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The area of human experience, skill, and understanding that reflicts man's concern with the enhancement of order, utility, value and meaning in his habitat. Bruce Archer

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.
Christopher Alexander

"the future job of a designer is to give substance to new ideas while taking away the physical and organizational foundations of old ones. In this situation, it is nonsense to think of designing as the satisfaction of existing requirements. New needs grow and old needs decay . . ."
John Chris Jones

Every human being is a designer.Many also earn their living by design - in every field that warrants pause, and careful consideration, between conceiving of an action and a fashioning of a means to carry it out, and an estimation of its effects.
Norman Potter

‘All men are designers’ where ‘design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order’ (Papanek, 1972)

"Design is an expression of purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art."
Charles Eames' famous response to that question in 1972, during an interview with Madame L'Amic of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris

"Design is the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose."
Dick Buchanan

design is creatively extending, elaborating, questioning, and overcoming
existing conceptions in view of the future realities they promote for others
to live in.
---Klaus Krippendorf

We should not underestimate the crucial importance of leadership and design joining forces. Our global future depends on it. We will either design our way through the deadly challenges of this century, or we won't make it. For our institutions - in truth, for our civilization - to survive and prosper, we must solve extremely complex problems and cope with many bewildering dilemmas. We cannot assume that, following our present path, we will simply evolve toward a better world. But we can design that better world. That is why designers need to become leaders, and why leaders need to become designers.
---Richard Farson (noise between stations on design thinking)

In the end, design is about shaping a context, rather than taking it as it is. When it comes to design, success arises not by emulating others, but by using organizational assets and integrative thinking to identify, build on, and leverage asymmetries, evolving unique models, products and experiences -- in short, creative business solutions.
----Roger Martin

Design is a tradition of inquiry and action that predates any of the other traditions. It is the essential competence that identifies us as humans and makes it possible for us to act with intention. Design is the means by which humans continue to participate in the ongoing genesis of the real world. Through our innate capacity to design, we have created our cosmologies, cultures, and technologies. Design is a distinct form of inquiry: not a midpoint on a continuum between art and science, or one of the end points-design is neither applied art, nor science.
---Harold Nelson

We differentiate design from art and science by the concept of service. Design is defined as service on behalf of someone else-a contractual relationship. Artists and scientists engage in forms of service legitimately focused more on their own interests. Artists express their emotions and feelings; scientists express their curiosity about the world. Designers, however, serve the needs and desires of others. This does not mean that designers are not aesthetic or rational, they are both, but most importantly they are empathic.
---Harold Nelson

Designers are participants in the lives of others -- Jan Kuypers

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
Paola Antonelli

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO, Apple

About a year ago on phd design there was a thread on definitions of design in which one of the participants (Paul Osmond) shared this simple yet profound little gem from Ezio Manzini -

"Design is a process of structuring relationships".
It is my current favorite till another one comes along.

Sustainability: Models for Critical Sectors in India

2009-04-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

Sustainability: Models for Critical Sectors in India – Roti, Kapada, Makaan, Bijlee & Rojgaar – Food, Clothing, Infrastructure, Energy and Occupations.

Students of the Design Concepts and Concrens (DCC2009 Foundation) class explored the assigned areas and sectors and this time they went out of the campus in search of multiple perspectives and meetings with people and experts who could give them insights that they did not have when they had explored it on their own during the first brainstorming session. The difference between the first round of exploration and model building and this second round revealed ways of filling areas of ignorance with fresh perspectives and new information from the field. The models showed these new insights and all groups were able to identify and expound on a number of important categories that would be critical for the understanding of the sector that they had been working on. These insights were shared with the whole class with each tram making fairly detailed presentations and the discussions gave further insights as well as several approaches to take these forward from here towards the next assignment dealing with exploring design opportunities and in visualising these for sharing with colleagues and the class as a whole. The images below show each tem with their second stage model that maps out their current understanding of the sector that they were assigned.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Composite view of the Roti team (Food) with their model of Food in the Indian Economy and the supply chain that would need to be addressed with design imagination for a sustainable future.

Image 02: Composite view of the Kapada team (Clothing) exploring areas of concern and opportunity to bring sustainable practices and ideas to the sector as a whole. A case study of water in some common T-Shirts was brought to the attention of the class.

Image 03: The Makaan group (Infrastructure & Housing) had a limited view of their field and they explored sustainability issues in housing and shared these with the class.

Image 04: The Bijlee group (Energy) had discoverd many categories of potential action and showed these as parts of a large jig-saw puzzle that formed the strategy for their model.

Image 05: The Rojgaar group (Employment and Occupations) had an elaborate spiders web to explain their understanding of the complex interplay of possibilities and threats in a world that was passing through a financial meltdown.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Sustainability DCC Way: Fun Picture Break

2009-03-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

Images from the sustainability presentations across Roti, Kapada, Makaan, Bijlee, Rojgaar. More to come.

Prof. M P Rajan

Prof. M P Rajan

Scenario Visualisation: Indian Village as a visual panorama in DCC2009

2009-03-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Scenario images as a visual recall and reflection on a real experience.

Download the full set of scenario images from the class as an A4 size pdf file 11.9 MB size from this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.pdf) and as a quicktime movie of 24.2 MB size at this link here (DCC2009_EP Scenarios.mov). Village name is used as a prefix followed by the student name and then the image number in both the pdf file as well as the quicktime movie.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: Thumbnail images of six selected student representations from the Bhoira Village group.

Each student is named in the caption and the prefix B stands for Bhoira followed by the student name and the image number. In the images that follow G stands for Gundla village and H for Hingolgadh village respectively.

Image 02: Another six images from the Bhoira group.

Image 03: Thumbnails from the Gundala village.

Image 04: Further six scenarios from the Gundala village.

Image 05: Six scenarios from the Hingolgadh village.

Image: 06: Next batch of six scenarios from Hingolgadh.

Scenario Presentation: Learning about composite images in DCC

2009-03-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Sharing the visualization of ones experience: Preparing for team work through articulation of ones deep insights and experiences.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Scenario presentation to the whole class on Saturday morning in the NID Foyer area. Forty six of the students had completed their work and come forward to share their experiences during their Environmental Perception course at Gundala, Hingolgadh and Bhoira villages in Rajkot District of Gujarat.

Scenario visualization was introduced to the class as a way forward in the early stage of design expression first to articulate an individual designers undestanding of a given situation or experience and in this case all our students had a recent exposure to a village having lived there for a week and interacted with local people in a rich context of sharing and learning. The effort to make a composite image of their week long interaction is an effort to reflect on their experience and to use the skill sets that have been acquired during the foundation programme in order to show their colleagues an exact image of what relationships and priorities each of them had perceived while they carried out their observations in the village.

Image 02: Two examples of scenario visualization from the Gundala group taken at random from the display softboard.

Each scenario was a rich representation of many elements and actions that the students had gleaned from their village exposure, some for the first time in their lives, and learning new things from the environment would be a lifelong task for a designer since in most cases we would be working at the cutting edge of change and in areas that are new and unexplored from which the designers are expected to make sense and bring some clarity to the fuzzy contexts through a variety of processes of sense making. Scenario visualization is one such sensemaking tool that we use as part of our work in the field with rich patterns of people and life actions that are filled with both traditions and change.

Image 03: Students from all three groups volunteered to make presentations and after the first round some were invited by faculty to come forward and share their scenarios with a rich discourse of their insights as well as intangible experiences and feelings. It is this rich discourse that makes design discussions so compelling and insightful to team members. This is also an opportunity for the individual to reflect on ones experience with an external model as an aide memoir and in the process discover deeper patterns that may not have been apparent when the scenario was being created in the first place.

Each student came forward with rich descriptions and some used the image to build another layer of description that added value to the story and showed their insights from the experiences in such a way that shared perspectives could be built with the whole group. What was striking was the different angles from which each student approached the same event or activity and in this discussion they could share their personal perspective with the other colleagues for the first time and the outcome is a multiple view of a situation and not a unitary view from a position of authority of any one individual. This is a useful bit of learning about a typical design situation with multiple approaches and outcomes possible and not just a single outcome as is expected in math and some science results.

Image 04: Hingolgadh village study team in front of their display softboard before commencement of the presentations. Those not present missed the interesting session.

The Hingolgadh team mapped out the contours of their village experience as well as several particular aspects that were highlighted as individual experiences. This is typical of design when many team members are able to provide a variety of insights that contribute to a new synthesis of the whole village while working as a team.

Image 05: Bhoira village study team in front of their display softboard. Those not present missed the discussions in the class.

Bhoira team too mapped out their individual scenarios and many elements and attributes overlapped with those identified by the other teams. However each village had some unique features and these were identified and kept as pointers for future reference as the course went forward with the major assignments that would follow.

Image 06: Gundala village study team was the biggest group but even here some students missed the presentation. Those who missed the event have been asked to submit the work on Monday for a final submission and we hope that they comply with the requirements of this assignment.

When we have a large group looking at one village we can clearly see the variety of perspectives that each of us can bring to a particular situation. This is a very valuable aspect of design learning and action, one which we had seen in the Calico Museum visit when 40 students had created such diverse expressions after one single shared visit to the Museum over one morning in the field in 1999 as shown in the previous post. This Calico Museum visit has been documented and a quicktime movie file with all the individual expressions of scenario as visualized by the group is available for download from this link below:
Calico Museum visit scenarios from DCC1999 class as a downloadable QuickTime movie file of 14.6 mb size.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Scenario Visualisation: Assignment on Composite Images and Mental Maps

2009-03-10T07:31:00.000-07:00

Visualising the Rural Experience from the Environmental Perception visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala in one single half-imperial size sheet.

M P Ranjan

Image 01: DCC teachers reviewing the course strategy together and looking at books on sustainability before the class session starts on Monday.

We did not expect to see the full class on Monday since the long weekend was followed by two holidays on Tuesday and Wednesday due to Id and Holi. We therefore decided to have a lecture for those who would be present on Monday and introduce them to the idea of scenario visualization as part of the process of design and we introduced the Systems Model of the NID Way as an approach to design exploration and action. To see the model discussed in class the 4 page 1.1 mb pdf file of “Understanding Design Models” can be downloaded from here along with a paper as a 691 kb pdf file on “Drawing and Visualising Scenarios in Design” also from here. These resources will help in understanding how we use mental images to draw insights and the role that these rich external images help in forming a deep understanding of the context as well as particular items within, all in a organized pattern of relationships that eventually help produce meaning and make sense of the whole system.

Image 02: Environmental Perception course had all the Foundation students travel to the villages for a full week in the field. On their return the course teachers reviewed all the work done in the form of drawings and evaluated the student through a visible process. Each student showed their work in a compact display in the NID foyer over a three day period.

The Environmental Perception course has been part of the NID Foundation since 1976 and it has evolved over the years to help students understand the dynamics of learning from the field a number of complex attributes and relationships in a typical Indian rural setting. We have over the years used this experience to bring the fresh and intense exposure that the students have had into the Design Concepts and Concerns course as a real example to explore and examine in some detail. This scenario visualization assignment was tried out with special field visits to Calico Museum or to the city bazaar based on which the student was required to capture their full experience in a composite image that would show all the significant components of the experience as well as a scenario that was a whole image which could be appreciated at a glance. This year the students are asked to reflect on their field experience to try and fathom the visible as well as the intangible insights about design possibilities and use this reflection to build a scenario of their personal experience that can be shared with the whole class on Saturday morning.

Image 03: The DCC Black Board that shows the concepts that were explored in the class leading up to the setting of the scenario visualization assignment. The context is the DCC course areas of Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijlee and Rozgaar – Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment – all political issues as well as design opportunity areas for all of us.

The larger context of climate change and globalization trends brings us to the theme of this course which is to understand sustainability in the larger context as well as learn to think in terms of sustainable processes and strategies while we design for each of the pressing problems that challenge all of us in India today.

Image 04: An example of the Calico Museum visit scenario visualization (as a 14.6 mb movie) that was prepared in 1999 by Debashree as part of the DCC course. Each student had made their own version of the visit scenario and each was as different as the person who made the drawing. Debashree is seen in her picture wearing a white kurta and a polka-dot pant. This was one of the amazing expressions from that class.

Scenario visualization is a very individual form of expression and any style of drawing can be used and a wide awareness of Indian painting and drawing tradition is a useful asset in carrying out this task successfully. At the end of the Foundation programme at NID all students are usually quite fluent in drawing and visual expression and in this assignment the attempt is to be able to organize ones memories into coherent contexts and to arrange these into a composite image that can be used to tell a rich story about that particular experience. The scenario in its parts ahs rich detail and texture some of it in vivid colour and expression.

Image 05: The students who stayed back at NID sat through the three hour long discussion about scenario visualization and about the nature of design as we know it today. They shared with the teachers and the class many of their insights from the recent visit to the village.

We hope that the other students who have rushed back to meet their families will return refreshed and join the task of preparing the scenario visualization which is required to be done on half-imperial size paper set in the landscape format. Each student can make a rough sketch of the various parts of the scenario and much like a painter who makes quick sketches to shape the contours and details of a new painting, each student may need to explore both style and content on a series of doodles and then prepare the final layout of their scenario visualization on the cartridge paper for presentation to the class. The final presentation will be held in the NID foyer on Saturday 14th March 2009 at 10.00 am and some refreshments will be served. The class will meet for a lecture on scenario visualization on Thursday 12th March 2009 at 9.30 am and the following Friday can be used fully for the exploration and completion of the scenario of the village visit to Hingolgadh, Bhoira and Gundala during the Environmental Preception course last week.

M P Ranjan

Business Models: Learning from the Field

2009-02-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

DCC2009 Business Models assignment: Learning from the Field in a design setting

Prof M P Ranjan

Image 01: Omlette-walla group with their visual presentation of the Ahmedabad street vendors who serve egg based food offerings.

Business Models are all around us and these are manifested in the form and structure of all the business that are active and working in the environment in which we all live and work. It is therefore possible for a sensitive designer to use their senses and the knowledge gleaned from the field to discover and articulate these into visible and invisible relationships through a process of observation, interaction, analysis, discourse and visualization based on which they could arrive at a new level of realisation about these. The particular business models that are embedded into each specific business that they wish to study in order to improve or compete with are laid bare in front of their eyes as the work progresses and they would then be able to explore alternatives to make these better or more effective as desired.

The assignments offered to the students deal with the intensive study of street food vendors in the field in Ahmedabad city using observation and interaction to gather insights about the particular vendor and his strategies as well as to look for more general situational characteristics and entrepreneurial behavior that helps the incumbent to succeed in a fairly hostile but opportunity rich environment of the city in need of certain types of services which are being addressed by the vendor in question. The students were assigned five types of street food vendors in Ahmedabad – The Omlette-wallah (Egg Omlette maker), The Bhajiya-walla (Fried Indian Snack), The Chai-walla (Tea vendor), The Pav Bhaji-wallah (Bread and Curry maker) and The Pani-Puri-walla (Fried Puri with liquid chutney) – and each group was required to study several live examples in the field in order to make a composite visualization of their insights that could be shared with the class at the end of this process.

Image 02: Bhajiya-walla group made a number of models to describe their understanding of the business models but their final offering was a paper model of the proposed hand cart which offered many new features and promised to solve many of the aspirations of the vendors as well as the imagined features that the group liked to provide to these vendors.

Here, when a design student is in learning mode, it is far easier to start with small and micro enterprises such as street food vendors who are easily accessible and can therefore be a very useful source of business learning and about a number of finer aspects of entrepreneurial behavior. Each of these micro businesses is indeed homologous to a huge multi-national business conglomerate in a similar line of business such as the ones involved in the preparation and delivery of food to their customers across several continents. The large and the small businesses all have to carry out much the same activities in much the same space in a city with the same collective audience but at a very different scale and reach but the components are all very similar.

Image 03: Chai-walla group showed the processes and relationships at the macro and the micro level of discourse and at the micro-level they used a literal flow of the liquid Chai – from cooking vessel to tea pot to tea cup and then to the mouth which is followed by the customers hand giving money to the maker who in turn uses the money to make more tea and make a profit in the process – a business process, all in one single flow…

Learning from the field is the way forward for designers who wish to work at the cutting edge of change and be able to shape the future with their insights and contributions. In real life too this would be the way they will have to work by gathering insights from the events and activities that are live and happening in their business space and with these insights they would be able to propose the new offerings that would go to the creation of the future landscapes around them. Design has moved forward from being focused on objects and spaces alone to include the business processes through which these objects, services and spaces are created and offered to the customers and managers too are now taking this area of design creation as an important part of their area of expertise.

Image 04: Pav Bhaji-walla group made a model of the street vendors cart using a table and a couple of bicycle wheels along with a few props as a backdrop for their skit which showed their understanding of the business models used by the vendor groups they had studied. The flow-charts in the background showed their understanding of these processes.

Another aspect of design learning that the assignment design has taken into consideration is that designers need to learn to work in teams and to collaborate with a large number of professionals from other fields of expertise. These group assignments that require the students to go outside the classroom and engage with public at large is an important element of design education that prepares them for the future where we would expect them to work in co-creation modes with stakeholders of their particular business and in doing so build the attitudes, abilities and knowledge that would help them perform at a high level of creativity in the rich matrix of our reality in urban and rural settings. This does imply that design education with these methods needs peace and security to be taken care of when the students move into the field, however we have had situations where student teams have had to confront with hostile reception due to various factors, some within their control and others which are not. However they need to be sensitized to these issues so that they can recognize any threat and take precautionary measures as may be needed while they are in the field.

Image 05: Pani Puri group made a meticulous model with a very well classified structure that showed their complex understanding of the business models and strategies followed by their street vendors, all supported by highly expressive renderings of each aspect of the structure and a flow of arrows that linked all these elements into a complete whole.

The kind of learning that happens in such a group interaction mode and in contact with the field is very rich with first hand experience and deep insights are formed in all the stages of the assignment, particularly at the stage of visualization and presentation since these are carried out in a reflective mode based on the real experiences in the field and not just on bookish information or on the internet download type of knowledge that is delivered by remote experts in a loaded form of professional jargon which may or may not be truly accessible to the student. After three days and nights in the field with their respective street vendors and a good deal of time back in the studio as a group to process all the field data into images and texts that made sense the students spent a full day in making presentations to each other and the teachers, all resulting in a great deal of learning for all concerned.
Prof M P Ranjan

Sustainability Themes for DCC2009: Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Rojgaar & Bijlee

2009-01-31T23:31:00.000-08:00

Sustainability Themes for DCC2009: Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Rojgaar & Bijlee.

Prof M P Ranjan

The DCC class of 2009 have been assigned five sub themes around which they would explore the issues and perspectives of sustainability through the Design Concepts and Concerns course this year. The Foundation batch have now completed the first stage of their explorations where they map out only what the group already knows about the chosen subject from their life time of experience using the processes of brainstorming, classification and model building and visualization, nay “Visual Sense Making”. The sub themes are Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Rojgaar & Bijlee.

Image 01: Roti – Food group with their first stage model showing their current understanding of the subject.

Image 02: Kapada – Clothing group with their model.

Image 03: Makaan – Housing group with their representation.

Image 04: Bijlee – Energy group with their presentation models.

Image 05: Rojgaar – Employment group with their frames of reference and they also had a theatre skit about employment.

Image 06: Rashmi and other teachers giving a critique to each of the groups on their presentation. Students and faculty give critical comments and provide a platform of learning.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability

2009-01-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

What is Design in the age of Global Warming?

DCC2009 Foundation: Focus on Sustainability
Prof M P Ranjan

Image: Foundation class of 2008 batch at the start of DCC2009 this morning in the new extended classroom.

The year has passed and once again we start with a new group of students in the NID Foundation programme who are looking at the Design Concepts and Concerns Course with interest and apprehension. We talked about this today in class and passed the mike around to hear from the students what they had heard from the NID grapevine about the course in the, good and bad, and the discussion was lukewarm. That is till we came to the current topics of interest, in the news, around the world and in India and about their awareness of these events and happenings and its importance to design education and action.

The ice was however broken when we talked about Slumdog Millionare, the movie and its effects being discussed in the media and in blogs about films and the Academy Award nominations. Heated debate followed and it gave us a window to show that on all issues we could hold different positions and some of these could be deep seated and others could be swung in one way or another based on the new data that was presented as well as the quality of the arguments offered in the debates that followed.

Image: DCC2009 class black board discussing “What is Design?” in the age of global warming and setting a stage for the theme of Sustainability.

The blackboard that emerged as Rashmi captured the words that emerged from various efforts of the students to try and define design show the slant that we have chosen to give this particular module. Students would be engaged in ‘visual sense making” as described by G K VanPatter in his NextD conversations and the focus of the course would be on the theme of Sustainability which we had started working on earlier this year for the World Economic Forum at the Design Charette in New Delhi followed by the NID workshop on Sustainability that culminated in the preparation of five posters on the theme which have been sent to Davos for the event on 29th January 2009 which we shall watch with interest. We talked about Victor Papanek and his visit to NID in 1979 as well as the India Report by Charles and Ray Eames in 1958 that makes this the 50th year of its writing. This gives us an opportunity to look back and look forward at India and its need for design in the context of the global financial meltdown as well as the global warming that makes the sustainability debate all the more important for all of us. The other words on the black board are self explanatory or can be cross checked on wikipedia and by google search..

Students have been asked to write their own version of the blackboard discussion and we hope to share some of the more interesting ones here on this blog tomorrow. We closed the day long session with the distribution of the two papers that I had prepared about this course, the first in 2002 for the Design Issues journal called the “Avalanche Effect” (download the paper as 55 kb pdf here) which was unfortunately not carried in the India issue that was published later and the second called “Creating the Unknowable” (download the paper as 50 kb pdf here) which did get accepted in the peer reviewed conference EAD2006 in Bremen, Germany in March 2005. We showed the Davos posters to the students briefly and we will discuss these in greater detail as the course progresses into the theme of sustainability in the days ahead. We propose to form groups tomorrow which will look at what the students already know from their lifetime experience about the topics assigned to them and the chosen topics are very political indeed, at least at the level of popular slogans in Indian politics – Roti, Kapada, Makkan, Bijili, and Rozgar – which stands for Food, Clothing, Housing, Energy and Employment in Hindi.

Image: A sneak preview of the five posters on sustainability which were sent to Davos was shared with the DCC2009 class.

Let us see how this course develops as we go forward from here. Promises to be exciting indeed.
Prof M P Ranjan

Parsi, Jain and Marwadi Food: An Anthro-look in DCC2008

2008-10-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

Parsi, Jain and Marwadi Food: A closer look in Design Concepts and Concerns course in 2008. The batches involved included Graphic Design, Film and Video Communication, Furniture Design and Ceramic Design, all from the Post Graduate programmes at NID.

M P Ranjan

Image 1: Parsi food as a table setting of various categories of food from the Parsi fold and a backdrop of storyboards that was sued to tell a story of the Parsi way of life as the team understood it after their anthro-design investigations.

The Parsi food team had a matrix type storyboard on the wall and they used it from left to right and top to bottom to tell the story of the Parsi way of life and the role of food was woven well into their story. While the image and installation was not that visually rich they told a good tale and many insights about Parsi food came through in the presentation. An amazing number of facts had also been gathered by the team having contacted many Parsis in Ahmedabad and discovered the sources of supply of ingredients and Parsi delights.

Image 2: Jain food was represented as a road to salvation and a roundabout for the mortals. The route to Sainthood is flagged with street signs and terminates in a lamp.

The Jain food group spent more time explaining the philosophy of the Jains and their taboos for particular food types and as a consequence missed out on the appreciation of the value of Jain food and their potentials that is the purpose of the design investigation, to find sources of value and an understanding of the context at many levels. Their model was once again more symbolic than expressive and each section needed an explanation from the team for the finer aspects to be appreciated. The overall understanding that the team brought to the class was eventually quite deep.

Image 3: Marwadi food was shown as a very rich shop for provisions and the cultural attributes were captured in the icons, turbans and images of real food as well as the trappings of a real store in action, the balance, the price list and examples of food types all classified and visually articulated.

The Marwadi group had a collage of images of Marwadi food and an installation of the fields from a desert location besides the store metaphor that was the main attraction. The group also gave us a historical overview of the migratory passages of the community and the assimilation of various local cultures by way of food habits that the community had imbibed through this migratory passage over the years. In all a very rich presentation.

M P Ranjan

Food across Communities: Macro Micro investigations in DCC

2008-10-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

DCC2008 Paldi Group 2: PG Disciplines at NID: Graphic Design, Film & Video Communication, Furniture Design and Ceramic Design: Assignment one: Mapping the known universe of Food: Producers, Converters & Consumers.

M P Ranjan

Image 1: The Producer Group with their model of the production pyramid and the variety of food types at the circular base.

The last batch of students who are taking the Design Concepts and Concerns course here at Paldi campus of NID were asked to look at the theme of Food at the Macro level of exploration in three groups, each looking at three stages through which food travels from the land to our plates, from the point of Production, Conversion and then Consumption. This kind of Meta investigation is encouraged in all design journeys since it is a good point of departure for any design task to take stock of what we know of a particular subject or a theme that is being addressed and to try and map this territory as clearly as possible before embarking on a further journey of research and experimentation to discover what we do not already know. As a group process, this kind of articulation of what we already know about the broader contours of a discipline or a particular subject is very useful to discover the depth of understanding that is present with the group members as well as get a glimpse of regions of uncertainty and in particular the areas of ignorance, which could inform the later stages of research in those specific and identified areas.

Image 2: The Producer Group making their presentation to the class.

This batch was divided into three broad groups that included, Producers, Converters and Consumers, since the focus was on Food and we were keen that the groups would explore regions that were beyond the ordinary, to include areas of agriculture, nature and food production through the Producer focus group while the broader contours of processing, trade, branding and distribution could be covered in some detail by the second group which we called the Conversion focus group. The last group looked at the whole area of Food consumption lying at the far end of the supply chain by looking at the Consumer as a category along the long path from growing to eating. Each group went through the processes of brainstorming and categorization to discover and articulate what was known to the group and from these explorations they built models that could be used for a show & tell presentation about the insights gleaned from the whole process.

Image 3: The Converter Group gathered around their Sun metaphor with the long supply chain as a literal exhibit on the floor.

This batch of students came from the disciplines of Graphic Design, Film & Video Communication, Furniture Design and Ceramic Design, all post graduate students, from a variety of disciplines which brought a good mix of variety of skills and abilities to the group processes in this course. The three groups had an equal number of students from all the participating disciplines since the process of selection ensured an even mix in the composition of each team. Three coordinators volunteered at first and they then selected one team member from a particular discipline by turn till all the members from that discipline were assigned to one of the three groups. They then moved to the next discipline and selected additional team members by taking turns and all the disciplines were covered in the end. Each group had an even mix of students from all the participating disciplines and in the end we took lots to assign the three meta themes to each of the groups thus formed to ensure that the whole process was democratic and not pre-determined by any one including the teachers.

Image 4: The Consumer Group with their “Last Supper” metaphor to capture the huge variety of conditions of food consumption across India.

The three groups wee given a day and a half to explore what they already know about the chosen and assigned theme through a process of brainstorming and categorization and the group then built a structure that was based on the discovered words using a metaphor that best captured the meaning of the joint investigation that the team had discovered during their explorations of the theme. The producer group came up with a Pyramid of concerns with the hierarchy of governance flowing down to the roots in the variety of agricultural products on one side and dairy and poultry products and fisheries on the other two sides of the triangular pyramid. The circular base was strewn with images of all kinds of food alongside words that the team had gleaned during their intense explorations of the day before. The second group on the other hand made a sun like image that radiated from a soft centre in rings of growing magnitude before breaking out into rays that extended around the circle, each touching upon a key issue that the group had identified as being important for their analysis of the Converters in the chain of the supply of food in India and across the world. The chain was represented by a set of large paper links that formed a “Chain” along the ground from the sun to a remote location across the room. The third group used the metaphor of a complex dining table, almost a last supper, in their representation of various categories of eventual consumers, from the poor and the hungry to the rich and the affluent, each located at opposite ends of the table. The installation was set on the ground and words were literally sprinkled on the floor in meaningful groups and paper plates with images of food and chairs that expressed the status of the consumer by their form were the highlights of this particular display. The representation achieved by this group was quite stunning in effect as well as in structure.

M P Ranjan

Jignesh Khakhar: On DCC in Bangalore

2008-10-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

Image: Jignesh Khakhar at the DCC class presentations on various days in Bangalore.

The Design Concepts and Concerns (DCC) course was conducted for a two week period from September 25 to October 01, 2008 at NID's Bangalore campus. DCC is perhaps one of the longest running courses taught at NID. It is taught by Professor M.P. Ranjan, who conducted the course for 41 students from three disciplines at NID-Bangalore - Information and Interface Design (IID), Design for Retail Experience (DRE) and Design for Digital Experience (DDE).

The theme for this year's course was 'food'. Three groups investigated the theme in the context of three southern states - Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

The course introduces students to design, design thinking, design process, design opportunities, to mention a few. Most importantly, in my opinion, it forces students to ask the question: what is design, and what is their role as a designer? These are complex questions and require a lifetime of deliberation. Students are pushed into the 'deep-end of the pool' and forced to swim or stay afloat. Thus begins their journey, or 'design journey', as Professor Ranjan calls it.

There are two significant challenging aspects to this course: One is to represent their ideas. Various metaphors are employed to represent data, and it is often a challenge to map the data to a particular metaphor. This time, a number of metaphors - kite, word, tree, metro map, etc - were employed. Some were more successful, others were not. It is quite a long and challenging journey before a representation becomes a visualization, an act of insight. The other challenge is to work in a large group. This involves 'managing' relationships, time and space. The nature of the course has changed over the years to enable and encourage students to work in collaboration with each other, something they will inevitably have to do in practice.

The final exercise termed 'me board' was an act of introspection. This was perhaps the most challenging exercise, as it required students to 'peer' into themselves. To my mind, this requires a high degree of honesty, akin to 'searching for the truth', and then representing it in some 'form' - an indelible proposition indeed. However, some of the presentations in the form of collages were remarkably interesting and provoked me to question the nature of such representations and their relationship to painting. Perhaps I may find some answers in the future.

Finally, the Design Concepts and Concerns course remains a very intriguing, interesting and enjoyable journey, both as an observer and a participant. Its significance and impact is one students are bound to realise much later in their design education and professional practice.

Posted by: Jignesh Khakhar, NID Bangalore Centre

Modeling and Mapping: Finding Design Opportunities

2008-10-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

Design Concepts & Concerns: Modeling and Mapping - Tools for Design Exploration and mapping Design Opportunities
Prof M P Ranjan

Image: The Karnataka group used a choreographed skit to tell their story of design opportunity explorations and shared their thumbnail explorations as well as the chosen scenario, both displayed as placards on their body. The front had the thumbs arranged, as a letter form while on their back was the scenario, which would be explained by their team adjacent member. This group missed categorizing the explored design opportunities using higher categories in their focus on the ideas created by the individual.

Design Opportunities can be felt but not seen since they are a product of the imagination that is triggered by a particular perception or insight and these are nurtured by the designers conviction till it can be manifested in the world through the process of visualization, construction and operation. I am therefore not surprised any more when policy makers and the public alike fail to see value in a particular design offering till it is almost fully realized and placed on the market as a compelling offering and at an attractive price with an appropriate set of features. Design offerings take on a particular form and these can be easily differentiated through both deep and - or superficial transformations and compositions which is a strategy that companies use to make a range of offerings to meet a variety of price points and an equally wide range of feature sets to make for an active market where none exists.

Image: The Tamilnadu group used a metaphor of a number of kites in the sky to map out broad areas of design opportunities in the fields of agriculture, industry, and fisheries and at the infrastructure and systems level of action. The thumbnail maps of the individual design opportunities were categorized and arranged along the string that held the kite in the sky and the developed scenarios came out of their group debates and identification of priorities. However most groups did not know much about agriculture and this was visible in the fewer design opportunities being identified for these sectors of collective ignorance, suggesting scope for additional research before these explorations are done once again.

The format for exploration was created earlier this year when the DCC course was offered to the Foundation class in the previous semester and over the past few months we have given this format to each batch of DCC students at Gandhinagar, Paldi and at Bangalore and the results have been very encouraging indeed. Group and individual explorations can be bridged by making the design exploration journey a shared experience by giving the peer group a place in the process of design opportunity mapping and this reinforces the process of exploration through the strengthening of the expression through a process of peer discourse and sharing that would otherwise have not been encouraged in a design class that may be project driven and one that involves individual exploration. Since the group has a shared agenda to realize the best design opportunities with the focus of a chosen theme along with a given bias, in this case the theme is Food and the bias for each group is the chosen State – Tamilnadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh – the process of articulation and choice making is both individual as well as group driven.

Image: The Andhra Pradesh group used the metaphor of the branching tree with its elaborate sets of deep and capillary roots, each part with a particular name, characteristic and attribute that mapped the real world attributes that the students found in their journey into the field during the previous assignment, The group was particularly successful in their exploration and as a group that were able to show a wide range of application areas and fairly developed scenarios for the particular design opportunities that came out of the group selection processes that they had adopted for their task.

Numerous thumbnail images are created on the format provided and each image is supported by a brief write up that describes the salient features of the design proposal or as we call it the design opportunity. These are discussed and debated within the group as they emerge from the hands and minds of the individual creator of the images and these then may go through a further transformation with the incorporation of the feedback that is so critical for the design journey to get a bearing that is akin to the potential responses in the market place. However the conviction levels of the designer would determine whether or not the suggested changes are carried out in full or in part, if at all. The insights that led the designer to make this particular offering may not be seen or be visible to his colleagues which sets up a platform for discourse and debate and these processes at an important part of the conviction building process in design when it comes to making a decision, in favour or against a particular offering or a part thereof, of that particular offering.

Image: Scenario visualization being shared by some of the students from each group as part of their final presentation of the DCC course at NID Bangalore campus.

Students then select one out of many potential directions that are revealed in their design opportunity mapping and this choice is done in consultation with the team members. Each student then sets out to develop his or her chosen design opportunity and in the process sets out to build a visualization in the form of a scenario that would help articulate the particular offering, its impediments and potentials, the business models that would need to be considered to make it a success in the face of known and anticipated competition as well as a host of other factors that would deal with material, function, aesthetics, economics and other meta level criteria such as current and future legislation and the ethics of the offering in the context of society, culture and the ecology in which it is to be manifested eventually. This complex offering applies to all kinds of design situations and the design student is taken through these in the classroom long before they came face to face with these complexities in the field in which they are required to act.

Prof M P Ranjan

Understanding Food: Anthro-Design Research in DCC

2008-10-08T05:14:00.000-07:00

Understanding Food: Anthro-Design Research in the DCC class at Bangalore
Prof M P Ranjan

Image 1: Presentation by the Tamilnadu group in session at the NID Bangalore Centre. The group chose to build a flow chart of their understanding and the presentation uses a “story-board” that was represented like a film strip from the Tamil cinema story as shown in the illustration below. The storyboard was personified by the image of “Annaswamy” their man from Tamilnadu, from childhood to old age, and the food for all seasons brought into sharp focus by the overlapping threads of their story.

The first assignment at NID Bangalore dealt with mapping ones own knowledge about food and each group had a particular bias from which their knowledge was to be mapped and shared with the rest of the class. As describer earlier this thematic bias plays a strong role on how the subject is addressed and it even shapes the perception of the situation and this was quite evident in the various interpretations that were exhibited by the groups, each working with Climate, Region and Culture, as their given bias for investigation and articulation. While I did not specifically tell the students that they were not expected to do elaborate research on their subject of food with the bias assigned to each group, they did not have the time to do such research and all the teams had to fall back on their well of knowledge that resided in their collective memories and from which they drew quite liberally through a process of brainstorming, categorization and articulation to show their models and constructs on the given subject FOOD – with the bias of Climate, Region and Culture.

Image 2: The ‘story board” shown by the Tamilnadu group who used the persona of a young Tamil software engineer to represent their understanding of the chosen theme of “Food from Tamilnadu” shown here as a life time story, a journey from the cradle to a ripe old age, very interesting indeed.

The Second assignment saw the groups fanning out to various places in Bangalore to carry out direct contact research in the mode of “anthro-design” with each group being assigned to a particular region State of South India. The assigned States were that of Tamilnadu, Andhra and Karnataka, each assigned through a draw of lots, which was done on behalf of the group by their student coordinator. The group members then went into a huddle and made a plan for gathering information and this information strategy played out over the next three days with the groups meeting and exploring Food and eating places in Bangalore, each looking at their respective State issues and trying to make sense of the vast field that could be covered by the omnibus assignment with very low definition and broad interpretation. As designers they were to investigate the subject directly from the field in live contact with ‘experts” and ‘stakeholders’ from whom they could get valuable insights about their assigned subject – FOOD from one of the three chosen States of South India.

Image 3: The Karnataka group looked at the business of Food and explored the various dimensions of Karnataka cuisine as well as the typical resources of the State as they had discovered through their engagement with their contacts and eating-places across Bangalore city.

The Udipi café, MTR – “Mavali Tiffin room” and Café Coffee Day success story played strongly on the minds of this group and shaped the story that they had to share with the class through their wall size model and their mega success stories of food and the potential for a revolution from the State of Karnataka to the world at large. Their presentation was located in the basement workshop space of the NID Bangalore Centre and they impressed with their scale and sense of structure that was achieved in their model.

Image 4: The Andhra group was shocked by the stories of poverty and distress that came from many of their contacts across the migrant labour now in Bangalore. Their installation, which is the appropriate term that can best describe the assembly of objects, sarees and posters that the group assembled to tell their story, was colourful and then filled with coloured light and everything turned red….

Making contact with live sources of informants in the field is so important for design students since it is important for them to learn that what they need is not knowledge of the kind found in books as much as getting a feel of the situation and in picking up specific insights that would give them a sense of direction and a glimpse of the way the trends shaped up in their area of investigation. It is here that anthro design as a subject area gets appreciated and some degree of competence is built up in handling such research where book based knowledge would certainly not fill the need. This kind of experience would be useful for design students and through these experiences they would also learn about research strategies to be used in the field and the whole range of processes of making contact, making observations, meetings and interviews as well as processing the rich data from the field in order to glean insights about latent needs and future possibilities are all critical for design education.

Prof M P Ranjan

DCC2008 Bangalore: Invitation to FOOD themes

2008-10-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

Prof. M P Ranjan
DCC2008 Bangalore: Invitation to FOOD themes

Image: Invitation sent out by NID Bangalore students for their first presentation scheduled on 22 September 2008.

Their two week course started late on the 18th of September since I had to attend the Governing Council meeting at NID having been summoned by the Chairman for a meeting with the GC on 16th September when they met in Ahmedabad to discuss the action plans that would be an outcome of Dr D O Koshy's premature relief from the position of Director NID. I reached NID Bangalore on 17th Afternoon and the DCC class started on 18th morning with the first assignment being assigned to the students on the 20th September. The first presentation was scheduled on 22 September with three teams looking at the theme of Food with a bias towards – Region, Climate and Culture.

Image: Views from the Swiss design exploration workshop conducted by the Swiss design team of industrial designer Frederic Dedelley and design journalist Ariana Pradal at NID Bangalore

This delay was also due to the unexpected event of a one day workshop conducted by the Swiss design team involving all the students of the NID Bangalore campus. This was a hands-on workshop and it brought value to the students who were all busy in making working models of a "Letter Opener" concept directly by shaping materials, like "kalakars" and not in the more usual tradition of first making elaborate drawings before some crafts modelmaker creates a finished prototype. The direct shaping of materials is close to the hands and in my slogan for design, Hand-on Minds-on", this is a very critical part of being a designer, through working with ones hands, while exercising the mind. In conversation with Jignesh Khakhar who was working with me this time as an associate teacher on the DCC2008 course at NID Bangalore I outlined my insights about the kinds of people that were being attracted to design education and how the NID admissions systems seems to be skewed towards the selection of "chitrakars" at the exclusion of "kalakars", which is in my opinion a real loss for all of us. The spectrum of abilities and multiple capabilities that are desirable for design education could be classified as follows as an as yet incomplete list:
1. Kalakars: craftsmen who can work materials with ones hands
2. Chitrakars: artists and illustrators who can create images through drawing and painting techniques
3. Shilpakars: sculptors who can shape materials into image models in clay or other materials but with no joinery (usually)
4. Vastukar: planner and architect who proposes built spaces
5. Natyakar: dancer who uses the body and choreography to express form and message
6. Sutradar: storyteller and theatre performer who tells a compelling story
....... to name only the dominent categories from our experience at NID.

....... and now we have some more categories such as the "Digital Illustrator", "Software Programmer" and the just plain "Manager" wishing to become "Design Managers" with a booming market emerging for this last category and I still need to find an equivalent hindi name for these categories of design aspirants. All of them can be designers and design thinkers if the design education establishment acknowledges their skill sets and abilities and steers their foundation training to bring about a transformation in their abilities and attitudes towards change making in the real world which is one of the major roles of design action that wishes to shape the future in small and big ways. Therefore the levels of design action can go from dealing with the Tactical Level using skills and sensibilities of the designer, through the Elaborative Level by using market and trade values in many particular sectoral categories, through the Creative Level through the creation of breakthrough innovations and patent driven investments and lastly through the Strategic Level through the creation of new visions and the translation of systems level change that can help change a whole sector and shape the future in the process. My paper on Levels of Design Intervention explains this model and was written in 1998 for a conference in Barzil. The paper can be downloaded from this link below: Download:"Level of Design Intervention: as a pdf file 200 kb size.

Prof. M P Ranjan

DCC2008 at Bangalore: Three disciplines participate

2008-10-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

Prof M P Ranjan

Image: The three groups that explored and mapped out the contours of Climate, Region and Culture.

Design Concepts and Concerns at Bangalore concluded yesterday morning with several students sharing their "Me Boards" or self maps with the class in the NID Bangalore Conference Room where all the lectures and group discussions are held. Earlier their assessment grades were finalised by Jignesh Khakhar and myself and these were submitted to the academic wing at Bangalore as well as to all students and coordinators as a three page pdf file. The report on the first assignment has already been posted in the Design for India blog as part of my report on the Bangalore visit and I will be posting the other assignments from Ahmedabad since the internet access speed in NID Bangalore was very poor during the first week at Bangalore and I did not have access to the internet in the evenings since the NID Bangalore Guest House is not connected to the web.

Image: Students of the NID Bangalore making group presentations of the first assignment. (click image to enlarge)

The theme was once again food and this time the macro survey included Climate, Region and Culture as the meta themes for brainstorming and Sensemaking" using the tools of modelling and discourse so that the team could plumb their own minds and life experiences to map out their current understanding of the assigned theme and the bias given to each group.

The post on the Bangalore visit can be seen at this link "Design for India" -Bangalore visit.

Prof M P Ranjan

Individial Visions for Food Security in India: DCC2008 Paldi01

2008-08-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

…>…Design Concepts & Concerns…

Individial Visions for Food Security in India: Scenarios developed during the class DCC2008 at NID Paldi in the past two weeks.

Image: Individual offerings for the scenario visualization assignment at the end of this DCC2008 class at NID Paldi.

Scenarios visualized by NID students for the broad range of issues identified by them while working in groups over a period of two weeks in this particular session of the Design Concepts and Concerns class at NID Paldi. It is ironical that there is so much to be done and the country is facing severe food inflation but the investments in design efforts to solve these problems on a long term basis is almost zero.

Image: Another group of students from the DCC2008 class with their individual offerings of imagined scenarios to address the real needs of food and the design opportunities in our economy today.

It is not that the country does not have the money to address these issues but most of the money is spent on making standards and on testing rather than on innovation which will promise a better future for our people. This year we have as a nation spent a huge sum for trying to avert farmer crisis in the form of the loan waiver scheme that was announced by the Government of India while a small fraction of this amount spent on a regular basis on farm based innovation and the building of imaginative prototypes for the future would have given long term solutions. I hope that we will see such investments in the near future with the National Design Policy having been launched last year. However agriculture, education and health are still not on the radar of the policy makers since they seem to be only looking at luxury products for exports and not at real needs across the land that need design

…>…Design Concepts & Concerns…

Incubating Design Opportunities: DCC2008 Paldi 01

2008-08-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

… Design Concepts & Concerns…

Incubating Design Opportunities: Food, Inflation and the Economy: DCC2008 Paldi 01

Image: West Bengal team with their huge Sun icon and the design opportunity thumbnail images distributed along the categories identified by the Solar flares, each named in an appropriate manner.

After trailing all the other groups and getting sharp critiques from their peers in the first two assignments the WB team has come back strongly to make a clear statement showing a huge leap forward in their understanding as well as their articulation of all the design opportunities identified and sketched by the group members. The model and the visual presentation was very powerful indeed.

Image: Goa team with their radial model surrounded by all the thumbnail sketches of the design opportunities shown as a horizontal display with the viewers traveling around the model to look at it closely.

Goa team continued their effective radial model and they offered a modified structure and this time to accommodate the categories that they have identified for their numerous design opportunities for the theme of Food, Economy and Inflation with reference to their chosen region, Goa.

Image: Rajasthan team in front of their display of design opportunity maps that have been broadly categorized into areas of concern and value.

Rajasthan team used the broad categories of Ecology, Awareness, Culture and Economy to arrange all the design opportunities that the team members had articulated during the thumbnail brainstorming and exploration phase. They are seen holding their individual scenarios based on an agreed selection arrived at through peer review within the team.

Image: Uttarakhand team in front of their display of design opportunity thumbnails in the NID Foyer and they hold in their hand their individual scenario visualizations.

Rajasthan team had an interesting categorization of all the design opportunities that the team members had imagined and articulated. These were divided into broad categories through a process of sorting and categorization and they used the categories of Education, Food Preservation, Community Development, Industry, Water (Mineral), Transport and also a special category for Policy and Legislation that was also proposed.

Image: Detail of Goa model and design opportunity thumbnail sketches

… Design Concepts & Concerns…

Design Opportunities Presentation: Water, Sun, Hills and Desert

2008-08-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

…>…Design Concepts & Concerns…

Design Opportunities Presentation: Water (Goa), Sun (West Bengal), Hills (Uttarakhand) and Desert (Rajasthan)

Image: Goa group took their radial model and modified it to accommodate all their design opportunity thumbnail sketches along the various categories identified by the group (Right) and the West Bengal group used the Sun as a metaphor to map out the various categories in which they arranged all their design opportunity thiumbnail sketches (Left).

The four groups dealing with the theme of Food in the four selected regions of India made their group presentations in the NID Foyer yesterday. Goa, West Bengal, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan were the areas of focus for this batch of DCC2008 which just concluded at Paldi and this gives us the platform to reflect on their offering during this course. Just as the Gandhinagar students had explored four other states of India these students gave us a glimpse of their imagimation for the issues and opportunities that they saw after their journey through the various stages of this course that included the exploration of the theme leading up to the development of design opportunity maps and then onto individual scenarios for one idea that they felt needed their full attention.

Image: The celebration at the end of the course with students and faculty bunched around the Goa model that was displayed on a group tables moved in from other rooms near the Foyer, impromptu but instantly effective.

The groups gathered at the Foyer at NID Paldi and each put up their design opportunity maps for all to see. The sky was overcast and the sun was almost gone but fortunately the lights in the foyer were discovered and this gave a renewed life to the presentations and we were able to photograph all the submissions and also record the individual scenarios which will be shared in another post after the groups have been discussed in some detail.

…>…Design Concepts & Concerns…

Rajasthan: Song, Drama, Theatre and Games as Metaphor

2008-08-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

Design Concepts & Concerns

Image: Team Rajasthan with their Board Game as metaphor and their Puppet Theatre to drive the point home.

The Rajasthan group used all the devices in the book to make their presentation. Starting with a song and a puppet show they told a story of a Princess and her new fangled ideas for bringing prosperity to a dry land. However the plans go dry and some problems emerge needing the attention of the King and his consort as the story unfolds. Their understanding of the complex interplay of various factors come out clearly in their first blast of theatre and drama to make their point.

Image: The Rajasthan team used a digital presentation to share their detailed structure for Food and the various categories of influencing factors, very detailed but long winded.

A very detailed structure gave the team a fairly deep understanding of the factors but since they used a digital medium that was linear in the mode of viewing the audience could not quite keep all the factors in their mind. This led to the discussion of George A Miller and his concept of the number seven and the limits of the mind memory span. This gave the class a view of an alternate platform that could be used and they could examine the pro’s and con’s of the various methods used by all the teams.

Image: Multiple views of the Rajasthan groups presentation using various methods to share their exploration of the theme and share their findings and insights with the class.

This group had the benefit of all the other presentations since they came last in the sequence but not to take away from the offering from the group the class appreciated the rich show and tell that they used.

Design Concepts & Concerns

West Bengal : Boat Fish and Fish Boat as Metaphor

2008-08-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Design Concepts & Concerns

Image: West Bengal team members with their Fish-Boat or Boat-Fish model.

The West Bengal group bounced back and surged foreward after the drubbing that they got in the first round of building models. What they missed out everyone else got to learn from, “fail early to succeed sooner”, as the slogan from the IDEO group says.

Image: Team members explaining the various parts of their model of Food in the context of West Bengal using their metaphor as an aid.

They chose to make a three dimensional model and the disadvantage was that it had more that one side and they had to work twice as hard to mark both sides of their Fish-Boat or should I say Boat-Fish metaphor to capture their understanding of the West Bengal food scenario as they had understood it after their meetings with their experts.

Image: Multiple views from the group presentation and the discussions that followed from the West Bengal team show.

The team however still did not have the deep understanding that a coherent structure would have provided them and the critique was sharp and the discussions quite revealing. The effort of making the huge model was however appreciated by all the particpants. However the consensus in the end was that the group missed out on using the richness of the model fully since the categories were quite macro and the finer aspects were not integrated into the final model but kept on the various external elements still to be brought into a central area.

Design Concepts & Concerns

Design Scenarios for Food Security: DCC2008 Gandhinagar

2008-08-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

The four groups at Gandhinagar had a week to make their individual scenario visualisations that was based on the thumbnails that the groups had explored in the previous week in a visual brainstorming mode, each in a huddle in their respective studios or under the tree in the back of the mess block where Punjab group had located themselves.

Each of the groups are shown here as thumbnail images and a bigger image of the individual scenario will be posted when the group members find time to send me the email of the supporting text which is still awaited.
Click on each image below to get an enlarged view of the scenarios. Punjab:

Image: Punjab group and their individual scenarios for design action in India.

Image: Kerala group and their imagination for the way forward as individual scenarios visualised and shared with the class.

Image: Northeast group with their mountains of ideas culled into individual scenario visualisations based on their own convictions for the action going forward.

Image: Gujarat group with their real business like models for rapid deployment of food based scenarios based on their very rich model and exploration as a group.

The four groups in Paldi – Uttarakhand, Goa, West Bengal and Rajasthan – too will be working on their group thumbnail brainstorming and over the weekend on their individual scenario in consultation with their group members in a peer review and supported process, in other words with a little bit of help from their friends. We look forward to their presentation in the NID Paldi Foyer on Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 5.30 pm.

Goa Group: Fish, Boats and Beach as Metaphor

2008-08-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

Image: Goa group with their massive model and metaphor representation with the Fisherman in the foreground and the Goa Tourist map and persona in the background.

While the Goa group had very rich palette of images to support their presentation it was their structure that was truly memorable. Using a radial structure they built their structure about Food, Inflation and the Economy with the Meta factors around the circle and the process questions along the radial axis. This gave them the possibility of using the rings to represent the various parts of their structure in a very interesting manner.

Image: Radial model of the rich structure by the Goa group with the Fish, Boats and Beach Metaphor with the Fisherman in the foreground.

The structure model was further strengthened by the use of small iconic images strewn all over the diagram that helped us locate the major ideas visually while getting an overview of the structure. The Move in understanding was huge. While the first presentation that was based on what the group already knew was skewed towards a sort of outsider view of tourist Goa the second round saw the group connecting with all the right kinds of people who can be called experts and this led to a huge shift in understanding.

Image: The Goa team making their impassioned presentation with all members taking the stand and making a pitch with a very high level of motivation.

The presentation which had all the team members participating was truly memorable and of a very high quality. In the teachers experience this is by far the best effort in many years in the PG programme at NID. I would request the students involved to make a textual note of their experience and to share this with all of us so that this experience can produce durable learning that Prof Bruce Archer had told us about when he visited NID in the early 80's to give the Sir Misha Black Award for excellence in Design Education to the then Executive Director of NID, Ashoke Chatterjee. He told us that experience by itself does not produce knowledge, but it is the reflection on experience that does create deep and durable knowledge.

This assignment is therefore a way for groups of individuals to first map out what they already think they know about any chosen subject through brainstorming and categorisation followed by rounds of modelling to find structure and finding a suitable metaphor to map the discovered structure for all to see and understand. The next assignment has the students sharing their understanding with real experts and through research and the process of modelling, finding structure and making a metaphor so that the findings can be shared in a coherent manner. This process also has the effect of clarifying the concepts in ones own mind as well as in locating insights that would drive the process of opportunity mapping and decision making as the design process goes forward.

The other two groups too have completed their second round which will be reported here later in the day. We need to meet today to review all the MeBoards, perhaps in the SDM studio and the final opportunity maps as well as the individual secnarios will be exhibited in the NID Foyer on Tuesday the 12th August 2008 at 5.30 pm IST. We have booked the Foyer space through the NID Academin Administration and we look forward to a live participation from faculty, students and invited guests.

Uttarakhand Group: Mandi as Metaphor

2008-08-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor for their presentation.

The Uttarakhand Group was the first to complete their model by the evening today so we decided to have their presentation while the other three groups would have theirs tomorrow morning. The team worked out a way to reuse their Himalayan Mountain range model by using it as a backdrop to locate the wild life and fauna of the region while the main exhibit was that of a Sabji Mandi or vegetable market through which they tried to explain the current level of understanding about Food and the chosen region in the context of design possibilities going forward.

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor with the teachers included.

The Mandi metaphor was however not used as effectively buy the group to make their presentation as it came out in the discussions and critique that followed the groups presentation. According to the comments from the teachers it showed a lack of an articulation or visualisation of relationships that formed the core of the concerns that the group had indeed identified and expressed as very interesting images of islands of concerns that were arranged on the backdrop. The four main headings of Production, Distribution , Consumption and Impact did offer the group an adequate framework for linking the various sub-groups and issues that were in the field of vision but the audience felt that they missed showing the linkages between all the issues covered there.

Image: Uttarakhand Group assembled in their Mandi Metaphor as the class presentation progresses.

Further the lack of detail at the next lower level of the structure was also pointed out in the arguments and comments that followed. The Mandi visual was quite effective in getting a feel of the place and the context as a whole and I used the metaphor of the Constellations to show that association of star groups were given meaning by showing the invisible lines that gave the groups its form as a visual symbol which made it memorable and recognisable in the rich ground of all the other stars. Each illustration was rich and when the team explained the model it was clear that the team had come a long way forward in their understanding of both Food as well as the context on the ground in the Uttaranchal region through their meetings with experts in the field, but the group failed to tell us who they met and how the insights were actually collected and put together in their model. In all the group efort was appreciated by the class particularly since this group was able to meet the very tight deadline and come through with a fairly high degree of effective representation and discourse.

We do look forward to some rich presentations from the other three groups in the morning tomorrow. The order of presentation will have the Goa Group making their presentation at 9.30 am and this would be followed by the other two between 10.30 and 12.30 pm tomorrow. The afternoon session is for the next lecture on Design Opportunities after which the groups will start work on their next assignments dealing with Design Opportunities in the area using the formats that have been developed for this purpose.

Down the Drains

2008-08-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

Image: Ayan Ghosh at Gandhinagar and Paldi DCC2008 discussions

I feel a primary aspect to be understood while analyzing the role of food and its importance in its current context is to examine how humans consume food, which is after all what its main function is. This consumption pattern has never been constant, and has changed considerably depending on the way food has been cultivated, stored, transported, re-stored and eaten. These systems have been considerably modified by the various discoveries, innovations, improvisations and inventions which continued to evolve since humans settled as an agrarian society.

Cultivation
Some main events in the journey of food have been the discovery of fire and the plough, and a basic understanding of time and seasons, leading to agriculture. This new form of foraging, through cultivation, was helped substantiality by innovations in irrigation techniques (like the Archimedes’s screw and the Noria) and extensive canal building. Later, architectural innovations followed in the form of dams and later more sophisticated aqueducts built in ancient Rome.

However, the pattern of agriculture the world over remained unchanged for thousands of years, although techniques might have differed from civilization to civilization depending on the climate and topography. The most significant innovations that boosted the production capacities of fields to feed the increasing global populations happened in the post industrial revolution late 18th and 19th century, with development of fertilizers like Ammonium Nitrate, pesticides, and other mechanized innovations like the development of tractors, and threshers.

Preservation
Limitations in preservation options reduced the transportability of food which being organic in nature starts putrefying in short time. The organic nature of most food either allowed it to be frozen or dried. Drying substantially altered the nature of the food, while freezing was expensive and exclusive. Food storage changed drastically since the 19th century, with Nicolas François Appert inventing canning in 1809, which contributed significantly to Napolean’s army’s mobility and Europe conquest. Appert himself didn't know how the process of heating canned food helped in its preservation worked, but was later explained by Louis Pasteur. This was followed by breakthroughs by scores of inventors contributing many small advances in cooling machinery leading to the perfection of the refrigerator. This allowed surplus food to be stored in its actual state for many days domestically, and also to be transported overseas on long journeys. Later innovations in packaging design also contributed hugely in optimizing trade.

Human Movement
Various events and inventions in other domains contributed greatly to the food industry, like globalization, colonialism, colonization, international trade and human migration. Globalization, which has its roots in the silk route trades across Asia and Europe, contributed in the spice economy, which thrived for hundreds of years. Colonization, starting with the Spanish conquests of the Americas, resulted in many new food items being introduced to Western countries. After colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They also took it to the Philippines, whence it moved to southeast Asia and then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the potato and tobacco to Europe. Similarly the British Empire introduced tea from China to Sri Lanka, India and Britain and the USA.

Colonialism and the industrial revolution also catalyzed an unprecedented amount of human migration the world over, which gave rose to new consumption requirements and opened up endemic food cultures to new markets.

Image: Ayan Ghosh at Gandhinagar and Paldi DCC2008 discussions

Alternative power
Shift from traditional energy sources like animal, human, wind and water to steam, coal, fuel and electric also revolutionized the way the food industry expanded over the last century and a half. The industrial revolution triggered the concept of the factory and the mass production of food. It also led to the invention of the railways, automobiles and lastly the aircraft. The last three are of major consequence, as it allowed surplus food to be exchanged between countries through exports and it also allowed fast and networked system of food distribution, thereby preventing widespread famines.

As a result…
However all the above mentioned factors have also contributed in a serious fall out of food wastage which is a result of the ability to acquire surplus food. Since we can acquire much more than we consume, its inevitable that there is a great deal of surplus in the hands of the upper classes in the first world countries who can afford such benefits on the basis of a higher disposable income. Previously we cultivated only as much can be consumed immediately, but the option of preservation has made us uncertain to the consumption amounts, since there is always back up.

In the USA
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) calculates 20 percent of the country's food goes to waste, representing an annual value of about $31 billion in lost resources. Such wastage is not productive, sustainable, or ethical. While food is being squandered in rich countries, 800 million people around the world often do not know where their next meal is coming from, 166 million children are undernourished, and 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

In Britain
Britons are throwing away £10bn worth of food that could be eaten each year. About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched - including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don't eat the leftovers. The complete £10bn consists of food that could have been eaten, not including peeling and bones, the researchers say. Tackling the waste could mean a huge reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to taking one in five cars off the road.

In India
Its a matter of concern even in India where it was announced in the Rajya Sabha in March 2008 by the Minister of State for Food Processing Industries (FPI) that wastage of harvested food items is estimated to be around Rs 58,000 crore at various stages of handling due to lack of adequate post-harvest infrastructure, cold chains, transportation and proper storage facilities.

Food = water
A new report by the Stockholm International Water Institute has determined that the wastage of food means wastage of a large amount of water. According to a report in Discovery News, given that crop production uses about 1,800 trillion gallons (1,700 cubic miles) of water a year, almost 40 per cent of which comes from irrigation rather than rainwater, that loss represents a lot of water. The report says that in the United States itself, up to 30 per cent of food is tossed out each year, worth about 48.8 billion US dollars, which is equivalent to flushing 10 trillion gallons of water down the drain.

Why so?
There are many reasons for the humongous quantities of food wastage. They vary culture to culture. Economy, social status, cultural habits all play a part, and many solutions have also been suggested in the past and continue to be done. Rationing food had been a popular concept in socialist countries. It is however an economic control, aimed to provide food to those who cannot afford it. Denying people who can afford to do so the right to food is never going to be accepted universally in a democratic political ideology.

However, I personally feel that the problem hasn’t been understood yet, and all solutions are working at a preventive level rather than a curative level. Waste food management is happening because waste "is happening". It is broadly accepted that completely eradicating food wastage is not possible and every effort should be taken in minimizing it. One possible source of finding the root cause of why we waste food I feel lies in our evolutionary past, and how it has shaped human psychology. Maybe somewhere within our subconscious the million years old hunter-gatherer psyche is winning over the thousand years old settler-cultivator psyche. One aspect of study that has been undertaken in this direction deals with how humans and all other animals behave with food, and is called optimal foraging theory.

Optimal Foraging Theory?
A central concern of ecology has traditionally been foraging behavior. In its most basic form, optimal foraging theory states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time. In other words, they behave in such a way as to find, capture and consume food containing the calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The understanding of many ecological concepts such adaptation, energy flow, competition hinges on the ability to comprehend what food items animals select, and why.

Furthermore, the absolute limits of the range of food types eaten by a consumer in a given habitat are defined by morphological constraints, but very few animals actually eat all of the different food types they are capable of consuming. Optimal foraging theory helps biologists understand the factors determining a consumer’s operational range of food types, or diet width.

At the one extreme, animals employing a generalist strategy tend to have broad diets; they chase and eat many of the prey/food items with which they come into contact. At the other extreme, those with a specialist strategy have narrow diets and ignore many of the prey items they come across, searching preferentially for a few specific types of food. In general, animals exhibit strategies ranging across a continuum between these two extremes. Recently, scholars have connected optimal foraging theory to prospect theory, noting that survival thresholds might be responsible for human attitudes towards risk.

So?
I am personally still trying to understand the full implications of the optimal foraging theory and how it is directly linked with global food wastage but I sincerely believe in its existence. Somewhere down the line, through a protracted history like I mentioned, the process of accessing food has got distorted too fast, which has contributed to this current phenomenon of over-consumption. Wastage happens not only in food, but in almost every other form of consumerist products, which is a thematic redundancy phenomenon in modernist and postmodernist society at large.

A huge shift has occurred at the options level and the time level, which has led to the disparity in the intake and outtake proportions. The handling time and search times required for access to food in the current urban set up is minimal, which means we gather up much more than what we can consume. The energy requirement levels have stayed the same, since humans have been more or less engaged in the same energy expedient tasks since cultivation started. What might have altered is the energy supplementary levels, which is a result of the consumption disparity. Our dietary patterns have changed so drastically since the dawn of agriculture (at least in the urban areas), that the amount of food required to meet the necessary energy levels have also been distorted. In most cases we consume more, to bridge this gap.

We fear that we might not be able to meet this shortfall,be there a crisis or not, and so the ones who can, they consume more than what they need. They are not to be blamed entirely, because the surplus they are consuming is being made available to them in the first place. Its a huge and complicated cycle of economics and ecology, but very little research has actually been done into the subject, or maybe I haven't myself delved into the subject in depth as yet.

Maybe this in itself is a design research subject which can be expanded on for addressing the cure rather than the prevention part. Maybe an apple a week can keep the doctor away, as well as one a day.

Ayan Ghosh
~

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

~ Gregory Bateson

Sustainable Food solutions and Waste management

2008-08-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Image: Food wasted in a week: US Department of Agriculture. In India food waste starts from the field due to poor storage and transport facilities at the farm end itself.

An immense opportunity waits to be tapped with regard to Food waste. Enough cannot be said of the amount of waste that is generated in particular by the consumerist mentality of the current generations in terms of food and several aspects relating both directly and indirectly to the food industry. The primary problem that can be seen clearly is one of distribution. The cycle of demand and supply can be met with much greater ease if only a strong distribution network could facilitate it. In India, the land of contrasts, the issue is always one of extremes- Of simultaneous drought and floods, of slums and high rise buildings that share a wall, of children who study in the dim light afforded by the street lamps while others live in over-lit mansions and most strikingly, of starvation and excess.

What will it take towards creating a food network that will be sustainable worldwide? The answer is complex on many levels and yet calls for immediate consideration, action and solution. With the liberal policies of globalization undeniably linking everyone together through good times and bad, no one is spared the consequences of the actions of the other. There are many simultaneous and conflicting consequences that arise as a result of our agricultural policies and the technology that is implemented. On one hand, there is an increase in yield per unit of land as a result of which there is less requirement to cultivate new land. This leads directly to facilitating the sustenance of numerous natural life forms and securing their habitats. At the same time, this comes at the cost of permitting enduring harm to natural resources such as water and soil by imbuing them with immense quantities of prolonged chemical exposure and this leading to a speedy deterioration on these fronts.

The immediate challenge confronting us now is in increasing the production of food to be able to meet the demands of the future without any harmful impact on the environment. Another significant challenge in this realm is to ensure that everyone has access to adequate food to live a fit and fruitful life.

In order to be able to live up to the needs of the future and tackle them successfully, a strategy must be concocted that will encompass the relevant policies and the technology required that will enable us to eradicate food uncertainty, food shortage, and undernourishment in a manner that is in harmony with an ecologically sustainable management of natural resources.

There is a need to connect with the learning that we garner from such a macro-perspective and an understanding of the global phenomenon, in order to apply this newly gained knowledge into our own immediate surrounding. Discipline begins at home and in this regard there are numerous examples of food waste that we can see all around us- our very own canteens and cafeterias, home kitchens etc are huge opportunities for creating a sustainable system of waste food recycling which can cater towards fulfilling many constructive and urgent needs of communities around us. Within this large spectrum of the food chain from pre-process to post-consumption to disposal, waste generation and utilization exist innumerable opportunities that make not only ethical and social sense but also have the ability to generate several layers of economic independence.

Attached are a few links of relevance in this regard.

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/12/11104.pdf

http://www.wastedfood.com/

http://www.cambridgenow.ca/npps/story.cfm?id=1114

http://www.foodbeforefuel.org/

http://naturalspecialtyfoodsmemo.blogspot.com/

http://localfoods.wordpress.com/

http://www.foodtimeline.org/

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Browse/DietHealthSafety/

A New Stone Turned

2008-08-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

Image: Anindya Roy commenting on students presentations in DCC2008 Paldi01

“An unusual choice of career at your age, isn’t it?” This is a question I’ve been thrown in one form or another many a time by friends and acquaintances ever since I made a conscious decision to stop running behind the bigwigs of the Automotive world and instead, look a different way. I joined NID as faculty of transportation design at the age of 27. It is close to a year now since I joined and through this time I have been involved in various courses across a few disciplines. All through this time, like the murmur of monks in a monastery, I used to hear about DCC from students. The remarks didn’t sound so much like that of a course that was taught but a great journey to an uncharted place – revelatory, eye (and mind) opening, unforgettable, intense, tiring, rewarding – and one that would leave you changed somewhere inside for sure.

Just like when I hear of someone who’s been to Ladakh, and I haven’t, my first thought is, “I must go there myself and see what the fuss is all about!” What could be in this place that everyone who’s been to can’t stop raving about? With this curiosity built up over a period of one year spent at NID, one ordinary morning I decided to pack my bags and book my ticket, by replying to M.P. Ranjan’s email call for volunteer faculty. Brave move, knowing that I really had no clue about the course or its subject for the year, I had never read this blog and that I would be facing 20-30 students at a time, some waiting to hear great words of wisdom from this young faculty. The fact is that I was in it for really the same reason as the students – to learn about something anew. Well, the students do have grades to fetch as well but that’s another matter.

Image: Anindya Roy with teaching colleagues: DCC2008 Paldi01

It’s been a week for me on this journey and I’d say what has taken me by surprise is how much there is to unlearn before new learning can begin. It is an unavoidable situation having grown to this age conditioned by much focused education and exposure, the result of years of learning within limited context. What does it take then to outrun the legacy? This is where the DCC course structure takes on the avatar of a roadmap and students become the guides on a journey that never ceases to explore. It is through their brainstorming and structuring of gathered data that a wholesome picture starts to emerge within which one can find specific sites of interest.

Though initially what comes out may be a barrage of information with too many layers for the untrained mind to make sense of, it is within this very tangled web that multitudes of design opportunities lurk. In sessions that follow, much grey matter gets activated, sleep is lost and egos are put aside, reluctantly at times. Scores of minds aligned by a common goal can be a fantastic force. While I am yet to see results of some of the intermediate stages of the process, the direction gets clearer with every passing day. Having a bird’s eye view of the ongoing process not only is educating me (even as all the effort at ground level is being put in by diligent students) but also allows me to have an overview to reflect upon.

Image: Anindya Roy in DCC2008 Paldi01

This is about getting to know your context of work first-hand, meeting the people who matter and the people in whose life a little design intervention could go a long way, about designing not to satisfy the ego but to attempt to satisfy real needs. The relevance of this approach to a context as complex, rich and demanding as India is undeniable. Hopefully, many of us will carry the learning beyond the academic realm and remember it in our careers whatever they may be. A young bloke came to teach a few things and got taught many times as much in return. Not such a bad choice of career after all!

This is but my initial reflection on a new method of Design Thinking that I have had a chance to experience firsthand and in great detail. In the days to come of my involvement with the course and beyond I will be posting my insights, remarks and findings for all to share and comment on.

A personal Journey

2008-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Image: Harini at Gandhinagar during DCC2008

This is a personal post based on my reflections over the past four years. I have had the good fortune and a rare opportunity of acquiring a glimpse both sides of the DCC coin- First as a student in 2004 and now, as assistant faculty in 2008. The journey has been tumultuous and exciting with each day bringing new learning and growth.

The methodology advocated by DCC has become a way of life and is being utilized by numerous people across various walks after having assimilated it into the order of every day things. Four years ago, groups converged in the studio spaces at NID to weave our ideas of the concepts and concerns of design around the theme of globalization and the new order of the world. At that time not many of us possessed the foresight that one small course at NID spread over the course of a few weeks would change and shape the way we would all reason from then on- both collectively and as thinking individuals. There is a clarity that emerges from all the confusion, which calls for a new kind of thinking, understanding, questioning and constantly revaluating opinions and beliefs.

Image: Harini discussing brainstorming and at the presentations with Gandhinagar students

A few days ago, soon after this new phase of my journey began; I rummaged around to rediscover the thoughts and feedback I had penned at the culmination of the course in 2004. This is what it had to say – “When I reflect back on the entire course and all the rapid exchanges and brainstorming sessions there were many thoughts that kept surfacing through my mind and striking home. Many of us grow up with an exaggerated sense of our own self-worth and intelligence. Our spectrum is narrow, our tolerance level non-existent and our motto in life ‘My way is the best way, if not the only way’. Eating humble pie (with unceasing regularity) is probably the best way of learning one of life’s bitter truths and what should have been the Eleventh Commandment-‘you are definitely not as smart as you think you are (or even as smart as others think you are!)’” In hindsight and with slightly more lucidity now than before, I believe that was the result of a first encounter from very close quarters of group dynamics in action.

I trust that each person we meet or come in contact with, whether at home, in the workplace or otherwise have a definite part to play in our overall education in the subject of life. We can never walk away empty-handed after any encounter with the feeling of not having learnt something new. To this end each person’s background and imbibed values areof relevance in enhancing the experience of others. One of the richest experiences that life has to offer is of meeting other people from different arenas of life and the reciprocal exchange that arise between them- it appears impossible that one should ever give without getting anything in return. There is something to be learnt, whether positive or not, from every interaction with another. It also helps us to realize that there are always people to help us out with our own deficiencies. Learning to work as a team, to work with a team- a very challenging, sometimes formidable task but always a gratifying one. A time to share your thoughts and experiences and a time to learn from others.

Image Harini at the group presentations in the NID Gandhinagar Atrium.

My impressions of my first day at DCC class is etched in my mind- a little nervous and apprehensive but very eager and enthusiastic –to learn, to make an impression and to meet and make friends and broaden my perspective of the world at large- a daunting task by any stretch of the imagination. Having heard a lot about the course from numerous friends and seniors I was geared up to face the storm. Upon reflection I now feel that the whole experience has been one of the most rewarding ones till date –the experience of rubbing shoulders with some very resourceful and enterprising people, the desperation in meeting last- minute deadlines, of debate and boisterous argument, the feeling of pride in a job well done, your own growing awareness of your increasing confidence in yourself, the feeling of being part of a team or making a presentation which you have slaved over for hours- these feelings to me are the essence of professional development.

Two invaluable lessons that I take back with me at the end of all this are-firstly, never to go into the battlefield without being fully prepared and doing your groundwork thoroughly and secondly, to be truthful while admitting your ignorance- it’s perfectly acceptable to utter the words ‘I don’t know, but I will find out’. The feeling of being cut down to size is very deflating, but it does serve its purpose-it teaches you a powerful lesson you are not apt to forget easily! The more dogmatic we are, we consciously close shut many doors of opportunities that we could experience, learn from, draw strength and courage to go on to be a better person. After than, can there actually be an individual who doesn’t require a second chance?

Urban Farming

2008-08-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

This striking image of urban agriculture is from Havana, Cuba. I read in an article that the only MacDonalds in Cuba is at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, which belongs to the US. Cubans on the other hand, enjoy a superior diet, with access to fresh nutritious fruits and vegetables, cereals herbs, etc They have an agricultural system which is largely self sufficient and does not depend on industial farming, pesticides or fertilizer, and is almost entirely organic. They also have a special food culture where communities of people farm together and are close to the production of their food.

How this came about is briefly something like this - following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba suddenly faced a severe food and energy shortage, since the economic support which included food subsidies, farm equipment, petroleum, pesticides and so on which it had enjoyed came to an end, leading to a period of great hardship.

With limited resources, no subsidies, no Soviet oil for tractors, fertilizer and pesticide, the government decided to prioritize food production, through substantial research and a search for affordable alternative farming techniques. These included many back to basics practices – vermiculture, natural composting, inter cropping, natural pesticides and bio fertilizers. In addition land was redistributed into small and large worker managed collectives, and farmer's markets opened to sell excess food crops.

By 2004, fifteen years later, 35,000 acres of urban gardens produced 3.4 million tons of food. In Havana which is home to 20% of the country's population, 90% of the city's fresh organic produce comes from local urban farms and gardens. The country is beginning to take on legendary status as a model for sustainable agriculture and local food production.

In Mumbai Dr Ramesh T. Doshi, has done pioneering work in developing techniques for terrace farming. On his 1200 sq.ft. terrace in Bandra he grows – lady’s finger, eggplant, leafy vegetables, coconut, pomegranate, chickoo, guava, spices and more. Dr Doshi is an economist by training, and spent many years marketing fertilizer. It was only after retirement at the age of 61, he began experimenting with farming – first at his farm near Pune, and subsequently on his terrace in Mumbai. Dr Doshi's agriculture is done he says using solar energy, only organic compost and pesticides, and controlled amounts of soil, water and labour. He does his planting in closed large diameter polyethylene bags or metal drums, this minimizes the need for water as little water is lost in evaporation or leached underground. He uses sugarcane waste from the local juice vendors and all the organic waste from the neighbours to make compost, through a patented process of rapid aerobic decomposition by thermophilic bacteria. Dr Doshi believes that urban community agriculture is a solution to the problems of collecting, transporting, and disposing urban waste besides of course the access to fresh nutritious food.

Dr Doshi has been sharing his farming practices through demonstrations and trainings. One of his students was Preeti Patil. She is the catering officer at the Mumbai Port Trust Central Kitchen where she has developed a terrace farm using the techniques she learnt. The Kitchen provides food to canteens in the Port Campus daily feeding about 3000 employees. All the waste generated in the kitchen is used in the terrace garden, and all the produce which includes tomatoes, gourds, brinjal, radish, spinach, guava, chikoo, pomegranate, lemon and even cherries is used in the kitchen. She is now working on a project to teach these farming techniques to street children in Mumbai.

All over the world there have been long traditions of farming intensively within and at the edge of cities. Over the last century, with the industrial farming revolution needing large tracts of land, farms have moved further and further away from the city. With the spiraling costs of food and fuel for transportation, coupled with concerns about food security in a rapidly urbanizing world and a widespread appreciation of the superiority of organic over industrial produce, - urban farming is being re-looked at as a possible answer.

Several interesting initiatives along these lines are afoot -

http://www.fallenfruit.org/index.html

http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=50581_0_23_0_C

http://www.lfa2008.org/event.php?id=57&name=GrowBags:UrbanAllotments

http://www.dott07.com/go/food/urban-farming

Incubating Design Opportunities: DCC2008 Gandhinagar

2008-08-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

Image: Team Punjab with their presentation of design opportunity thumbnails and scenarios on the theme of Food.

The week long incubation period for the exploration of design opportunities that the four groups of students had discovered came to an end today with the final review and presentation of the groups work at the NID Gandhinagar campus. Each group had explored various design opportunities using the format for thumbnail sketches and a brief outline and these were discussed at length within each group to look for value and limitations in each of these explored options. This process of articulation and review continued through the week although the class had got over by last Friday when the groups had captured many such illustrations that gave us a glimpse of what was in the minds of the individuals who had drawn them after a process of collective exploration, brainstorming and engagement with experts in the field using anthro-research approaches to clarify directions and define specific insights that could produce value.

Image: Team Kerala with design oppportunity scenarios.

The enthusiasm and committment of the groups resulted in as many as 500 individual design opportunity maps and these were arranged into categories by the teams and some new explorations were initiated on the basis of the insights that were drawn from the initial explorations and the results thereof. THis group was particularly enthused by the design opportunities discovered and the final presentations were a trace of this enthusiasm, and the teams were all present for the final review. Each group has been requested to make a scanned image file of each thumbnail sheet and share these with all the other groups and during the interaction session this evening at Gandhinagar we photographed all the students with their Design Opportunity Scenario sheet with a final request that they send in an email with a brief but effective textual description of their design opportunity scenario to the teachers. These textual notes would also be made available to all students through the NID server at gandhinagar just as the pictures would be shared with all students as part of the contemporaneous documentation of this course.

Image: Team Gujarat with their radial model of design opportunity thumbnails in a categorised map.

Image: Team Northeast with their offering after the incubation period of one week.

Each of these explorations will be shared in some detail in the days ahead as the emailed texts come in to supplement the scenario visualisations made by the students of all four teams.

Gandhinagar in the Rain: DCC2008 Presentation

2008-08-02T00:49:00.000-07:00

Image: Final presentation of Design Opportunity explorations by all four groups in the NID Gandhinagar Atrium.

The vehicle fiasco did come to our aid today in making a change of venue and an impromptu rescheduliong of our presentation to Gandhinagar campus and all the students were stranded at Gandhinagar and both the busses were parked at Paldi and the driver had a day off being a Saturday!! The student coordinators forgot to inform the Admin about our presentation and then we had phone calls at my office in Paldi at 10.00 am the time when the presentation was planned when we last met at Gandhinagar one week ago.

Since the final presentation is an important part of the process of learning design thinking the teachers who had assembled at my office decided that we would go over to Gandhinagar for which we requested a car after many phone calls to Gandhinagar and the Paldi administrators. Harini, Ayan, Anindya and I left Rashmi behind since she could not accompany us to Gandhinagar, a big loss for the styudents since her feedback would have been very insightful and sensitive. We are now at Gandhinagar and the presentation will start at 2.00 pm and we have requested all the students to be ready with their groups as well as with their individual design opportunities so that the show and tell session can be organised in a way that the learning can be complete. Each student is also required to send us a brief note by email about the story in their Design Scenario Visualisation so that some of these could be posted on the blog for all to see and discuss further possibilities.

We are eager to see what the students have done so far and I was hoping that the Paldi students could also see what the Gandhinagar colleagues had achieved in their exploration of the DCC Theme, FOOD, Inflation and the Economy, each dealing with a selected area of the country, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Gujarat. With one week given for imcubation and group discussion we are sure that we will get to see a rich exploration of various dimensions of the chosen theme and I do personally look forward to the afternoon session, planned after the lunch break in a few minutes from now.

We drove in the rain from Paldi to Gandhinagar and on Ashram Road the traffic was pretty heavy and with the light drizzle the humidity was high and the temperature very uncomfortable particularly since the aircon system seemed to malfunction, but later towards Gandhinagar the weather turned and more rain came down and with the driving speed we had a good airflow through the windows but with some degree of wettness due to the spray. On the whole a good ride and since we were eager to meet the students some discomfort is acceptable. The rain is all around and the presentation is planned in the main building in the central Atrium that will start in another twenty minutes from now.

Reflections on DCC2008: Priyadarshinee Mohapatra

2008-07-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

Image: Model of the Design Process proposed by Priyadarshinee Mohapatra and sent to me by email along with a description of the model that is quoted below.

Design is complex and challenging, as it involves both analytic and creative solution to a problem. Designing a product, not only requires a designer, but also needs the understanding of human experience on it. It's a task involving not only the designer but also the target users for whom it's designed. For any design solution it's important to follow the design process which is an iterative process. Design concepts and concerns-2008 by MP Ranjan has taught the "design process" in a very effective and planned manner. It's a wonderful experience to be part of this programme. It has a clear path/process from "recollecting the known" to "discover the unknown" and finally "creating design opportunity" while solving the problems in a given context.

What you already know:

In the first level, it's basically "recollecting the data already exist in your mind". It's self exploration phase. So the information is collected from every individual based on "self knowledge" and "on what he/she believes in". It's followed by group brain storming to make it more precise and determine the information architecture, structuring and reflecting the same on a visual metaphor. A visual metaphor gives a complete overview of the context. A strong visual metaphor is self explanatory.

Initially, though the group had less information, eventually the information was created by self exploration and group brain storming. Truly said by Ranjan "You never know what you know and you can challenge any modern age computer".

Discover the unknown through research:

The next level, we had to "discover the unknown" through research and field study. During this phase we were exposed to real world to know and find out information. Finally, we incorporated all the information on structure and metaphor. The collected insights give a complete idea about the real world problem. It helped us to create personas and to understand the common man's mental model about the context. From insights, one could make out "What is already there?"and "what could be done?"

Creating design opportunity:

Finally design opportunities created by analysing the observations and insights from field research in the given context while solving the problems. The issues were pointed out in a group brain storming. From various ideas, every individual has to take one idea or design opportunity and give a detailed solution to the real world problem. The solution has to be presented visually to make it self-explanatory.
I worked in Gujarat group. My learning through the whole process was a lot .It was not limited to my own group only, I also learnt a lot from other groups as well.

Thanks & Regards

Priyadarshinee Mohapatra
Strategic Design Management (SDM)

Late Night Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

2008-07-30T09:48:00.001-07:00

Image: All four groups ready with their respective models, stucture and metaphor for the theme of Food across four regions of India. Uttarakhand (top right), West Bengal (bottom right), rajasthan (bottom left) and Goa (top right).

Working with very few breaks the teams were all ready for presentation by 2.00 pm in the post lunch session, a little behind schedule, but this is acceptable since it is the first time that these groups have worked together and much learning is still to come. The results are quite encouraging and in the evening we had completed the discussions and presentations of two of these groups, Uttarakhand and Goa. We will report in some detail about these presentations in another post. However for now, the two presentations were actively participatory with a number of students coming forward to make critical and constructive statements, a good sign towards a healthy peer review culture in the days to come.

Design journey-DCC-2008-PG campus

2008-07-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

Image: Sonal Chauhan with Prof M P Ranjan in the DCC class at Gandhinagar.

It has been a great experience being part of DCC team.
This was my very first encounter with DCC as well as Professor Ranjan , since I have joined this institute very recently.
In My college days we had no opportunity to learn this course and it was added later for the fortunate ones. Being from the so called “Design Community” I believe that design is what you think you can do to enhance life, product, feelings, experiences, dreams or aspirations .But what leads you to design outcome is your approach towards it.

I must admit DCC-2008 has added a new dimension to my design approach. Though seating on the other side of the students, I was very much a student . But it was a dual learning for me i.e. student as well as faculty trainee( a new breed of Student).It was great to learn ways to achieve design solutions.

KNOWING THE UN-KNOWN – was the first assignment where focus was on the first hand data that one would have stored in mind consciously& unconsciously. Gathering that data (Brainstorming) and using it to make model structure followed by metaphoric representation - would have been quite a task for beginners. It was a process which would lead you more and more towards identifying unique design opportunities as you clear each step (read: assignment here). I have witnessed it that students had to work extremely hard and they were enjoying to dig more and more to gather data/information. Learning was so much from the student presentations that I felt like getting in to one of the group and actually going through the experience of making of that learning.( which, I couldn’t allow myself - with some block)

ME BORD – was more to identify ,analyze and assess our own self. Again knowing the unknown in a way. It was to know one’s love, pride, fear, mental block, inhibitions, strengths, weakness, commitments, dreams, policies, nature and other interests.
What was equally important here was coming with information/ideas and making it in to visual communication .We all know the power of words but this targeting power of images.( Image power) And it is so much true, that some times you cant have enough words to explain or express and same can be done very crisply with just one image.

Having open forum to debate , discuss and express views , at the end of every presentation involves further crisscross of data, brainstorm, a new emerging approach, people’s eye view and a lot more that (may be my dictionary would limit me with).
I relished that part of it more since, I was not part of group presentations and so the rich experience they have had.

Working hard and making people work hard – is something every student must have learned from DCC and so have I( all in good spirit).As working in groups have certain advantages as well as disadvantages. And DCC module surely adds those group dynamics and leader ship qualities to the students.

I wish i was there in each of the class gathering. Myself was quite a silent observer through out the class and would vouch for the constructive feedback that came in with each presentation, from the Professor Ranjan, Harini, Ayan, or student group themselves. I am thankful to all for sharing such rich experiences . My best wishes to Gujarat, Kerala, North East, Punjab groups for their final presentation and ahead.

Late Morning Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

2008-07-30T00:20:00.000-07:00

Image: Work in progress with all teams rushing to meet the new deadline which has been posted at 2.00 pm.

Groups have reassembled after the break and working almost non-stop with a few hours of sleep over night. The metaphors are taking shape and the structure is being frozen by each of the groups exploring Food, Inflation and the Economy as the major theme for the brainstorming assignment.

We will assemble again at the studios after lunch and take group photographs of all team members in front of their presentation models and then move on to the review of each presentation by turn. The first group to finish and report will have the first go with the presentation. We look forward to it.

Early Morning Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

2008-07-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

Image: Tired but not floored, work in progress early in the morning in the NID studios where four groups have spent the late night grappling with the categorization of all the data that was generated last night and in the evening rounds of brainstorming.

The studios were still quite empty with a few students coming in in small teams to get back to work and meet the 11.00 am deadline for the group presentations scheduled today. The signs of a new form of organization is seem in the materials strewn across the rooms and in the semi-finished work sheets that will be made ready after the breakfast sessions and all the students come back to the studios. Harini went across the studios at 9.30 am to bring us some insights of the work in progress and we do look forward to the major presentations later in the day.

Late Night Edition: DCC2008 Paldi01

2008-07-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

Image: Groups at work late into the night sorting and organizing the discovered words in order to find a meaningful structure that could adequately provide a shared view of the understanding developed by the group members during their team brainstorming sessions.

The four groups worked in their respective spaces in the SDM studio, PD studio, Drawing studio and the Old Canteen space to develop a structure through the categorization of all the words that they found in their group sessions. Using cards and post-it stickers the groups argued late into the night till they achieved a form of shared perspective on Food and the specific region that had been assigned to them at random. The students discover the dept of knowledge that each of them harbors in their lifetime of exposure to places, media, events, people and all their daily experiences with food as a very personal and closely held layers of experience of a lifetime.

Image: Groups leading towards the creation of models and structures that could show their shared understanding of the subject at hand, Food in a particular region of India and the various attributes and connections that could be useful going forward in the design journey.

Harini Chandrasekhar who is helping Rashmi and me during this course went around the studios at various times during the night and also helped negotiate late night access to the studios from the main gate security carried her camera to give us these images of work space and action that the teachers would not see when the groups met the next day to make a presentation. We have been using this form of photo documentation for the past ten years ever since we got the first digital camera that changed the equation between cost and volume of pictures. My first SONY, a Cybershot 707, a 1.7 MegaPixel camera was among the first digital cameras at NID in 1998 and in that year it helped me record as many as 50,000 images of students and activities in my class and across NID which I have been sharing with our students as a tool for reflection on the progress in the class. We have used many such cameras in the years past and now NID has hundreds of cameras moving about if we were to include the phone cams that our students carry and capture images with. An image aided pedagogy took firm root as part of the DCC course and at the end of each batch all the students are offered all the images in a reduced resolution so as to fit on a standard CD-ROM. Today we offer all the images in full resolution on DVD-ROM’s as well as place all the images in real time on the NID server called UNSECURE which is accessible to all our students and faculty and these have become collectibles for some interested students and faculty.